2015.12.09
Interview with CHIO (Vocals) and YOOKEY (Guitar)
By Takeshi Yamanaka
Original Interview (Japanese)
Since their suspension of activities in September of last year, a year and three months have passed. With UPLIFT SPICE’s YOOKEY and CHIO taking the lead, THE MUSMUS has begun their new creative activities. After repeating their destruction over and over again, all that remained in their hands was the desire to create music that is pure yet universal. With their refined taste in composing music, solid performance abilities, CHIO’s one of a kind emotional vocals, and their serious approach to creating new things all becoming one, there’s no doubt that THE MUSMUS is showing us some brand new scenery.
From UPLIFT SPICE, you made a fresh start with the name THE MUSMUS, but what do the words “THE MUSMUS” actually mean? When I searched for it, all that came up was a restaurant specializing in steamed food...
YOOKEY: The one in Marunouchi, right? (laughter)
CHIO: The first person singular would be “MUS”.
Um, what are you talking about? (laughter)
CHIO: A long time ago I had some hamsters as pets. I had a male and female, and I named them “Ham” and “Star” respectively.
Man, you have a good taste in naming.
CHIO: Then, Ham and Star started having a ton of babies, and I had about sixteen hamsters. I could tell Ham and Star apart from each other, but when I named the others one by one I wasn’t able to distinguish them, so from the word “HAMUSTAA” (Japanese pronunciation of "Hamster") I took “MUS”, and when they were all together I called them “MUSMUS”.
Huh.
CHIO: Back then I was still an elementary or middle school student, so I eventually wanted to get 100 hamsters. However, their life span was short, so that dream never came true... I suddenly remembered that, about how the hamsters would all pile over each other like “mugimugi~!” (a barley snack), and I thought it looked similar to a mosh pit.
I thought it was completely unrelated to music, but there is a connection there.
CHIO: Right. Hamsters are only there so that they can live, right? I thought that was such a pure world. A small world, but pure. That’s why, so that I can have 100, or rather, so that I can have a lot, I named the band “THE MUSMUS”.
I see. In September of last year UPLIFT SPICE suspended their activities, so what was the course of events after that?
YOOKEY: The reason for suspending our activities was, put simply, that the four of us reached our limit, or should I say, we thought “there’s no way we can keep going beyond this”. However, I was the only one to come out and say “I still want to do this!” Originally, I had also been the first one to propose that we start UPLIFT SPICE, so I felt like reviving it once again, but I guess you could say we put it aside for the time being.
Rather than a break up, you’re saying you put it aside.
CHIO: Effeminate, isn’t he? He’s probably the type who doesn’t throw away his ex-girlfriend’s things after breaking up (laughter).
Hahaha (laughter).
CHIO: After we suspended our activities, we wondered if we could still make music somewhere else... YOOKEY searched for somewhere he could make music as YOOKEY, and I tried to find somewhere I could make music as myself. I felt strongly that “UPLIFT SPICE is these four people”, so I thought all we could do was break up. However, nothing felt right.
YOOKEY: I also decided to try a support role, and even entered the studio. But all I thought was “why do I have to play these tunes that other people thought of?”
You’re the type that believes in your work 150% even though you made it yourself. (laughter)
YOOKEY: I felt like “if I didn’t make it myself, it’s no good!”
I see.
CHIO: Because of that, I received a message from YOOKEY that said “let’s be in a band!” However, when he said that, I still couldn’t summon the feeling to say “yeah, let’s do it,” so as a prerequisite I said “beyond these three songs you wrote that make my heart flutter, if I’m going to do this, then I want to be Thouzer.”
Thouzer? From “Fist of the North Star”?
YOOKEY: Yeah. The top of the pyramid, so to speak.
CHIO: Right. So that I can say “you don’t get any say.”
Hahaha (laughter). You wanted to reign over the band with absolute authority.
YOOKEY: To properly run a band, if you have someone holding absolute power, they can allocate the distribution of roles. In UPLIFT SPICE that wasn’t a pyramid, but more of a trapezoid. We kept having meetings and it got really depressing, so CHIO has seized that authority (laughter).
CHIO: Even outside of music, there were a lot of frustrations that influenced us, so I said “I’ll take command. Is that okay?” YOOKEY responded “by all means!”
Hahahahaha (laughter). By the way, what were the three songs you listened to?
CHIO: Track 2 “BINARY”, track 1 “BAPTISMA”, as well as another that we haven’t put out with our current release. When I heard those three songs I decided I wanted to be in a band again. More than wanting to be in a band, I thought that only I could sing them. I felt like “I don’t want to let anyone else sing these” (laughter).
Because of that, you decided to reign as Thouzer.
CHIO: Because of that, I said I would assemble some people who would also want to play these songs, so SHINGO and KYOYA joined.
YOOKEY, was your sense of music composition different from before?
YOOKEY: It was pretty different. I thought about what the meaning of playing music was to me. Of course, the feeling that “I want this to be able to sell!” was strong, and that still hasn’t changed...
Yeah.
YOOKEY: But I thought “what on earth is ‘rock’?” For example, even on the artist’s side, there are people who say “nowadays, even in western music there isn’t anything good.” I start thinking “in that case, wouldn’t it be good for me to make something myself?” However, I guess you could say when I find good music I think “I want to do things like this”.
Right, right.
