KAKOMIRAI is out now!
Image: Ben Develin.
Australian/Japanese producer Taka Perry has unveiled his debut EP, KAKOMIRAI. To celebrate the release, the musician is taking MILKY through the release, track by track!
"KAKOMIRAI translates to ‘future and past’ in Japanese; it’s about reflecting on the past and how it made me the artist and person that I am today, but also looking into the future as I try to push the boundaries of my own creativity and reach new heights. That duality is something I hold close to my heart, not just my art, but life in general, hence it felt like the perfect title for my debut EP. KAKOMIRAI - the culmination of my musical exploration to this point and springboard for the journey ahead.” Perry shares.
DON’T
I was experimenting with an Oberheim SEM plugin one studio night and decided I wanted to glitch it out in a way I’d never attempted before. I threw everything I could at it and that became the first sound you hear in the song. I couldn’t even tell you how to recreate it. I just wanted to make something unashamedly explosive and hard-hitting.
ALIVE
This is the first song I made for the record, right around the time I made ‘Introspect’. I recorded some ‘ooh’ vocals and started layering some drumstick sounds to build the foundations. I wanted to have this abrupt switch in the second half, and just by slowing the drums down to a half time groove it completely recontextualised the otherwise unchanged vocal loop. Because it was 2.5 years old by the time I was finishing the record it’s been through so many iterations that at this point I barely remember what the original sounded like.
LEMONADE
I’m a big believer that the best songs come together the quickest, with Lemonade the whole song was mostly finished in about an hour, on the same day Boy Soda and I actually met. As soon as he walked through the door, we landed on the exact same wavelength and had one of those days where the song just falls right into place, and you think to yourself “did we really just do that?”. Boy Soda’s unlike any other artist in Australia right now and I think it shows on Lemonade. It’s tough, its vibey, it’s hooky and above all, it’s completely unpredictable.
GUILLOTINE
I think my two biggest influences for Guillotine is J.Dilla and Tyler the Creator. I wanted to make an unashamedly throwback boom bap track that feels like it was chopped up on vinyl and programmed on an MPC. The tempo fluctuates in spots, the drums are 12-bit, there’s big analog filter sweeps on all the group buses. Everything about it was produced with that aesthetic in mind. My management had the idea of getting YDB on the track, and then I got Nate to throw down some vinyl chops in the chorus which really brought the track home.
HOKUSAI
This song started with a foley loop I found on Splice; it had this really mysterious energy to it and had these cool bass and vocal licks that would jump in and out erratically. I re-harmonised it with my own chords and started recording some vocal layers on top. All those vocal lines ‘don’t leave me here on my own’ etc are my voice pitched up an octave.
APOLLO
APOLLO is me showcasing the best Asian artistry in the country right now. Birthing the track alongside the melodic rap of Japanese speaking Cyprus, I then brought in the Korean flair from 3 of the 1300 boys, before having the incredible Chinese/English wordplay of newcomer MUNGMUNG, making it the first quadrilingual song to come out of Australia.
I’ve always been facilitated with the merging of cultures in not only music but in life. This is the sound of east meeting west, delivered in real time and I couldn’t be more proud to bring it to you.
TOKYO
I made this song during lockdown in 2021; I found a whole bunch of old voice memos I took of street foley from last time I was in Tokyo, and just dragged them into Bitwig and started chopping and stretching them around. I had just downloaded this Kontakt library called Yangqin which is the first koto-like sound in the song. At that time, I was listening to a lot of Burial and really wanted to emulate that two-step drum groove and bring it into my world.
KAKOMIRAI is out now!