Piano and Electronics Merge in Ako Amo’s Contemplative First Album What’s the Sound of a Dream?

Transmission 228: Interview with Ako Amo

Ako Amo is a compositional ambient duo based in Switzerland, formed by pianist Olivia Zaugg and electronic musician Martin Reck. Their work combines acoustic piano with live-processed electronics, drawing from backgrounds in classical performance and electroacoustic composition.

Title: What's the Sound of a Dream?
Artist: Ako Amo
Genres: Ambient, Contemporary Classical, Drone, Experimental Music
Label: self-released
Description: Swiss duo Ako Amo release debut album June 15 2025 on self‑release; seven tracks blending live electronics and piano.

Their debut album What’s the Sound of a Dream?, released digitally in June 2025, emerged from extended rehearsal and live performance. The duo focused on internal processes, iterative composition, and subtle structural development, avoiding direct references or conceptual frameworks.

How did your backgrounds in electronic music and classical piano intersect to form Ako Amo?

Martin:
We met at music school, actually a little before that. I studied electroacoustic composition.

Olivia:
Yes, and I studied classical piano. We both had this vision of interacting — I was interested in working with electronic music, and Martin was interested in acoustic instruments. Our first project was actually a music theater production, which was never released due to the pandemic. That’s where we first created music for a scenographic setting.

I think that led us to what we’re doing now — music that still tells stories. We’re seeing scenes, sceneries, and that’s stayed with us.

Martin:
Maybe you read that Ako Amo started as a live interpretation of a piece by Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto. It was a bit unusual, interpreting an existing piece in electronic music, but we were drawn to that aesthetic — combining minimal electronics and piano. We thought it would be interesting to begin not with our own composition but by trying to replicate something.

So I programmed an instrument to recreate those sounds in real time. That was the starting point — trying to merge electronics and piano with custom-made tools. It wasn’t just a project for a single concert but something we wanted to continue for years.

What challenges did you face when custom-building your own electronic instruments for live performance? Do you still use them?

Martin:
A big challenge was building an instrument stable enough for an entire set — something reliable, where the sounds don’t constantly shift every time I have a new idea. I wanted to formalize electronic sounds without using samples.

The entire live set is only about 10 megabytes. All the sounds are generated in real time, which allows me to change them as we play.

It has an acoustic quality — I can respond in the moment to what’s happening, but I can still compose with it. I can define which sounds or patterns should appear at specific moments. It’s a balance between real-time, virtuosic sound design and structured composition.

That was the hard part — building a system that allows me to compose while still altering the sound aesthetics live. It’s now in its third version. We spent three or four years developing that setup.

And then there’s the piano processing, which also uses custom-made processes tailored to very specific aesthetics. The entire live set, including the instrument, was built entirely for this project.

What drew you to reinterpret Uoon I by Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto as your first project together?

Olivia:
Initially, it was about analyzing what makes this music feel so direct — what gives the piece its meditative quality while remaining structurally stable. On one side, we focused on the electronic sounds, and on the other, we analyzed Sakamoto’s piano playing.

We discussed a lot about the balance between interaction, composition, and improvisation. Eventually, we identified certain essentials, but it still didn’t sound like their music. That’s when we realized we had overlooked an important layer — the long-term structure that allows the piece to reach a calm, meditative state. That requires attention to timing — when is the right moment to play something?

Martin:
The material is really subtle. We had a sense of it, but we couldn’t fully understand it just by listening. We had to recreate the feeling through playing.

One example: there’s a frozen piano sound — when I freeze the piano and make it slightly louder, it feels like pressing the sustain pedal, but with the sound increasing in volume. That creates an eerie feeling — a piano that gets louder after being played, though it’s not an electronic sound. It’s just a sensation. Playing a freeze in such a way that it doesn’t sound like a piano — that creates a space.

That space is what makes the music feel so intimate and intense, yet calm.

When did you first become interested in manipulating acoustic sounds electronically?

Martin:
It began with sampling field recordings. My earliest electronic work was recording-based rather than synthesized, and in Ako Amo I wanted to express my own voice through my own sounds. Later we revisited electronic processing, but never for its own sake—there’s always a compositional question behind it.

One effect we use often is what we call “halftime.” The aim is to make a piano sound as if it’s playing at half speed, an octave lower, like a turntable in real time. The solution is an effect that samples live and plays the material back slower. Every processing choice starts with a musical idea, not simply “How can we make funny sounds?”

