EIKO
ISHIBASHI

Japanese / English

When I interviewed you after The Dreams My Bones Dream was released, I came away thinking you probably wouldn’t do any more song-based albums. Did you feel that way yourself?

I feel ready to pack it in, every time. Making song-based albums takes a lot of time and energy. They’re more exhausting than any of the other releases I’ve done, so every time I finish one, I’ll be thinking: Nope, never again. (Laughter)

So you don’t get that with your instrumental work?

Those tend to be more fun. With albums like For McCoy or Hyakki Yagyo there’s a strong improvisational element, and I keep a lot of that in the editing – plus I’m doing most of the work myself, except for the mixing, which makes things more relaxed. They’re like interim reports from the daily experiments I’m conducting. There’s a bit of that with the song-based albums, too. Nobody listens to vocal albums all the way through these days, which got me thinking even harder this time about why I’d go to the effort of making one. I hope that listening to the whole thing leaves you with a feeling similar to the one you get after watching a movie. That’s what I had in mind, but it involves coordinating with people, and takes time and money. Not that I’m doing this for the money, of course, but it can start to feel like deep sea fishing: halfway through, I’ll want to throw it back into the water.

Was that the case this time, too?

Yes. I’d planned to take it easier on myself this time around. I wanted to make something pleasant-sounding that could function as background music, but it didn’t turn out that way. As I was working on the album, it gradually got heavier and heavier.

Background music_…? Did you have any particular reference points?

I wanted to make an album with a Julee Cruise feel, that felt like floating around in some backstreet bar.

I think it still has a little of that atmosphere, like the vocals on ‘October’_…

Right, the overall song probably has that vibe to it. But when I project myself into the lyrics, they inevitably start to reflect the way I’m feeling at that time. If there hadn’t been any lyrics, the album might have ended up as I’d envisaged – or maybe not? I always find it difficult to translate words into music.

Reading the lyrics left me with a sense that you were confronting what’s happening in the world at the moment. It’s like in Aki Kaurismaki’s films, where there’s often a TV or radio playing in the background reporting on some crisis_…

And it isn’t connected to the story.

Right, but it’s part of the environment in which the characters are living. I felt like there was something similar going on here.

I’m really glad to hear that. For me it’s very important to express things by taking what I’m feeling at the time and transforming it somehow, rather than making a direct appeal to listeners through the music. I’m not so interested in expressing things directly. If I wanted to do that, there are other ways of going about it.

It would be stranger if you tried to completely shut out reality.

Yes, that would be completely unnatural. What’s been going on in Gaza and Ukraine has really brought home to me how important it is to know your history. I read Human Acts by Han Kang recently, which was amazing, but it left me ashamed that I didn’t know anything about the Gwangju Uprising. This is something that happened in a neighbouring country, during my lifetime_…

It’s an awful feeling, isn’t it, to realise you’ve been living all this time without being aware of something like that?

Yes, I felt totally ashamed. I wonder if tragedies like that happen when nations, religions and people’s way of life all merge together, and everyone becomes forced to share the same ideals and illusions. The Gwangju Incident is one example of that, but violence has repeatedly been justified and normalised within the nation state. And this hasn’t ended – it’s actually getting worse – which I think suggests that human insecurity and fear is causing the collective consciousness and the framework of the state to get bigger and bigger.It seems our fate as human beings is to live in a daily conflict  that we cannot separate from one another. However, as social and personal matters have become too close to each other, it seems like the default has become ease of understanding. I feel like my readings of history were reflected in this album and the previous one [The Dreams My Bones Dream].

Does this tie in with that quotation from Michel Foucault’s ‘The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century’ which you use in ‘The Model’?

I think meeting Hiroki Okabe was a big influence. Mr Okabe has ALS, and he’s a former president of the Japan ALS Association. The director Ryusuke Hamaguchi introduced us. Mr Okabe really likes music, and he’s come to a lot of my shows. He’s completely paralysed, but he’s carried on visiting ALS patients around the country and working every day to train caregivers and improve the system for treatment and care. He’s spoken a lot about euthanasia; he held a press conference after that “mercy killing” trial in Kyoto last year [of a doctor sentenced to 18 years for the consensual killing of an ALS patient]. There’s a fear that if we allow euthanasia, we’ll end up with a society governed by eugenic principles, where there’s no longer any place for people who’ve lost the ability to move their bodies. I realised that this isn’t just someone else’s problem; everyone ends up becoming weaker, even if it happens to some of us sooner than others. It’s the same as how pursuing happiness can inadvertently lead to war: I feel like our desire for easy answers is leading us towards eugenics, without people realising it.

Reading the Foucault essay was quite an eye-opener – the way he describes how when the state took over from charities in providing assistance to the poor, they started categorising people.

I think people gravitate towards things that seem to provide easy answers. We’re strangling ourselves with these binary oppositions like health and sickness, normal and abnormal, useful and useless.

Still, it’s unusual just to drop a quotation into a piece of music like that.

I think that by using that quotation, I may have wanted to give it a kind of parallel world feel.

Speaking of parallel worlds: Antigone feels like it shares some DNA with your earlier band albums like car and freezer, but it also inhabits a different space, kind of like a fantasy realm. Was that intentional?

That wasn’t my original plan: I just set out wanting to make music that floated. But the music itself took on this dreamy quality, which was there in the initial demos I made, and then it kind of got more rugged as I started to add words. (Laughter) I think that was a good thing, though. Maybe it’s because the music was so dreamlike that the lyrics have a bit of bite to them. Injecting a little dose of reality through the words might have been my way of balancing things out.

I was surprised to realise you were singing “genocide” during ‘Mona Lisa.’

(Laughter) Yeah, I thought it might be interesting to pair the word “genocide” with a melody like that.

And you reel off that list of words – “Caviar, champagne, cocaine, thong” – in the most beautiful way_…

Those all appear in the opening scene of this film called Tough Guys Don’t Dance. I love that scene, and I put it directly into words. It came to me intuitively, and I was delighted to discover that it fit with the rhythm and melody of the song. Tough Guys Don’t Dance is a great film, I want more people to know about it.

Looking through the lyric sheet, I noticed there were repeated references to graveyards, too.

Yes, Perhaps it is because I’m experiencing more and more the loss of people we love and I like visiting graveyards and having a look around. I’ll do it when I visit other countries – it calms me down. I went to Gena Rowlands’ grave recently. There’s a cemetery in LA where a lot of actors have been laid to rest: Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, John Cassavetes. Walter Matthau, too. That was fun. OK, maybe “fun” isn’t the right word_…

Eiko Ishibashi

Interviewer James Hadfield
Editor Tomoko Ogawa
Designer Mayu Matsubara
Production Yusuke Nanbu

Hair & Make Up Kenichi Yaguchi & Hitomi Suga

Photographer Taro Mizutani

Location yamayuri