Dream pop and psych-folk have always had a skewed relationship with time. Given the ethos of psychedelia is one that is untethered and unbridled, this should come as no surprise – hallucinatory melting clocks symbolising the surrealism to which this sort of music is no doubt related.
The new LP from Koichi Yamanoha’s Grimm Grimm project, Cliffhanger, certainly flows in an abstracted, non-linear environment, floating away through the end of the world and the days wasted on it. After seeing him perform tracks from the LP at an intimate launch concert at The Old Church in Stoke Newington, he tells me: “The mood I wanted to create for this album was the feeling of standing in a floating junction of the past, present and future at the same time, something like hearing the sound of singing into the future. I wanted to try and create something timeless that stands alone as itself, something like those old nursery rhymes where people hum the melody, but no one really knows who wrote it.”
And the album certainly succeeds in creating a certain timelessness, bookended with Radiophonic Workshop alluding synths on ‘Diagonal Green’ and ‘Shayou’, while on ‘Hybrid Moments’ jittery guitars create a liminal space to float within. Not relying on linear narrative as a conceptual hook, the album instead draws on a dystopian cinematic to give impetus within its ethereality. On tracks like ‘Orange Coloured Everywhere’ and ‘Final World War,’ it does this with a frail whimsy, giving warm intimacy to the end of the world. Koichi says this ‘heavy and light’ feel is intended, telling me: “Werner Herzog talks of ‘ecstatic truth’ as being ‘mysterious and elusive, reached only through fabrication and imagination.’ I wanted this album to be heavy and light at the same time, I think it was partly influenced by the megalophobic feelings I have when I see enormous architecture, ships and ruins, and partly influenced by facing my close friend’s death. It became strangely positive and optimistic through the process.”
Within the gentle affection of the album, there is certainly an underlying menace and darkness, and it’s almost as though you can hear Koichi grappling with darkness through the light, a process using ‘fabrication and imagination’ to see through the clouds. On title track ‘Cliffhanger’ – which is interestingly positioned in the middle of the album – he floats through days passing by till the guest vocalist Dee Sada sees ‘your reflection in my knife’. Yet this potentially threatening imagery feels more like a gentle butterknife spread, menace coated with a softly spoken comforting melody. On ‘Still Smiling’ the line ‘please just kill me’ is followed by ‘do-re-mi’, while on ‘Final World War’ he sings about the end of the world where ‘the empty sky is falling over all’, before whimsically commenting ‘how overcast’ – looking into the mysterious but with friendly sarcasm.
The album also has a light nostalgic coat, and though this is partly achieved through affectionate nods to 60s psychedelia and folk on tracks like ‘Wheels’ and ‘Ballad of Cell Membrane’ (the video for which premiered on FRUK), it is also reached through images recalled and moments recaptured. He tells me: “When mixing the album with engineer Goh Nakada, I would communicate the feeling I wanted for the mix of each song by describing a specific place or situation like ‘the roof of ruins’ or ‘a hospital on the seaside’ or ‘rehearsing sounds of a secondary school brass band from far away’. I don’t know if there was necessarily one driving idea throughout the whole album, but for me, each song reflected feelings from place or scenario. The ideas I wanted to convey were quite abstract and hard to explain with words, so it was great to work with an engineer who really understood where I was coming from.”
I put it to him that the album could be described as being a sort of ‘dream folk’ piece – a phrase I use to orient my own music when describing it to would-be listeners. When I ask him about this, and the tension between associations of folk music as being authentic, laid-bare expression versus the obscuration of some dream pop and shoegaze, he tells me that it’s about the mood and honesty, saying: “The thing I like about certain folk music is that the context can be almost too personal to be out there in public, it creates some sort of intense mood. No matter what genre though, when someone is creating honest sounds it tends to shock me in an inspiring way. I know some of my songs have aggressive doubled up voices and reverb etc., but I never intended to make it dreamy…but maybe more creamy? Like Elvis or Suicide’s slap-back echo effect, it still haunts me for some reason.”
‘Honest’ is perhaps the best way to describe this album, as its charm can certainly be pinpointed to an innocence, its lack of pretension toward superficially loftier concepts or ambitions. Though the album is abstract and intriguing, it does so with a childlike imagination of love and the apocalypse – again on ‘Final World War’ he dreams about imagining being a hero in the biggest war of all time. The album is also rooted in the world as he experiences it, he tells me, drawing on the places he’s been and the people he lives and works with, but with an unbridled imagination the cause of the at points psychedelic response. He says: “I tend to take inspiration for lyrics and sounds from things people around me say, or scenarios from my life. Probably this creates a cinematic feeling, but I don’t deliberately make it cinematic in its scope. ‘Shayou’ specifically, was inspired by an experience I had in Hungary when an enormous amount of vivid orange sunbeams were coming through the cracks of this run-down wall, it was very dramatic. Orange Coloured was actually originally written as a short film score for ‘Blue but Pale Blue’ by Daisy Dickinson.”
And though the album is, for the most part, gentle and at points cerebral, Koichi’s honesty and self is perhaps laid most bare when the guitar is stripped back on ‘Afraid’, where a brooding synth pulses below heartfelt vocals, in what is perhaps the most affecting track on the LP. He tells me: “The form didn’t have to be folk either. When I started this project I initially wanted to make pop music as the songs in my head are usually melody-driven.”
When delving into the recording process, it becomes apparent that the home studio setup through which the LP was recorded is also key to its intimate feel. He tells me: “Most songs were recorded with limited equipment in my room in London as I tend to feel awkward in recording studios, I tried several times, but it didn’t work for me. Most of the recordings were through miking-up my guitar amps and tape compressor which probably made a certain nostalgia because it tends to cuts the high frequencies. Although I didn’t particularly intend to be either lo-fi or hi-fi, I more followed mine and Goh’s instinct to create suitable sounds for each song.”
The result is an album that despite its gentle whimsy is a deeply endearing and emotional space to float in, an enduring space to pass the world by in.
Cliffhanger is out now on Some Other Planet Records