1. Geinoh YamashirogumiEcophony Rinne
I found this on YouTube. I have a big love affair with things that don’t sit anywhere – I like not knowing the lineage. Of course it’s Japanese, but you can hear and feel they’re studying a lot of different musical lineages and digesting them. It was kind of like the starter of my first record, Ancestor Boy: I came across this and it kind of gave me a breath and direction to start the record. It’s not a literal influence necessarily, but it’s more the emotional rainbow that they opened for me that was inspiring. They did the soundtrack for Akira, which is what they’re most known for, but they’re a collective made up of hundreds of people, gathered precisely for not being musicians, which is something very interesting to me. I studied classical music, but always felt like I didn’t belong or wasn’t enough, so it was a good foundation for me to be so in love with the music of hundreds of non-musicians – teachers, journalists, lawyers, whatever. I also love all the group singing, there’s rarely a focus on an individual voice. My entry point into music was the collective, and I’ve always been more interested in the feeling of the group than the “I”.
