Aili

Aili are Belgium-Japanese electro-pop duo Aili Maruyama and Orson Wouters. After a chance meeting at a party in 2019, and time spent bonding over music and synths, they found they had an instant connection, their different personalities and approaches to making music inspiring each other to explore new ideas and sounds.

Starting every studio session with no preset ideas, Aili and Orson instead embraced a more spontaneous and playful way of writing songs. Bouncing sounds, samples and even jokes off each other, they let the music develop in unexpected ways until Aili would feel the words begin to appear. To her own surprise this also led Aili to sing more and more in Japanese, or rather the unique version of Japanese she developed with her father so they could stay connected after she left Japan, aged just seven.

Since that debut the band have cemented their position as one of Belgium's most exciting new bands with new singles praised by the likes of Rolling Stone, a wonderfully strange video that saw the band draped in food, and becoming a regular feature on tastemaker radio stations like KEXP and KCRW in the US and Radio Nova in France. Having found a way to transfer the energy they generate in the studio to the live stage the band have also gone on to perform ecstatic live shows throughout Europe and even appeared as themselves playing live on the hit Belgian TV drama Roomies.