Kishi Bashi is throwing a party, and you’re invited
The indie pop singer took a breather from his international tour to chat about his Japanese heritage and the future of AI
Kishi Bashi released his sixth solo album, "Kantos," earlier this year.
Rob Williamson
Words by Annie Midori Atherton
When every other headline announces the end of human creativity, it’s easy to feel a sense of preemptive grief. But grief is not what you will feel when you listen to Kishi Bashi’s latest album, Kantos, or attend a show on his current tour with British band Sweet Loretta, where confetti rains and a giant steak dances on stage. That’s by design—Kantos is explicitly a response to the contradictions of our era, full of both hope and fear. The result: “A party album about the possible end of humanity as we know it, at turns deeply unsettling and sublimely joyful.”
Kishi Bashi, as fans know, is the pseudonym for Kaoru Dill-Ishibashi, who at 48 has already lived many artistic lives—including studying film scoring at Berklee College of Music and becoming a world-class violinist. He’s collaborated with Regina Spektor, Sondre Lerche, and was formerly a member of the band of Montreal. In 2012, he released his first, critically acclaimed solo album, 151a, and has since gone on to release five more.
As someone who also makes a living from creative work, I’m intrigued by his stance on artificial intelligence. I also relate to him on other fronts: we share Japanese heritage and were both born in Seattle, though he moved to Virginia at a young age. In recent years, he released an album and directed and composed the score for an Emmy-nominated documentary about the illegal and unconstitutional incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II (both titled Omoiyari)—which is something my family experienced. And we both have one daughter (his, now 18, cameos on one of his songs). So I was excited to speak to him about his cultural identity and creative process.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Annie Atherton: Kantos is very different from Omoiyari in terms of theme and music.
Kaoru Dill-Ishibashi: My parents are post-war immigrants, so they're not connected to incarceration. A lot of Omoiyari—both the album and the movie—was really about finding my personal identity. It's very tangential to the incarceration story, because it's about authorization, and we share a lot of common trauma of being minorities here in this country. But other than that, I try to stay positive, because I want to uplift immigrants and migrants and refugees. I tried to concentrate on the humanity of people, how they were able to love, or have loss, or forgive, or have compassion. Instead of, “Look at what happened,” it's more like, “Look at how strong they were. Look how resilient they were, and how we could be the same.”
But the subject is still heavy. And all the while, I've been creating this other kind of music, and once I finished the film, I felt comfortable exploring these other ideas that had been brewing all throughout. That's what Kantos eventually became. Once I knew it was a totally new direction, I wanted to do that because I like to provoke. That's why it's kind of like a party album.
AA: How does your Japanese heritage and connection to that culture influence you creatively?
KDI: Omoyeni was really a transition into feeling comfortable in this kind of bicultural artistic state. So I started mixing Japanese into it, if it felt right. On Kantos, there's a lot of Japanese singing, like on “Chiba Funk.” And also, the last one is a cover from this TV show called Tokyo Love Story that was a huge hit in Japan a long time ago. When I was looking for a sound, I realized that there's this genre called city pop that's like this 80s Japanese funk. And then on the back of the album cover, the artist I work with, Jerrod Landon Porter, created a bunch of kamons, which are like unique family crests for each song.
"Kantos" is Kishi Bashi's first full album in five years.
Cover art of "Kantos"
AA: You talked about AI at the Seattle show. Do artists have a chance against it?
KDI: Right now, for sure. But in almost every science fiction story, in the future, there's already been a war with AI, and the humans that have survived have banned it. I think it's almost inevitable that they'll surpass us in some way.
AA: “They” meaning robots?
KDI: Yeah. It might be an immediate, cataclysmic event, or it might be gradual, and we'll just eventually not notice that we've been ruled by them. Because it’s so powerful, what large language modeling can do. But the point I wanted to make, because a lot of people are afraid of it, is that human artistry is still something that has a value to people. Because people come to the show, they come to see me or my musicians. We create imperfect music, but through our human efforts, right? So there's a value to this. People want to see artists because they inspire us of our own potential.
AA: Would you say you're not quite anti-AI then, you're just protective of human creativity?
KDI: I use Midjourney (an AI-based image generator) just for fun, and it's amazing because I can't draw. So it's really exciting for people who love art, but who aren't really artists. But I think that probably irks a lot of people who spent an insane amount of time perfecting a craft. So I think it's definitely disrespectful to make money off of that, or start using that as human-created arts. That’s very unethical, I think.
AA: So if you had to sum up your take on AI, it'd be…mixed?
KDI: Definitely mixed. It’s great for concepting. For me, it's like throwing words into a bag and then picking things and making poetry out of it, which is basically looking for inspiration. So as a tool for inspiration, I think it's great. But if it's to replace art wholesale…first of all, people can see through it. And also, why would any artist endorse that?
AA: What’s your process like when writing a new song?
KDI: It’s almost never lyrics. It’s almost always riffs. I do a lot of sample chopping. If there's like a funky guitar in it, that’s usually the first idea. Basically how my songs work is, there's a very strong synthesizer idea at the beginning of the song, and then I build on it. So “Late Night Comic,” for example, has a cool sample at the beginning, same with “Chiba Funk,” same with “Lilliputian Chop.” So they have what I think are cool ideas, and then that's usually how the song gets started. I'm always recording ideas on my phone. I just work on it over a long period of time. If I feel creative, I'll work on it, and then once the juices have exhausted themselves, I put it down and do something else, then I come back to it.
AA: Despite the foreboding future, joy is a huge part of this album and your shows. Why do you feel like that's an important response at this moment?
KDI: I really think that joy is a perspective. To think that the world is coming to an end is a pretty morbid place to be. So I try to encourage people to make the best of it now. When some people might think it's the end of the world, others think it's just beginning. I like to encourage people to work on their perspective. It'll lead to a happier life.
AA: Do you consider yourself an optimist?
KDI: Absolutely.
Published on November 12, 2024
Words by Annie Midori Atherton
Annie Midori Atherton is a writer, editor, and parent living in Seattle, Washington. She covers a variety of topics including parenting, work, and entertainment, and is particularly interested in the way culture and media influence our understanding of ourselves and relationships.