As our world gets increasing overloaded, or some would argue over-saturated, with stimuli — adverts, sound, news clips, fast fashion and more — the ability to parse out what is “genuine” and what is genuinely “trying too hard” grows wider than the chasm of what constitutes good taste. I think, carving out good work requires one to actually take a step back and ruminate on what one is doing before actually doing it. It’s that thought that had me reaching out to ASPIDISTRAFLY to contribute a guest mix for my latest Digging Deep, LYL Radio show.
What was it? Was it nearly a decade ago when we last heard from them?
Based in Japan, but begun in Singapore, the duo of April Lee and Ricks Ang debuted in 2008 with I Hold A Wish For You, an album made up of copious creative influences that would later christen the many directions Ricks’ Kitchen. Label would take onward. What began in an embryonic version with a hundred hand-painted sleeves, in 2004, now had its first true, official marker — here begins ASPIDISTRAFLY.
Three years later we’d get treated to 2011’s A Little Fable and a furthering of their vision. Before its surprising TikTok rediscovery, there was this, their bit of increasingly personal world building music that a seam (or a seemingly way) was found to step in on the language of nature and mix it into their own artistic vocabulary. But then, the silence…
It was in this period of silence, that precipitated their latest release, Altar Of Dreams, that I was really invested in.
You hear it in the single they chose to reintroduce themselves to the world. As part of their label, musicians like Meitei, ironomi, and haruka nakamura had established a voice for themselves, friends like Sugai Ken and Ichiko Aoba just did, but what exactly was their voice? I thought “The Voice Of Flowers”, now this, this is a statement. Here was a reason well worth the wait.
So, as I always do, I had to reach for the truth and reach out to them — let’s have a conversation (in the way I know how) with words and music. Here’s what they had to say.
ASPIDISTRAFLY Interview
F/S: First of all, congratulations on your latest album Altar of Dreams. How does it feel to present this work to the world?
April: Thank you! How we’ve been feeling is largely indescribable. I was really happy to be able to present this work before the world ended and just glad that my listeners could receive this music before I ceased to exist. Apocalyptic jokes aside, it’s been a tough decade. ASPIDISTRAFLY is probably the most absolute crystallization of who I am and what I want to express. And to have held that all in, for a good ten years, was remarkably challenging and troubling. I still remember holding the final masters in my hands, shaking, in disbelief, that we were finally happy and done with it. I’d probably still be shaking on release day!
F/S: It’s been a decade since your last full-length, 2011’s A Little Fable. What kept you?
Ricks: I admire that level of prolificacy that some other artists have but I truly believe we’ve only benefitted from working at a snail’s pace because I obsessed over cohesion and every detail when it came to making records. We know that our listeners are waiting, but deep down, there’s always small hope we will finish it, eventually. If we do drop something, we want to make sure that we are happy with how it turned out.
However, the album’s production did halt for a few years because I was diagnosed with tinnitus and found it challenging to mix the album. I have grown to live with it, and by the time we restarted the project, we had evolved and pieced it together from scratch. Along the way, we got married, built a home together, and advanced into our respective careers – April as a creative director for an A.I. company and myself as the owner of KITCHEN. LABEL – but this music has remained a constant.
But yeah, I think for the next one, we’ll try a different approach so we wouldn’t have to wait another decade before we put out something new again. You can only do this so long before it affects your mental health.
F/S: Speaking for myself, it’s simply been a joy to see how your record label, KITCHEN. LABEL, has evolved from its beginnings, as this labor of love between you two, to this now growing roster that includes other forward-thinking acts like Meitei, Haruka Nakamura, to name precious few. How has the stresses/achievement of running such an endeavor fed what we’ll hear in Altar Of Dreams?
Ricks: When we started, we didn’t seem to fit into any music scenes in Singapore or outside of it. So we went to Tokyo in 2007 to build something together with like-minded artists such as Haruka Nakamura and Ironomi, whom we met on MySpace back then, to set a blueprint for the label to create our own narrative instead. We were all neither pop nor experimental, nor electronic or acoustic. I just knew we always had our foot in the “ambient” pool despite falling between all these genres. It’s a huge blessing that we’re able to find musicians who speak the same musical language. It did help that we have our synergies bouncing off from one another. There is a kind of communal spontaneity and the label is our home.
