SAPPHIRE SLOWS
While weighing in 2013’s overwhelming onset of notable releases, as the quality of the relentless end-of-year-list season swelled in every field, Allegoria was one of those unexpected gems that winked curiously back at us. The debut full length by Tokyo’s Sapphire Slows (real name Kinuko Hiramatsu) manifested itself as an unanticipated quirk in our retrospective round-up.
Hiramatsu’s intimate-sounding, semi-danceable tracks found a home on LA label Not Not Fun, an event the producer describes as “too fantastic” when we’re transported, via a series of excitable e-mails in her second language, to the Tokyo bedroom which has become synonymous with her output. “I’ve been a big fan of their releases since I started collecting underground music vinyl in 2008/2009” she says, “so I sent my first few demos to them in 2011, when I had just started making music. Just two days after I got their reply saying let’s release my songs on NNF!!!!!”. It’s easy to see why Amanda Brown, the co-owner of the psych/noise/drone imprint was drawn to Hiramatsu, as her giddy, drifting sound and pulsating rhythms are comparable to some of Brown’s more beat-orientated experiments with her LA Vampires project.
Allegoria takes a darker turn from Hiramatsu’s previous releases, such as the piano house collaboration with Magic Touch on Not Not Fun offshoot 100% Silk, yet still carves its niche in her distinct, reverb-drenched vocals. As they float around dotted piano stabs and synth bursts, Hiramatsu edits her murmurs like any other sound material, as “just sound can express enough what I couldn’t do verbally in the first place.” Mostly unintelligible, it lingers and weaves through woozy production for multiple layers of expression; “I always sing obscurely in English. Basically the words came from something like memories or emotions in my mind but I try to make it in some way abstract. Lyrics are important to know or guess what I feel, but I don’t care if people never know.”
Paradoxically, the record feels both distant and intimate. Dreamy vocal smogs are smothered over submerged, aquatic bass lines; Break Control is earthy and rippling while the title track’s gnawing, itchy techno rhythms build around a disjointed piano line. The album’s standout track, Corekill, layers hauntingly ethereal vocals over pulsating bass that bears a likeness to Andy Stott’s gloriously murky Numb. What does she think of the comparison? “When I first heard [Numb] I felt the same thing … though I’d already made Corekill then. Numb is an absolutely stunning song, isn’t it?” The track, finding its skeletal structure through an iPhone production app, also highlights a particular insouciance to her production technique, “The song is my favorite too. Actually it is the oldest song in my album. When I made it about 2 years ago I wanted to try a TB-303 sound but I didn’t have one so I tried to make the bass with an iPhone app called DB-303. The bass sound was lo-fi and not even stereo but I thought the song could be cool with it, so I added some other stuff and made it into Corekill.”
Created in isolation in her flat in Tokyo, Slows’ production incubates that sense of innocence and longing often prescribed to a certain ilk of bedroom producers. “I’m living in a small apartment in Tokyo by myself, so the process of making music in my bedroom is super private.” Far removed from the chaos of the city around her, this insular mood is hushed through her dusky, atmospheric “whispers”, a vocal style she tells us stemmed from her hesitancy to disturb the neighbours.
Often associated with an emerging pool of Tokyo bedroom producers, Slows is quietly confident about the small collective she belongs to. “I have some close friends who produce music but the community is still very small and hidden.” However, struggling to be separated from a pigeonholed outlook on her city’s musical heritage, Hiramatsu has been known to express her complaints at reductive and lazy ‘J-pop’ (typically day-glo, larger- than-life Japanese pop) comparisons. “Yeah, many genre categories by the music industry are just lazy. I know they have to explain music to sell it so it could be a good thing. But at the same time, I’m a young Japanese girl living in Tokyo – that’s totally true, but so what? That sucks if I have to be one of those Kawaii girls.” While Slows’ production continues to lift itself from an emerging pool of localised producers, we’re convinced it’ll continue to intrigue and mystify long after 2013’s end.
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Allegoria is available now via Not Not Fun
Words: Anna Tehabsim
Photo: Satsuki Kawaguchi
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