Noriko Tadano introduced her Shamisen, a traditional Japanese instrument, to Australian audiences when she moved here two decades ago and this winter, it’ll light up Illuminate.
When Noriko Tadano first came to Australia from Japan in 2004, she wasn’t trying to be a musician at all. Instead, she arrived in Melbourne to teach Japanese to school students while on a working holiday visa.
“I had my traditional Japanese instrument, the Shamisen, with me to show my students as a cultural exchange,” Noriko says. “I believe that music doesn’t need language.”
The Shamisen is a three-stringed instrument, similar to a banjo. Noriko would play it intermittently in the school community, reviving her passion for the instrument, then further honing her performance skills as a busker, which she says was “challenging as a Japanese girl on the street with a weird instrument”.
“Shamisen is quite a unique look, but lots of people see costume as well, that’s what I learned; if I wear colourful costumes girls get interested and men more are interested in the guitar or instruments,” Noriko says.
Toshi Sakamoto, who Noriko says is a pioneer of the Japanese drum in Australia, approached her after seeing her busk in Melbourne and invited her into his band. From there, they toured schools nationally and Noriko “started thinking that becoming a professional musician is quite fun and suits me”.
Noriko has called Adelaide home since 2019 and found the local music community to be “amazing” and “quite different from Melbourne”. She explains: “I feel more warmth and family here”.
But before she moved to Australia, at just 25 years old, Noriko had cervical cancer treatment in Japan and today lives with endometriosis. After falling in love and marrying her partner, Simon, Noriko underwent five years of IVF to give birth to her son. Since that time, Noriko’s health had a profound impact on her perspective, encouraging her to pursue her travels and throw herself into the music communities of Adelaide and Melbourne.
“I wasn’t quite happy mentally in my late 30s, then I had the opportunity to attend the only female festival called the Seven Sisters Festival in Melbourne,” she says. “I started feeling, ‘wow, women are amazing!’, I felt I wanted to celebrate every female, mothers, sisters, aunties, daughters and anybody on this earth that’s amazing – including me.
“Then I felt more motherhood towards my son, I was happy with having a son and everything but even more after that I thought being a mother is amazing.”
Her son is now 11 years old and hates the Shamisen.
“He’s not interested at all,” she laughs. “I believe it’s because I played up to like 34 weeks and I was banging and he probably had enough!”
He is interested in Taiko, a Japanese drum, and Noriko says they were lucky enough to play together on stage in Paris and Switzerland.
Closer to home, Noriko will take the stage at Nexus Arts with collaborator Adam Ritchie (also known as r.domain) for Illuminate’s Supersonic festival in July.
They’ll showcase her Shamisen in a new light, and she says audiences can expect “something weird”.
“(Adam) is an amazing composer and taught me quite a lot of things, he uses the module synthesizer, and I play just one note or two notes, he creates and can stretch that out for nine minutes,” she says.
“I thought, ‘Wow, no way that my instrument can do that’, but with him, almost everything is possible, he can create any wind sound or dark sort of feeling or cheerful or anything and I’m very, very excited to do this festival with him.”