Aukai

Aukai is the project of Markus Sieber, a German multi-instrumentalist and composer who lives in Palma. The name is a Hawaiian word for a seafarer or a traveller, and the music fits it: short instrumental pieces, ambient acoustic soundscapes meant to carry a listener inward towards stillness. Everything he has released so far is built around the charango, a small plucked string instrument from the Andes that sounds, in his words, "otherworldly, mesmerizing, dreamy", and that he says transmits the sense of space and freedom of being high in the mountains.

He grew up near Leipzig and, from the age of six, in a village outside Dresden, swimming and fishing in the Zschopau and the Mulde in summer and skating and skiing in winter. That early closeness to the natural world stayed with him and remains a source for his work. At sixteen he moved to Potsdam and played guitar in alternative rock bands in the East German scene of the nineties, then turned to acting in theatre, film and television in Berlin and St Petersburg. A move to Mexico brought him into contact with world and indigenous music and set him on the path he follows now.

He talks about music as something that can take a listener into a timeless state, where images, sensations and memories from the past merge with what he is feeling in the present until the difference between the two falls away. Within that timelessness, he says, he and the listener may find a space to meet.