Asobi Seksu: A Q&A

After recording and touring for an entirely acoustic album, Asobi Seksu return to their noisy-shoegaze-pop roots with Fluorescence.  Before embarking on an American tour, guitarist James Hanna spoke with Tastemakers about returning to an electric sound, bringing their newest album together, and an especially waterlogged experience had while touring Asia.

Tastemakers Magazine (TMM): Your last two albums, Hush and Rewolf, were both called departures from what you broke out with in Citrus.  Hush was more stripped down and Rewolf was all-acoustic.  When you recorded Fluorescence, did you have this in mind?

James Hanna (JH): We tried not to.  I think it just reflects where we were at — a kind of ‘€œgo-for-broke’€ thing where we put every guitar we could possibly imagine on every song, and then tracked some other stuff.   And now we’re getting more into playing live again and being a little more raucous.

TMM: And was it easy to get back to the electric sound after recording and touring all the acoustic stuff for Rewolf?

JH: Yeah’€¦the acoustic stuff was cool but it was never supposed to be anything more than pretty much a once off thing.  It was something that kind of just happened but it was fun.  It was definitely like ‘€œdoing a thing,’€ and not our primary identity.

TMM: I’ve listened through Fluorescence a few times and it seems like it’s a bit of a departure from your last few albums. You have a lot more synth, some programmed beats, and a song like ‘€œMy Baby’€ is really poppy in comparison to other songs of yours.  How do you go about crafting these new songs, and how do you decide what will be included or cut from a track once you have a rough idea?

JH: I don’t know.  It’s always kind of different.  We started working on the songs I guess a year ago, just me and Yuki, me playing a lot of drums badly and her playing synth, so I think that may be part of the reason why the synth figures more prominently.  It was just the place we were at.  It was pretty energetic.

TMM: Recently, a lot of people have been remixing the new single ‘€œTrails,’€ such as Holy Other, Painted Palms and Deerhoof.  How did that all end up happening?

JH: It kind of just all came together.  I mean, record companies have plans for stuff like that, and we just thought of some people we’d like to have remix it and they said yes’€¦and we were really really flattered that they would do it.  And for free nonetheless!

TMM: Did you have the same experience with [graphic designer] Vaughn Oliver who did the cover art?

JH: Yeah.  I think he was really excited to work with us.  He has been around a bit, so he certainly was not going to work for free, but he really liked the record and we sort of just ripped him out of the blue.  We just found his email address online and he wrote us back.

TMM: You’re about to start another U.S. tour.  Care to share a tour experience that sticks out in your mind.  The good, the bad, the terrible’€¦

JH: We just did a tour of Asia, which was incredible.  And we got stuck in traffic in Indonesia for like fifteen hours.  They said there was going to be traffic and that it was going to rain, and I thought it was just going to rain and have a little traffic.  But what it meant was that the whole city was going to flood and our car wasn’t going to move for about half the day.   But somehow, we go through it.

Be sure to check out Asobi Seksu’s newest album Fluorescence (out now) and their 2/25 show with BRAHMS at Brighton Music Hall in Allston!