Truth be told: I really had trouble deciding to share this album with you, fair reader. One of my many goals for this blog is to move away from the well-worn stereotype/trope of the “female musician”. However, staring right in front of me (and you now) is exactly what one associates that being by pigheaded industry types. Noriko Sekiguchi, when we last left her, was showing us through POiSON GiRL FRiEND that rare, but really wonderful, in-between period when Japanese indie rock music fell in love with electronic dance music and concocted it’s own equally unique stylistic blend. Now, we have her <<seemingly>> giving off the appearance of falling into the same worn out tropes other female musicians get railroaded into…hit me baby one more time, indeed…
However, as I kept looking at the story behind Love Me and ideas fully fleshed out behind the cover, I started to understand what the cover was meant to convey. Frankly, much like her, we all get to a point in our life when we just get tired of all the bullshit. For Noriko, it came in 1993.
After the quiet success of Melting Moment came the searching attempts to follow it up. Unable to find much inspiration within Japan she travelled to England and went deeper into their club scene finding simpatico musical partners like Simon Fisher Turner and Momus to help her flesh out demos. Now signed to a bigger label, Columbia, with the prestige, came the pressure. Working under an obvious huge influence made her a bit subservient to his vision.
On releases like Shyness we here Noriko’s leftfield take on Lolita-esque pop music skew more toward the standard role. As good as that album is and as much as Momus brought to her music, she succumbed a bit in what she could to that table. As she’d admit in interviews, the darker feel of that album ran counter to more of what she wanted to create. Noriko understood the power of the Lolita form in music and this failed to meet something she had to take the reins on. Love Me was the correction.
Love Me appears to be an exploration of how the sexual provocateur — the lolita — can flip the script. Rather than be a passive, naive woman, this character is a “fragile soul” capable of being assertive, taking control, and being vocal of what are her desires/needs. She was capable of being a grown-ass woman. One doesn’t have to wallow in the darker side of life to actually enjoy life in all its gradients. That’s what Love Me became. It’s something that began back in Japan while working with Nobby Style as Dangerous Electric Kiss a moniker they came up to make brilliant longform IDM for Newsic’s Angelic House – Ambient Love Collection compilation.
For POiSON GiRL FRiEND it was the purchase of a groovebox (used in those sessions) that afforded her a direction she could take. Falling in love again with heavier beats she could self-produce allowed her to sketch out an entire whole album with the kind of music she wanted to create. Now more Brigitte Fontaine than Bardot, from the opening song the electro-dub workout of “Passage Brady” to wonderfully baggy “Communication Breakdown” not one inch or quarter was given from this vastly more mature sound.
Moving away from some of her early ‘80s-leaning influences and exploring the nouveau beats of trip-hop, acid house, and ambient music, afforded Noriko the ability to shift moods much easier. The obvious highlight, one that inspired my “chanteuse” mix, “Love Is” featuring Killing Time’s Neko Saito, drills down that much more complex and heartfelt realm of emotion only capable from hearing someone who actually is fully committed with it. Vibe out, dance out, or pace out — it’s all here.
In Love Me I hear the ripples of earlier Japanese artists like Ichiko Hashimoto, especially in works like D.M., who managed to go beyond the suspect qualities of their overt, French influences, heading off into other crevices that speak better to what they’re really trying to say. Transforming Michel Polnareff’s “Love Me, Please Love Me” into angelic house music, points to this subversion of type. While other male Japanese musicians like Kiyoshi Hazemoto, Takeshi Isogai, and Makoto O2 help Noriko out, there is no svengali behind POiSON GiRL FRiEND . Songs like “Slave To The Computer” and “If You Wish” speak to the various sides only Noriko could suss out.
Capturing various moods, much like the various “alternate” album covers found within the liner notes, show Noriko finding her strength not from fixating on one thing but by trying on whatever the hell she wants. English, Japanese, French, hi-NRG, folk-hop, longform club-ready instrumentals, and yes, even darkness (see: “Tout Est Rouge”) come in when they matter. As one queen would say to the other: “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you’re gonna love someone else.” In the end, there’s a lot to love about Love Me.