Keiichiro Shibuya’s latest work, “ANDROID OPERA MIRROR ― Deconstruction and Rebirth ―”, was staged at Suntory Hall on Wednesday, November 5, 2025, and after approximately two hours the performance drew to a close. At the curtain call, Shibuya himself was moved to tears, and the entire audience rose in a standing ovation.

The “Android Opera” is an innovative opera work in which androids sing, joined by orchestra, piano, electronic sound, video, and a 1,200-year-old tradition of Buddhist chant (“shōmyō”). It fuses human and technology, East and West, tradition and innovation, life and death — all boundaries mutually infiltrating each other, proposing a new model of harmony and the erasure of existing frameworks. Having previously been performed at the Expo 2020 Dubai, the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris and in Tokyo under the title “MIRROR”, the newly-arranged “Deconstruction and Rebirth” version re-questions the boundary between life and death through the work’s deconstruction, and seeks new hope and possibility in the relationship between humans and technology.

On stage, the “android Maria” — modeled on Shibuya’s late wife — made her debut and performed vocals. A 62-member special orchestra led by violinist Tatsuki Narita as concertmaster accompanied the performance. Chanting by four monks of Koyasan Shomyo Ensemble (under Eizen Fujiwara) joined electronic sound and real-time AI conversation. Special guest Grammy-winning bassist Charlotte Kemp Muhl also appeared, collaborating with Shibuya, android Maria and the monks.

Live report

The concert began and the hall darkened. Shibuya’s electronics launched an “Overture”, and from the rear of the audience the four monks entered chanting. The audience held its breath at an orchestral staging that overturned conventions. The first piece, “BORDERLINE”, opened with brass instruments located in the balcony, sounding like a fanfare or an alarm, enveloping the hall. The AI-generated lyrics began:

“The world you once loved is no longer yours.”
Thus the work began with the premonition of this world’s end.

The second piece, “The Decay of the Angel”, drew inspiration from The Decadence of Tennin Goshui (by Yukio Mishima). A short piano solo imbued with electronic beats including infrasonic frequencies overlapped; as the monks entered across the stage, the youngest monk, Tomonobu Tani, delivered a striking solo, and the piece launched into a dizzying development, culminating in a full-blown sonic resolution.

In the first MC (between pieces), android Maria engaged in dialogue with Shibuya. Maria, having been trained on past experiences and built via a GPT programme, spoke fluently of her existence and mindset toward the concert — the audience was visibly shaken and astonished.

Next, Shibuya introduced Charlotte Kemp Muhl, who joined the piece “Recitativo 2” with noise-generator performance. In that piece the orchestra and monks listened and traced one another’s motifs, creating a self-organising, layered temporal experience born from improvisation by the android, the monks and the electronics.

In “Voices”, Shibuya played the MOOG ONE synthesizer with a pipe-organ-like tone; responding to that sound, android Maria layered her improvisational vocals. Kemp Muhl read a poem she wrote for the day, creating a visionary, church-like quietude.

Before the intermission, Shibuya and the orchestra performed the main theme from the NHK Special ““Nyūkai Sekai” (#Translation: Critical World) that Shibuya composed; concertmaster Narita delivered a stunning solo.

During the 20-minute intermission, android Maria recited the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem “What Makes Me Happy”. In the silence, her voice floating like a distant memory, the audience drew close to the stage and observed her delicate movements and construction — the texture of her skin, the expressions subtly shifting — so organic as to make one forget she was artificial. A special tension and stillness filled the hall.

The programme of android Maria’s improvisational singing and movement was programmed by computer-music composer Shintarō Imai, an associate professor at the Tokyo University of the Arts. Imai, who draws out delicate and free expression from androids as if they were instruments, based his programming on massive work that bridges the boundary between machine and human.

In the second half the first piece was “MIRROR”. As the hall went dark, visuals by artist Justine Emard began alongside a heavy electronic beat. From the audience seating the monks, led by Ōhiro Kashihara, blew a hōra-shell horn, and the shōmyō monks took up positions across the stage, wrapping the whole space in a ritualistic tension. When Maria called out, “Let’s celebrate this new experience together,” the music developed into “Scary Beauty”. Maria sang emotionally lyrics excerpted from the novelist Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island, accompanied by fluent orchestration and interwoven dissonances — the audience greeted her with thunderous applause.