Did you find an immediate audience for your sound?

Olivia:
It started in 2022. Our first live concert was the interpretation of Uoon I, which was also our first contact with an audience. We received really positive feedback — people entered the state we hoped to invite them into.

After that, we spent a long time focusing inward. We realized we wanted to establish our own voice — to find what kind of connection between electronics and piano felt right for us. We wanted both instruments to have equal presence and importance. That took time — a lot of introspection and the creation of our own compositions.

We co-composed everything, and finding a common voice was time-intensive. We needed space for that. Only about half a year or a year ago, we started performing again, entering a kind of new phase.

Martin:
To your question — how do we find an audience, or is there one — one of our main compositional goals is to make the music interesting but still accessible. We try to balance harmonics, melody, and rhythm to create experimental music for people who haven’t studied music.

We’re not doing classical music, we’re not doing electroacoustic music, and we’re not doing club music. That makes it harder to place, and it takes time. But we can perform next to a rave in a club and also in a concert setting. It’s an open concept.

Olivia:
So far, the range of people interested has been really broad — from classically trained 60-year-old bass players to 20-year-olds with no musical background. The feedback has come from many directions.

When you started work on What’s the Sound of a Dream?, did you have a specific concept in mind or did the theme emerge as the album progressed?

Olivia:
The theme emerged from the music, but the title came to us very suddenly — while cooking. We realized that was the feeling we’d been following from the beginning. It’s a bodily sensation we search for in our compositions and in how we play.

Martin:
There’s a space between day and night, between electronics and piano — a liminal space, also between classical and pop music. It’s always about what lies in between. A dream is something you wake up from with a trace of a feeling, but you can’t quite define it.

It’s that eerie, undefined sensation we try to evoke — pointing to something that exists between two points. It’s almost impossible to describe. Maybe that’s the question the title asks — a question you can’t really answer, but the music tries to create a space where you might find your own answer.

Did any non-musical sources, such as literature, art, or science, inform the atmosphere or structure of the album?

Martin:
This project started with an effort to shut ourselves off from external influences after the initial phase. We tried to dream our own dream — to make something strange, something with no clear references. We just kept bouncing ideas between us. We played the music live a lot before recording it, and that process shaped it more than anything external.

Olivia:
One influence that came later might be the drawings by Anna Balint, the artist who made our album cover. When we saw her work, we really felt reflected in it. That might be one non-musical influence.

Martin:
And we have a track called I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK, which is also the title of a film by Park Chan-wook. We watched the film and realized it matched the mood of the track, though that connection came afterward. Now, during live performances, we sometimes recite parts of the movie. So there is a connection, but it wasn’t the starting point.

Olivia:
It wasn’t the seed — more like we started from our own introverted ideas, and over time, other things got carried along with us, like a flood picking things up.

How do you translate the idea of “dream” into concrete musical decisions—are there particular sounds, harmonies, or structures you associate with dreaming?

Olivia:
What comes to mind is Mantra 2, where we use a form of piano processing with a harmonizer. I play something concrete, and then there’s a resonance you (Martin) control — but only to a certain extent. It’s about giving an impulse and letting something emerge beyond what we can control. We can only initiate; the rest unfolds on its own.

It’s similar to life — we experience situations, but how they appear in dreams is processed differently. This space, this interaction between electronics and piano, allows for that transformation.

Martin:
Dreaming involves not being fully in control, yet being shaped by everyday life. Composing like in a dream means giving yourself time and following what unfolds. We worked on these pieces over one and a half years, through many iterations.

At some point, you forget the original seed and just follow where it leads. That feels like dreaming — not a conscious, structured act, but something more intuitive. It’s not sitting down to write a piece on paper and then practicing it. It’s about letting go and trusting that at some point, it might be finished. That’s the process — and it resembles dreaming.

What’s next after the release of What’s the Sound of a Dream?—are there new sonic territories or formats you want to explore?

Olivia:
Right now, we’re preparing for our release concerts. In 2025 and 2026, we’ll be touring with this program. And we’ll definitely continue composing. We already have new ideas, leaning more toward minimal music and minimal structures.

Martin:
This album was about finding something. Now, we’re working on a piece that includes our voices, exploring contrast — what would be the most “cardboard” version of the album, and what would be the rawest, most unpolished version?

We want to stretch the idea we’ve developed and explore its extreme ends. That’s the direction for the next project.

Photos courtesy of Ako Amo

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others