UA's Breathe @ 20

Inside the making of a fascinating Japanese avant-pop record

More than 20 years ago (fuck, I’m old), I discovered the Japanese singer UA (full name: Kaori Hasegawa) via fluxblog. The site’s proprietor, Matthew Perpetua, posted a track from her then-new album Sun, and I walked over from the office where I worked at the time to the Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya and bought the CD. I wound up following her career for a couple of years, ultimately buying several more of her albums: 2002’s Dorobou, the 2003 double live CD Sora no Koya, La (Live Recordings from Sun 2004), and 2005’s Breathe.

Sun is one of the craziest, most surprising, and most beautiful records I’ve ever heard, and it still fascinates me all these years later. UA’s voice is somewhere between Björk and Natalia Lafourcade, but the music sounds like neither of them. UA chooses to collaborate with a live jazz group for much of the record, playing “out” stuff in the neighborhood of Don Cherry’s Eternal Rhythm, or Yoko Ono’s mid ’60s collaborations with Ornette Coleman. There’s other stuff in there, too, though, demonstrating that she doesn’t have her head entirely in the late 1960s; one track uses various cell phone ringtones as melodic counterpoints, another features a dog barking throughout. And the album’s final track, “Ua Ua Rai Rai”, brings Balinese gamelan players into the mix. I’m not a big gamelan fan, but it works in this context, even if I do prefer the more “traditional” free jazz tracks.

Breathe is very different. The jazz-rooted sound of Sun has been almost entirely abandoned in favor of a simmering, atmospheric art-pop style that incorporates electric and acoustic guitars, strings, upright bass, and Ondes Martenot, but there are also glitchy electronics, samples from what sound like children’s cartoons, and layers of treated vocals whooshing from speaker to speaker. The rhythms are constructed from various looped sounds, rather than programmed on a drum machine or played by a live percussionist. It’s an avant-garde art-song record, reminiscent of Björk’s Vespertine or even the late work of Scott Walker.

The other major difference is that UA is singing in English on about half the songs, including album opener “The Color of Empty Sky”, “Moss Stares”, and “Like a Soldier Ant”. She seems more comfortable with the language than almost any Japanese singer I’ve ever heard, fully inhabiting the lyrics rather than seeming to recite them, and given the weirdness of the music it feels like an honest artistic choice rather than an attempt to “cross over” (the album was never even released outside the Asian market).

Breathe’s unique sound was almost entirely due to one man: Kazuhisa Uchihashi, a producer and improvising musician who’s worked with a wide range of artists including Fred Frith, Joëlle Léandre, Tatsuya Yoshida of Ruins, Hans Reichel, Akira Sakata, and the Indonesian duo Senyawa. He co-wrote almost all the material, produced and arranged it, and played on every track. I sent Uchihashi some questions about the album, in Japanese, via email; a friend, Phil Marvy, helped with translation on both ends. Here’s what he told me.

You played on one track on UA’s previous album Sun, and were part of her live band in 2004. How did you get the job of producing Breathe?

I knew UA before working on Sun, and she had asked me to join the band that she had at that time. This was the band she had before the album La, and all the members were different except for the bassist. Around that time, I wrote some songs for her and sent her the demos. These were the songs from Breathe. She said she wanted to do them all, but since we were in the middle of working on Sun, which already had a concept, we decided we’d do them on the next album. It seems that it was her first time making an album with only one other person.

Did you know UA for a long time? Were you part of the same “scene”?

We had a mutual friend named ZAK; an engineer I’d known since he was a teenager, and he suggested UA and I do an improv session together. It was at a reception for the release of a new work by film director Naomi Kawase. That was the first time that I met UA. At the time, she was a singer working in a world that had no connection at all with improvised music. She herself told me that she really started to change after she met me. I also thought it would be great if she expressed herself more freely, so I used to invite her to all kinds of things.

What kind of discussions did you have about the instrumentation and arrangements? Were the songs fully arranged from the beginning, or did you lay down basic tracks, she recorded vocals, and then you added more elements?

The arrangements were already fairly complete at the demo stage. For this album UA was kind enough to give me free rein, and she really didn’t say anything about the arrangements, she just left it up to me. The basic tracks were mostly made from my original samples, so the only additional recordings were strings, clarinet, acoustic bass on one track, my guitar, bass, and daxophone. The vocals were recorded last. At points where UA wanted to add a chorus, I arranged those sections so she could add vocals there.

You play almost all the instruments on the record. When someone else appears, did you choose them or did UA?

I chose all the additional musicians. For the strings, there were eight musicians just for the cello section. I asked someone I trust to act as section chief for me, and gather them together.

She was singing in English on several songs — did this change anything about the writing process? Did it require different types of melodies, or different arrangements?

Apparently on hearing the melodies, UA got an image of singing in English, so we didn’t have to change anything in the arrangements.

Was the record popular in Japan when it was released? How was it received by fans and critics? Did people become more aware of your other work because of working with UA?

The album was not well received. Most of UA’s fans were into funky pop music and the reviews were not favorable. It got some comparisons to Björk. I seemed to get most of the blame for the change in direction, it was basically negative. We were really satisfied with having made it, though. Later on, I ended up meeting a lot of people who were kind enough to tell me that this was their favorite album, but her traditional fans didn’t seem to understand what it was supposed to mean.

Was there a tour in support of the record? Did you perform live with her?

Yes, we toured it. I was the bandleader from Sun onwards, so I did most of the live arrangements.

You worked with her on three more albums after this, but never produced a whole album for her again. How did the creative relationship evolve over time?

We worked closely together for fifteen years. For a while she was really fascinated by the cutting edge, but as she saw her audience drift away, it seems she became more focused on being recognized as a pop singer. Lately, she’s more concentrated on pop, and she’s using younger musicians. She’s not making a whole album with only one other person these days. Basically, her stance is to produce each song on its own. Although I’ve left the band, we have a strong bond of trust, so we still play together sometimes. Whenever there’s an interesting project, I’m always invited. I think she just doesn’t want to go in a straight ahead avant-garde direction. She’s a person who’ll always keep that cutting-edge consciousness in her heart.

That’s it for now. See you next week (or on Friday, if you’re a paying subscriber)!