Hiro Kone is the alias of Nicky Mao, a New York City based musician and producer.  Taking a deconstructive approach to music, she is known to draw upon a combination of modular synthesis, noise, field recordings, and her once abandoned violin training.

 

Her full-length LP “Pure Expenditure” for Dais Records was premiered at Berlin Atonal 2018, following the BANK Records NYC release of “The Ghost of Georges Bataille”, a collaborative album with Drew McDowall of Coil. Previous to this, she released a string of EPs including “Fallen Angels” on Geographic North, which sourced Mao’s earliest memories of childhood in Hong Kong, repurposing vibrant fragments of the past through a disorienting array of sonic imagery. This was followed in 2017 by a full-length entitled “Love is the Capital” for the same label.

Hiro Kone has participated in several collaborations, most notably a live score for Cinema 16 at The International House of Philadelphia (2012), “A Raga for Moog and Violin” with Arp (release 2016 on Geographic North), a live re-imagining of Little Annie Anxiety’s 1984 album “Soul Possession” (Pioneer Works, 2017) and music for David Van Tieghem x 10 Fits and Starts (RVNG Intl, 2013).