Just info about Akikaze:

Akikaze, Japanese for autumn wind, is the electronic exploration of Pepijn Courant. Pepijn Courant was born in 1966 in Amsterdam. In 1977 he took piano lessons. He studied mainly classical music by composers such as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, but also modern music such as Béla Bartók’s. This seven year training was to have a great impact on his way of composing. In 1978 Pepijn Courant started to play drums accompanying his elder brother, who as a guitarist and singer who performed hits from the sixties and seventies by, among others, the Kinks and the Beatles as a guitarist and singer, both at home and in several schoolbands.
In the meantime he composed numerous pieces, from classical to pop, but soon realized the piano could not offer the sounds he needed for his music. Since 1982, he had been fascinated by the possibilities of the synthesizer, but it took him three years to save up the money to buy one. Till that time he collected all electronic music he could find. Fortunately, the library of Groningen, where he studied, had a huge collection of Tangerine dream, Gandalf, Neuronium, Vangelis etc.
Pepijn found out that this kind of music, which he had played himself on the piano for so long, was popular among a large number of people, because records sold well even though they lacked attention by the media.
He decided to release his own music which he had been ashamed of before. He joined the association KLEM (Contact Lovers of Electronic Music), which committed itself to promoting amateur musicians. He set himself apart from most other fellow electronic musicians in that he did not start his musical career as a listener, but as a musician. In 1989 he owned enough equipment to release his first compact cassette, 'Music from misty marshes'. The music was initially inspired by bird sounds from outside his apartment in Groningen.
As he had no sampler, Pepijn had to imitate all nature sounds with synthesizers, which yielded, according to a Belgian reviewer, a surprising result among all the new age releases with their realistic nature sound samples. He sent the cassette to the Belgian radio show 'Maneuvers in het donker' (Manoeuvres in the dark), presented by Flor Berkenbosch, who enthusiastically dedicated a large part of his show to this cassette.
In 1990 Pepijn released his second compact cassette 'Aquarius'. The music was inspired by the events that took place in the twentieth century, in particular in eastern Europe, where communism had collapsed at the end of the eighties. The visionary poems by William Blake had a significant influence on this cassette, which showed an optimistic view on the world. This cassette was also well received on "Maneuvers in het donker". Through this programme, the music became known to the renowned musician Ron Boots, at the time co-organizer of the annual KLEM festival, in the last years of its existence the biggest electronic music festival in the world.\
Pepijn composed a new piece specially for the KLEM festival, appropriately titled “Leap in the dark”, which was released on cassette and cd later. The concert was a big success.

The three cassettes were reissued on cd and eight more cd’s followed. Besides, Pepijn contributed some pieces to sampler cd’s. He kept performing on stage once a year or so until 2005. In 2006 he started playing guitar. His guitar playing can be heard on the last four albums, although electronic sounds still dominate his musical palette.
Pepijn Courant has jammed on stage with Synco, Mario Schönwälder, Bas Broekhuis, Ron Boots, Apeiron and Lambert Ringlage. Gert Emmens accompanied him on drums at E-Live 2015, where they performed the title piece of the new cd Solstice. Lambert co-composed ‘Twist of fate’ on ‘Blue sky events’. Ruud Heij of Free System Projekt played analogue sequencers controlling modular synthesizers on ‘Sense of urgency’ and ‘Solstice’.

Do you like to know more? Please visit www.akikaze.nl