YASUAKI SHIMIZU

The late Aki Ikuta, who co-produced Kakashi and L’Automne a Pekin, and I used to play all sorts of word games. For instance, we would collect tongue twisters, break them into fragments, and create new tongue twisters from them. Through the process of playing these word games over and over again, I came to realize that song lyrics were more about feeling the tonal quality behind words, than their actual meaning.
For Dementos I brought my sister Mieko over from Japan and made her engage in hours of idle talk. At first what we are singing seems incoherent, but as you listen, you adapt, and a distinct atmosphere emerges. Reactions to the work were mixed: some people said, “It’s just artistic self-masturbation, no one gets it,” others had impressions that were surprisingly right on. More than anything else, it made me think that human patterns of communication are strange indeed.