With her mix of artifice, artistic discipline and sexual promise, no traditional figure is more ambiguous than the geisha.

Irony and mixing meaning abound on Hanayo's latest release, "The Gift."

Artist, musician and performer Hanayo has invoked the same sort of ambiguity since she first came to public prominence in the early '90s. As a working geisha who contradicted her shamisen lessons with stints in noise bands and contrasted her kimono with a tattoo, Hanayo became the face of Tokyo's hyper-mix of tradition and pop (in fact, the British style magazine The Face once made her its cover girl).

Her "beautiful geisha life," as she calls it, ended when she moved to Europe and gave birth to a daughter, but Hanayo continues to garner the same sort of ambivalent attention.

Hanayo has a voice and an aesthetic that recalls a harder-edged Bjork. The list of collaborators on her new album, "The Gift" (Beat Records/Digital Hardcore Records), reads like a who's who of current German music -- from easy listening lounge lizard Curd Duca to techno wiz Jurgen Pappe.

Despite her musical accomplishments, a recent issue of Spex, Germany's premier music and art magazine, focused instead on "why Hanayo always works with boys and why she always wants to be abused," she said, laughing, during a phone interview from her home in Berlin.

The cover of the album, which shows Hanayo, in a Nazi uniform, with a bloody nose and a black eye, is a commentary on her adopted country. Its stylized violence is a reaction to the difficulties of being a foreigner in a country that isn't yet comfortable with them.

"The police often stop me," she says. "They see my passport is from Japan and suddenly it's OK -- I'm not Vietnamese. It's so racist."

Though her years as a geisha steeped Hanayo in traditional Japanese culture (despite her prominence as a pop star and television regular, she still took dance and music lessons daily -- "You can't be a geisha in a trivial way," she says), nationalism wasn't something she had really thought about before coming to Germany.

Thus her cover of "Kimigayo," Japan's national anthem, set against atmospheric waves of sound and the cadence of her own breathing, should be read not so much as a provocation (unlike, say, Kiyoshiro Imawano's recent version) but a meditation.

"I'm so far away that Japanese things are becoming more important. Besides, I have tried to record 'Kimigayo' many times, but could never get away with it," she says.

With her breathless singing, Hanayo has been compared with another Japanese girl with a wee voice, Kahimi Karie, and in some ways the comparison is apt. Both have a fierce intelligence beneath the coy, little girl image. Neither can shake an image of being muses to men more musically gifted than themselves.

However, while Karie only hints at irony and double-entendres, Hanayo drips with them. Just as the music is at turns beautiful and harsh, the elegiac pop song coupled with full-throttle electronica bordering on noise, Hanayo seems to be in constant mutation.

The name of the album, for instance, is rich in meaning. The Japanese title, "Kenjo," also means "gift," but one fit only for the gods. In German, however, the word "gift" can mean poison.

Her cover of Serge Gainsbourg's "Les Sucettes" is another case in point. The original was recorded by Frances Gall who thought she was singing about sweets. The song is in fact an ode to fellatio and when Gall found out, she took Gainsbourg to court.

Gall remains an idol to Shibuya-kei pop stars like Karie. For Hanayo, she is definitely uncool. Instead, Hanayo attacks the song's sexual innuendo with a vengeance.

Her childlike air is also more and less than it looks too. Certainly Hanayo is too smart not to take advantage of the male fascination with the childlike female and certainly a touch of ruined innocence is part of her personality. But beyond that, it may also be a philosophical choice.

Hanayo's favorite book is anthropologist Ashley Montague's "Growing Young." In it, Montague espouses the childlike qualities of playfulness, creativity and exploration in a quest to "die young as late as possible."

Hanayo, with a new album, a new band and a slew of recent photography exhibitions, including one at the Taipei Biennale, is living proof of this dictum.

For more information about Hanayo, check out her Web site (www.hanayo. com).

Saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu takes Bach to places that no one else does.

His recordings of Bach's Cello Suites were made well outside the realm of the usual classical music recordings. With his horn echoing through the chambers of rotting Italian villas or the large expanses of rock caverns, Shimizu reveals the composer's transcendent, mystic qualities, while the belching, wailing sounds of his Saxophonette group inject a bit of humor.

Shimizu has re-created the recorded experience of the Cello Suites at parking decks throughout Kanto, but his more recent live ventures have been conventional. The series "A Saxophone for Bach" is a kind of musical memorial for the last year of the millennium. It began in January with Suites 1-3 and the December concert will complete the cycle.

Though Trifony Hall is a lovely venue with terrific acoustics, one senses that Shimizu and his black-clad horn henchman are slightly more at home in an offbeat setting. But this will have to do until he discovers yet another eccentric place to bring his personal take on Bach.