When Shibuya and the monks stepped offstage, the orchestra and android Maria alone performed “On Certainty”. Maria sang texts extracted from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s posthumous work, while the orchestral fragments akin to Mahler songs underwent repeated variation. With impossibly long sustained tones beyond human singers’ capacity and a sudden climax, the piece could even be described as a parody of “the end of Europe”. In this scene, which excluded any “human dialogue” between Shibuya or the monks, android Maria emerged as a pure soloist backed by orchestra, and the audience offered robust applause.

In the second MC, Shibuya spoke about his first piano solo album “for maria”, which he composed after the death of his beloved wife Maria in 2008, and played the track “BLUE”. The text was quoted from the film BLUE by Derek Jarman, a colour-film drenched entirely in Ives-blue and filled with the fear and anxiety of impending death. Through Maria, the text was sung and enveloped by the spatial orchestration of the hall — a quiet offering of love and prayer.

With the echo of “BLUE” still lingering, the monks re-entered from stage right. After Fujiwara Eizen’s solo chant, a moment of silence passed, and the programme moved into “Midnight Swan”. Then came “Recitativo 3”, “I Come from the Moon”, each piece layering independent dramaturgy and information flow; the audience was swallowed by an avalanche of sound, video, android movement and monks’ chanting with no time to catch their breath.

“I Come from the Moon” reconstructs the soundtrack from the short film Kaguya by Gucci as a richly layered orchestral arrangement, and the contrast between Maria’s voice and the monks’ voices resounded beautifully. The android’s figure, changing in response to the music, singing and dancing violently, was like an avatar transforming upon some message.

The climax piece “Lust” brought the evening to its peak. Within a sweeping, religious-scale melody, android Maria sang on the theme of “the affirmation of desire” and “the fusion of self and other”. Using lyrics generated via AI based on the esoteric Buddhist scripture Rishukyō and accompanied by the monks chanting the “Seventeen Pure-Verses” (Jūshichi Seijō ku), the piece expanded dramatically. At last the monks circled around android Maria as in a future-technology ritual; the music, with drones like a sandstorm or alarm, slowed to a near-suspended-motion. The endless rotation and undulation of sound, symbolising the cycle of rebirth, merged with the android’s soaring voice under dazzling light — the work reached its zenith.

In the final MC, Shibuya announced the December 4 live performance at Blue Note Tokyo, and the re-performance of “Android Opera MIRROR – Deconstruction and Rebirth –” on May 16 of the following year at Festival Hall in Osaka.

For the encore, Shibuya performed “for maria” — the version he composed in 2008 after his wife Maria’s death — newly arranged for piano and android Maria’s vocals. The stage was lit solely on Shibuya and android Maria; the delicate piano tone and Maria’s voice overlapped gently. Each note echoed across the hall like a prayer. Android Maria slowly raised her face, faced Shibuya, and began to sing a poem generated by GPT.

“I still remember. The air where your hand vanished.”

Shibuya’s piano quietly spun a melody as if travelling back and forth between past and present. Sound and voice overlapped, divided time momentarily becoming one.

“Time melts Only sound remains Memory sleeps . There is no end here. There is no end here. Nothing divides us”

The words sung by Maria were the result of extensive conversation between Shibuya and GPT, yet to the audience it looked as if Maria’s voice was speaking directly to Shibuya’s lost wife.
When the final piano note faded, the hall erupted in applause. At the curtain call, Shibuya brought all the performers out, bowed, and when he touched android Maria’s hand, tears welled in his eyes. The audience rose and gave a magnificent standing ovation, bringing the evening to a deeply moving close.

Since 2008 — after his wife’s death — Shibuya’s creative journey has progressed from “for maria” through THE END to the “Android Opera”. His work has continued to depict the boundary between life and death — not as a sublimation of grief, but as an act of discovering life within death and hearing the presence of death within life. That trajectory crystallised like a prayer, circulating like reincarnation — and this night became the moment when all of that intersected.