YOOKEY: If someone is a trailblazer, 8-9 percent of people will start following them and digging deeper into what they’ve made. I started thinking, “In that case, what does it mean to be in artist?” and “What does it mean to make things?”
I see.
YOOKEY: Then, I relaxed a little... until now, I always had a deadline to make songs, or a cut-off for doing activities, and I was slave to those things. We were doing things in the live house, so I always thought “if we do things this way they’ll get excited”, and I think I was also bound by that. However, I guess you could say those restrictions went away.
So you could make purely good stuff.
YOOKEY: Yeah. Basically, I took notes on what I had experienced until that point. I thought, this kind of thing is a song. I found things only I could do, and what everyone had valued highly, and I thought it would be good things to do things like that as I wrote songs.
What you mean is things had become flat.
YOOKEY: However, the parts I had come to savor were, of course, the strong influences and stimuli from loud music. However, I wondered if that had become too mainstream. That’s why I thought if we all did things together it would be different, and decided “I also like guitar rock, so let’s mix it all together.” I thought it would be good if that could become something new.
About when did the current four of you assemble?
YOOKEY: July.
That’s pretty recent.
CHIO: The recording was only a month ago.
YOOKEY: In July we decided “alright, let’s record!” and it was hell (laughter). While we were searching for new members, we were making music at the same time.
I wanted to try and understand the good qualities the two of you brought from the UPLIFT SPICE days, since this project feels like you’ve refined things once again, with a high degree of perfection on all of the songs.
CHIO: During UPLIFT SPICE, I had a strong feeling inside me that I wanted to destroy certain things, but when I listened to YOOKEY’s demos this time and decided I wanted to sing the songs, I thought if I was going to do things again, rather than destroy something, I wanted to create a new world.
Oh!
YOOKEY: She said something really good. Not “destruction” but “creation”. She said that although we were facing the same direction, because our foundation is different our results should change.
CHIO: To sum it up, I thought YOOKEY’s music had changed. Maybe the songs aren’t like UPLIFT SPICE. Perhaps people who listen will think “ah, it’s UPLIFT SPICE!” (laughter), but for me, I could hear a fairly big difference in those three demo songs.
I want to talk about your image, or perhaps I should say, this project doesn’t have as much sadness as UPLIFT SPICE did. Those negative feelings, I don’t feel as strongly as I did with UPLIFT SPICE.
CHIO: Due to the things we stopped doing, something changed about me and YOOKEY. In addition, the newly added KYOYA and SHINGO aren’t such destructive people.
Was making lyrics also different?
CHIO: It was different.
The lyrics in this project aren’t quite as dark. You’re still using harsh words as always, though (laughter). There’s an awareness that you’re a person who always has and always will live with death as a given.
CHIO: Yeah.
In UPLIFT SPICE, those colors showed themselves a lot. In this work, that assumption is still there. For example, when I listened to track 3 “SILENT FINALE”, I thought, are these lyrics facing forward and trying to live, or should I say they’re lyrics facing forward and trying to die?
CHIO: Really? I like the philosopher Socrates, who, due to a few things that happened, was executed. At that time, someone mourned, “Why does he have to be executed even though he isn’t evil?”
Hmm.
CHIO: Socrates was a man who always said, “Ignorance is shame”, and loved pursuing things he didn’t know about, so he was asked “Well, do you know the world of death?” As he died, he said “Even though people haven’t died before, they are all terrified of death. Because I am dying, I can now know what ‘death’ is.”
Oh-ho!
CHIO: That had quite an impact on me. I think that if I die, I’ll rot, become nutrients, turn into weeds or flowers nearby, my shape will change and I’ll live again. Even if the earth explodes, I’ll become space dust and make up another new star... when I think that way, it doesn’t seem like such a sad thing.
That sense, does it feel like you have more of a foundation than just living?
CHIO: I feel that. The work we always did until now was destructive, and we fell apart into a state of nothing. From there, I wonder if we created something new, or something was born from there, and maybe it was similar to what I was thinking about.
You’re currently planning the start of a new tour, but how many times have you done live shows up until this point.
CHIO: We haven’t done any yet.
Ah, zero times.
YOOKEY: On 12/17 at Shibuya O-Crest we’ll have a solo show, which will be our first live show.
CHIO: Fortunately we sold out our tickets. When UPLIFT SPICE ended, we didn’t do a tour. I said “We’ve decided to end things, so doing a tour has no meaning.” This time I said, because we’re continuing, we have to do a solo show (laughter).
Thouzer!
CHIO: Like this. “Sell out our first solo show. This has been decided.”
YOOKEY: We all just said “Yes!” (laughter). Even though we also didn’t know if we could sell out or not.
Exciting, isn’t it? (laughter)
YOOKEY: As expected, now that we’ve done a lot of live shows, I guess I always have an awareness of the live house, so my attachment to it is strong. Nowadays you can broadcast things online, and there are a lot more videos there, so people might feel like they’ve already seen our live show, I want people to actually get up and experience things in reality.
Yeah, yeah.
YOOKEY: The genre we’ve been subsisting on... to say that now, for the loud scene, it’s pretty much decided that we have to do live shows. But when I tried thinking about that, there’s nothing that we could express that would be out of the question. There’s not one thing that we could do that’s out of the question. I think that “music is freedom”. I want to express that kind of feeling.
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