The whole process of working as a producer and being involved in all the albums on the label influences and inspires what transpires for ASPIDISTRAFLY to some extent. It is important to look back to our roots and renew, rediscover, and rejuvenate them. I think we have a particular affinity with our artists. We share the same musical universe, but our individuality means we express the same ideas, leading to different, unexpected, results. An example of that would be Meitei’s lost Japanese moods, which loosely isn’t far removed from ironomi’s take on Japanese archetype concepts, even if their music sounds completely different.
Without the label and our ideas intersecting, I don’t think ASPIDISTRAFLY would have made the previous two albums, or at least we would probably have sounded very different, for better or worse. So, what we have been doing for the label for the past few years did set the tone for Altar of Dreams (to some degree).
F/S: Can you describe the journey that led you to working with each other creatively? How do you sustain such a relationship?
April: So here’s some trivia – we were acquainted some many years ago when Ricks was scouting for a singer in his then-band. As with all rock bands, there were egos and we subsequently split. I remember it was Christmas Day (a life-changing one at that) and then, teenage Ricks and April decided to make music on their own. It was funny how we also considered the impact on SEO (search engine optimization) back in year 2000, so we put together a unique name ”ASPIDISTRAFLY” and never looked back.
Over the years, we’ve learnt a lot about working with each other. We usually keep our headspace separate, and then come together to evaluate the work and put on its finishing touches. I consider it a blessing to have found my life and music soulmate – while we appreciate different things, our interests and lines of thought always end up converging.
F/S: I feel we might share a similar sense of belief in the power of folk music and in the idiom of folk itself as evolutionary. Can you speak of the role this vocabulary gleaned from artists like Bridget St. John, Sandy Denny, Shelagh McDonald, and more, has co-existed with music, sounds, experiences lived through from your own headspace (and Singapore itself)?
April: When I begin shaping an album, it usually starts off with a story I want to tell and an acoustic guitar. The triggers can be from films, music or an experience. I’ve never really set out to create something defined by “folk”, though I’m so honoured to be compared to the hallmarks of folk like Bridget St. John, Linda Perhacs, Sibylle Baier and Vashti Bunyan, all of whom I love and respect.
When writing Altar Of Dreams, I was going through a difficult time in my life and I sought a lot of respite from an alternate reality, in the form of “lucid dreaming.” I tried to capture all the strange visions conjured from it into songwriting and arrangement, and also spent time unearthing hidden memories, connecting the dots between what happened in the past, that could have shaped circumstances today. In the later part of the album, the mirage-like days and nights I spent in unconscious thought were intertwined with my Christian faith which eventually set me free from this difficult phase.
About Singapore – over here it’s summer all year round and all I can do is to wait for a nice stormy day, which is probably a perversely different kind of weather wish for anyone anywhere else in the world, hence, it’s ironic that I’ve been subconsciously creating music that makes one want to cuddle up in a blanket with a crackling fireplace. I love films, and Singaporean horror soaps from the ‘80s have impacted me greatly since these were the first things I absorbed as a child, where scenes and events usually echoed and looped, with distorted reflections and repetitions.
F/S: Your work has always had an intriguing visual element. I find it interesting you name-checked visionary multidisciplinary artists like Serge Lutens (who has graced fashion with his astounding photography and makeup design, and equally beguiling perfumes) and Dora Maar, another of a similar stripe, who is best known for her surreal imagery. Can you explain the artistic direction you were exploring on this release? How important was it to get that element as right as the music?
April: Music has never been music “in silo” for me, since there are so many things of beauty to be inspired by. The sound and visual world are the two most closely connected things during writing and production, with music always eventually being accompanied by some sort of photorealistic vision in my head – in fact it’s usually the catalyst for the lyrics. I think about them right down to detail, texture and tone, and then I’m able to replicate that resonance into words and aural layers. My fascination with photography, art, beauty, fashion, fragrances, and all their rich history bleeds into composition and arrangement.
Altar Of Dreams is a manifestation of the lucid dream excursions I had, many of which were warped, unintelligible, and sometimes macabre, and could be based in the past or as a projection of the future. In expressing this gauzy transcendence beyond conscious thought, the early work of Serge Lutens for Shiseido and Christian Dior was an influence for the album, with his impressionistic approach in depicting his unconventional vision of beauty, set in an almost immortal-like time-space. The rich palette from his photographs – bruised purple, midnight blue, patina-ed copper, faces and bodies sculpted from cracked white porcelain, most of which were set against a shade of black that looked like the reflection of a bottomless well at night – eventually became an important textural catalyst for the album, for both sound and visual.
