What on earth is a kyoka? Simply a solo artist whose cut-up-and-dance laptop electronica suggests more screws loose than fully tightened? Her style has seen her labelled as anything from a pop idol to a noise artist. And as it is usually the way, the truth lies somewhere in between. Starting her solo career at university as a side-project to her school band, Kyoka quickly found herself favouring ever-more unusual outlets for her scatterbrain sound. Finding J-pop utterly unpalatable, she began to look overseas, finding live shows in Europe and the US as well as presenting her own show on Britain’s Resonance FM, ‘Postcards From Kyoka’. kyoka is finding fans all over the world – from Japanese experimental king Ryuichi Sakamoto, by whom she was invited to join his project, to Stooges/Minutemen bassist Mike Watt, who played her music almost every time of his recent podcast shows and who recorded bass for her sound. Her songs have ranked in the Top 2, Top 5, Top 20 and Top 50 radio charts in Japan and the US, and Amsterdam fanzine Daruma has described her as a “freestyle broken pop beat artist”, a description that fits nicely, thanks very much. On top of all that, she performs in unhinged female duo ‘Groopies’, who have also been invited by Sakamoto to join the other project; has collaborated with Mike Watt (of the Stooges, Minutemen) CurseOvDialect (mush records), Hypo (Active Suspension, Spymania, Afterhours, Intik) etc. She appears in TV ads for Honda as a musician, she used to be a columnist for a magazine, and has had music on compilations like the Chrome Hearts Magazine’s vol.7 (cover: Cher) in Japan, Hong Kong and America. Not bad for a girl who “just wanted to follow her honest taste”.
Posted on: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 08:03:48 +0000
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