With Shabason, Krgovich, and Tenniscoats’ “Our Detour,” the unlikely combination of two pairs of talented experimental artists results in a song as fresh and misty as a dew-soaked dawn. Esoteric, gentle and melancholic, “Our Detour” glides effortlessly, and will have you transfixed from the very first verse.
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Stream: “Our Detour” – Shabason, Krgovich, Tenniscoats
A set of artists brought together by chance, Shabason, Krgovich, and Tenniscoats make for an interesting combination.
After meeting while on tour in Japan last year, this group of diversely talented creatives clicked naturally, and decided to come together and create music in a studio setting. Across two days of free-form, meandering artistry, they produced the upcoming album Wao, out on Western Vinyl, August 29th.
The first taste of this collaboration is “Our Detour.” While hypnotic and sad musically, the lyrics, though cryptic, read with optimism and joy. It’s about flowers and nature, and the sensory impact of just living in it. It’s calm and contemplative, a song which needs to wash over you to be fully understood. Beginning with ambient sounds and a stilted electronic beat, the song cranks into life with distorted, almost atonal instrumentation, before Saya’s opening verse balances everything out and announces the structure of the piece.
If I look back
Instead of crocodile snap
A sea of every smile
A sea of every smile
It’s a song that, through it’s deliberate and well-crafted structure, hides the spontaneity behind the project. All the musicians involved – Joseph Shabason, Nicholas Krgovich, and Tenniscoats’ Takashi Ueno and Sayaka “Saya” Onodera – had only practiced together twice before recording, and when they came to get their ideas down in-studio, it happened naturally, while they were staying in The Guggenheim House in Kobe. Shabason found this added an organic feel to the record: “What is also cool about the album is that the house is very much not a recording studio, so it sounds super live. And because it’s also right on the train tracks, you can often hear the train in the recordings as it drives by. To me it adds so much charm and personality.”
“Our Detour” has more of a general feeling than a specific meaning. Saya’s whispered vocal carries a huge amount of power in its restraint; her voice is mesmerising at times, delicately impassioned and defiant. The male vocal take is in a similar vein, and as the two singers trade verses there is a dreamlike state to the piece, as Shabason observes, “The whole thing felt like a dream and was over so quickly so I kinda forgot about it until a few weeks after I got home. When I opened up the sessions it was really clear that we had done something special.”
Krgovich echoes Shabason’s affectionate tone. “The two days set aside for recording at Guggenheim House snuck up on me, and I think it did for everyone else too,” he tells Atwood Magazine. “All of a sudden it was like, ‘Poof! Here we go!’ So, I guess the main thing that carried things along for me was the thrill and gratitude I felt for being able to make music with Saya and Ueno and Jos’ and Eddie with no goal or plan in a beautiful place. It was fun not thinking too much (if at all) and just seeing what happened. I’ve admired Tenniscoats since seeing them play with Maher Shalal Hash Baz in 2003 and I’ve played with them in Japan a lot over the years, and they are so free and endlessly musical. I was kind of like, ‘What could go wrong!?’ When ideas came up it seemed to me everything would just fall into place, no sheepishness or second guessing, it was kind of like we were kids just playing around. Whatta life.”
There’s a simple sweetness to the traded verses being in two languages. You probably can’t get two languages more different from one another; the very fundamentals of the spoken word in English and Japanese are forged from different concepts. The effect of these two worlds coming together is enchanting, an exotic and varied sound which colors the timbre of “Our Detour” so brilliantly. If the rest of Wao employs this simple dichotomy, we could be in for something quite exciting.
Don’t look back –
Don’t look back from here
Flowers are blooming outside
As the piano and softened percussive elements keep the song drifting along, it’s easy to think of cool spring mornings, the ocean crashing gently in the distance, flowers blooming for the first time in the year. The openness and visual artistry of the lyrics invite you to dig deep into your imagination and daydream – About serenity and solitude, coming to terms with your thoughts, or anything else that’s on your mind. Saya gave her observations on the project in typically poetic style:
“When I am trying to make a song, through trial and error,
there are times when I touch the door or source of music.
On the collaboration too,
there is a feeling of being in touch with the music,
as if we are holding out our hand to a spring
that has been gushing out there for a long time.
We play with sounds, and resonate with stretching out the time that
we are (or were) present at shifts into memory.
Walking, feeling the wind, laughing, every conversation, remembering songs on the spot,
being in the musical space together is the inspiration itself for me.”
The intrinsic beauty of a piece like “Our Detour” is its pure collaborative spirit.
Across language and culture, this experienced group of musicians have put out a piece of music that manages to capture many moods and emotions – some of them conflicting – all at once.
Music, the universal communicator, has brought these two pairs of artists together for a project which, if “Our Detour” is anything to go by, should be an elegant and beautiful album.
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:: stream/purchase Wao here ::
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Stream: “Our Detour” – Shabason, Krgovich, Tenniscoats
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© Rieko Seizo
© Rieko Seizo
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