Speaking of Dora Maar, incidentally I had her photograph “Untitled (Shell hand)” as my phone wallpaper throughout making the album.
F/S: All this line of questioning brings me to the meat of the matter. I love hearing what others bring to the table when they want to share the music they’re into. What exactly were you trying to relay to us in the mix we’ll be hearing today?
Ricks: As long as April and I have worked together, atmosphere and texture have been at the epicenter of what we do, even down to the lyrics. We wanted to create a mix that reimagines our upcoming album Altar of Dreams, dictated by the record’s atmosphere and environmental specificity. The mix mirrors an imaginary region found in Altar of Dreams that spans visions of haunted futurism, one of which is also romantic, healing and hopeful all at once.
These are some of the music that inspired our record and other tunes that are on our minds, perpetually. Personally, I became very invested during this album’s production in the discovery of 1980s – 1990s ambient pop music from Japan and Asia, New Age/healing music, musique concrète and Béla Bartók; which are represented in this mix. We also included tracks by SUGAI KEN, who collaborated with us on the album, and our long-time friends and musical soulmates haruka nakamura and Ichiko Aoba.
My pursuit of discovering older, lost music is almost archeological in the hope that some of these records can find a new audience one day. I also hope that ASPIDISTRAFLY and KITCHEN. LABEL could act as a vehicle for musical discovery.
F/S: Is there anything on the blog that you’re all specifically fans of? Gotta ask why or how you found me.
Ricks: We have been following FOND/SOUND because it has been our go-to resource for Japanese New Age and some leftfield Windham Hill, which we love. I was reading about Mark Isham on the blog when I discovered Juan Martin’s amazing record Painter in Sound, which he produced. It was also memorable for me to find a post on Hiltzik and Greenwald on your blog, so I was thrilled to finally attain some information on these obscure ambient electronic albums from the label Sonic Atmospheres I found at my local used record store. I read about your post on L’esprit Far Journey and realized I have the album in my collection and how that I haven’t listened and forgotten about it is beyond me. L’esprit has since been one of my favorite recent music discoveries.
From time to time, we revisit fantasy/sci-fi/horror and melancholic drama series in the 1980s produced in Singapore, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong. It was partly for their curious mix of music used in their background. With the use of Shazam, it has helped to find matches to these musical accents, which unleashed a whole new music discovery level for me. Some of this music found were by lesser-known Asian composers that I never thought would eventually land on FOND/SOUND like Chan Wing Leung, Chen Shye-Shing and even early K-pop by Jang Pil-Soon.
These little anecdotes are how it got me invested in your blog, and I have to thank you for the immense documentation on FOND/SOUND.
[Editor’s note: Thanks to April and Ricks, for contributing to this mix. You can find Altar Of Dreams at Kitchen. Label.]
Guest Mix by ASPIDISTRAFLY
Tracklist:
Stairway – Blue Pool
Ivy Low (刘雪芳) – 惑 (Mystery)
Yon Seok Won (연석원) – 인어 (Mermaid)
Sugai Ken – をちかえりと渦女 (Wochikaeri To Uzume)
Yoh Chu Sha (幼虫社) – 漂流 (Voyage)
S.E.N.S – 時間の階段 (Stairs Of Time)
Joe Hisaishi, Hiroko Yakushimaru (久石 譲, 薬師丸 ひろ子) – プロローグ (Prologue)
Don Harriss – The Alchemist
Marc Barreca – Memory Paths
Linda Perhacs – Chimacum Rain
Béla Bartók – Music For Strings, Percussions And Celesta, Sz. 106 – 3. Adagio
Asami Kobayashi (小林麻美) – アネモネ (Anemone)
Azuma (東祥高) – Flying Angels
Strawberry Switchblade – Go Away
Mark Isham – Alina
Haruka Nakamura – Horizon
Toshifumi Hinata (日向敏文) – 光と水 (Hikari To Mizu)
Ichiko Aoba (青葉市子) – ひかりのふるさと (Hikari No Furusato)