Destruction and Imagination, and the Cycle of Despair and Hope Make the World Anew - Seiko Oomori
I’ve been obsessed with the answers Seiko Oomori gave Kera Style a month ago about the process of writing her new single, “draw (A) drow.” I liked her answers so much, I decided to translate it so I can share it with people. I translated it starting from second subhead; the first section is about the basics of what it was like to work with the song’s producer, TK
Kera: The lyrics leave an impression with words that hits you when you hear them. Like that lyric “phantom bug” that comes up in the beginning for example…
Seiko Oomori: When I looked it up, “phantom bug” wasn’t an actual term. I imagined a bug when I wrote lyrics this time. Maybe because I thought to turn my anger and flaws into lyrics, but I always imagined a bug so I put that word in.
What were the anger and flaws that you wanted to write about?
SO: When a culture is born, it’s created from inspiration by a person’s invention or creative work, right? But then when other people start to get drawn in and come into it, the people who built it have already left that scene, even though everyone else believes its really a important part of life.
When I go back to understand what I was I angry about or thought something was off all this time, I think it goes back to that. There are Seiko Oomori fans who think, with me putting so many different feelings into my music, I will strike up new ideas, and then that will become its own new culture. There are also people who doesn’t think like that. Even if the core of it doesn’t change, I will change gradually and try all sorts of things. And there’s some hope that a work by someone like me will be destroyed. I think you have to create, destroy and keep going forward with this cycle.
Hope in destroying something you made?
SO: Yeah, things are reborn again because they got destroyed. Even if we can experience 2017 again, I think about how we still won’t have any solutions, but that solution is something fluid and changing over time. So I liked the idea of someone who thinks “it’s OK to destroy this” to say that upfront, and so I turned that conclusion into song.
But that explanation is kind of a burden. I think it’s also fun to think this song is cool because it sounds great.
From a listener’s perspective, there’s this world being built as you listen, but that world is being torn apart by these strong words inside. And you experience that cycle in the music.
SO: Maybe that is the correct way to live on this earth? I’m always aware of that, so I try not to have these set feelings. Feelings change. I’m not the same when I wake up in the morning and when I go to sleep at night. I want to do right with that flow, so I want to cycle things out more and more. I want to record those moments in songs more and more. And then destroy them. Phantom bugs, black trash bags… It’s great how this brings up a lot of images.
I’m curious about the word “hope” in your lyrics.
SO: Despair and hope are the same, isn’t it? I think about when I look at young people or people who face themselves intensely. I wrote “hope” but it could be either or…
There’s despair because there’s hope. And there’s hope because there’s despair…
SO: It’s like a trigger that each can only create and destroy. You can’t destroy it so you can’t create it. If you can’t make the next thing, you get bored of yourself. But if you never get bored, it’s fun. In order to feel that, you have to destroy and go to the next room, the next field.
You destroy things you made out of despair, but that gets you closer to hope. How about your last album, kitixxxgaia?
SO: I was in a world of gods. Each time, I make something opposite from the album before. I’ve been doing this process where I confront the world I created before and I destroy it. I said “Seiko Oomori is god,” so this time I ended up with something that says “I am me.”
Now that I think about it, the release before that, “Orion-za / Yabatan Densetsu,” was something not so long ago. You really release things without a lot of break in between.
SO: There aren’t breaks. I want people to know it’s always going to be that way.
You showed the process of creation and destruction in one song, but I see it’s also like that for your activities throughout the year.
SO: That’s right. That’s the only way to get joy out of it. Because destroying things and then making something is really, really fun.
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