Words by Harper Mahood
“Glossolalia” is an English noun describing the phenomenon of speaking in an unknown language, especially in religious worship, where practitioners enter a ‘trance-like state of ecstasy.’ Glossolalia also happens to be the title of Motion Graphics’ latest ambient-pop EP, a transcontinental collaboration with Japanese artist, Utena Kobayashi. The EP features Joe Williams’ unique production quality, paired with Kobayashi’s proclivity towards the obscure, singing in a unique language of her own creation. Linguistic serendipity? Presumably yes.
Glossolalia also features remixes from Visible Cloaks, a Portland-based ambient new age duo as well as Kuniyuki Takahashi, a prolific Japanese DJ, music producer and sound engineer. Created entirely via internet correspondence and collaboration, Glossolalia explores the poignantly human element of the digital world.
Off Shelf: I’m curious what sparked the collaboration between the two of you, as well as Kobayashi and the Portland based ambient duo, Visible Cloaks?
Utena Kobayashi: The collaboration began when I asked Joe to do a remix for my album released in 2021. My husband introduced me to Joe. During the process of working on the remix, the collaboration naturally evolved.
Joe Williams: I have a friend, Shin, who has booked me in Tokyo to perform and DJ; he brings a lot of people from the United States to Japan. I think he heard the Ryuichi Sakamoto remix I did a few years ago and thought it would be a good idea to matchmake me with a vocalist to produce some music together. It was originally supposed to be a remix, and I changed a lot of the instrumentation outside of Utena’s voice. I would rework the songs from home, Utena and I hadn’t met, it was all done over email. We didn’t meet until after the record was done.
With Spencer from Visible Cloaks, we’ve been friends for over a decade. We were pen-pals for many years, collecting the same kind of records and being interested in finding music together. Then I ended up working on his album and we went on tour together. We’re friends and peers, and have done a lot of stuff together, so it seemed natural [to collaborate now]. Spencer had done a record with Dip in the Pool, an 80s and 90s kind of pop group for lack of better terms, with left-field influences and meanings. Dip in the Pool was definitely like a reference point for how I approached Utena’s music because Utena’s music is contemporary pop but there’s also folk and ambient influence. Dip in the Pool was a loose interpretation of where I thought I could take her voice and her sound to conceptualize it.
With Kuniyuki, I’ve been a fan for a long time. He’s a super prolific, an amazing producer and composer and he’s done a ton of remixes. I reached out to him through a mutual friend, and that was kind of it!
Utena is from Japan, I’m from America, Spencer’s from America, Kuniyuki’s from Japan; it felt like it fleshed out [the album] and gave it balance.
OS: Can you walk me through the creative process of working with musicians both across the country and internationally?
UK: The creative process was very interesting. These days, working online is quite common, but my exchanges with Joe felt more like corresponding through letters. There wasn’t much reliance on language—rather, sounds were exchanged and responded to with more sounds.
[As far as vocals] once I create a track, I set up a microphone and start recording. The melodies and words that emerge in that moment naturally become the lyrics. My music is often built around imagined scenes rather than poetic narratives. I strive for the vocals to exist as part of the scenery rather than as a means of describing it.
Moving forward, if a song and its melody lead me in that direction, I may also sing in Japanese.
JW: It’s pretty easy these days to export stems, have somebody bring that into their software environment, add things, get rid of things and make changes, then send it back. That was basically the process that I used with Utena. The only outlier being that on the A side, it was originally a remix, so those vocals were already written. The B side was one of several tracks that we started, for instance, with a voice memo from Utena, little bits of ideas being fleshed out into a song. The song that ended up being the B side was the most successful of the few tracks that we worked on together. All the music on the A side is from my studio and software outside of Utena playing some harp. And then on the B side, it’s all done at my studio.
As far as the distances, for whatever reason, my music, my musical network, the colleagues that I have, even if it’s not people I know directly [are all located across the world]. There’s a couple people in the Netherlands, England, LA, Portland, it’s kind of a loose network of people.
OS: Utena, In addition to being an electronic musician, you are also a multi-instrumentalist and vocalist. Do you find that having a background in instrumental music changes the way that you view and conceptualize electronic music?
UK: I’ve become more conscious of how different sounds harmonize within a composition. Balancing electronic sounds, vocals, and instruments within each track to create a cohesive world is something I find enjoyable. There are many types of harmony, and when I’m unsure, I try to determine what would best serve the song.
OS: Glossolalia marks an end to the eight year musical hiatus for Motion Graphics, following your self-titled album back in 2016. What inspired you to release Glossolalia now, and how do you feel that you have grown musically since your previous release?
JW: I never feel like I’m on a hiatus because I’m always working on music. Nowadays, people are so prolific, almost to a fault. They’re almost encouraged and pressured to stay at the top of the feed either testing out something new or releasing something. It’s a way to get fans but oftentimes I find people who take that route don’t really improve or show growth. I don’t want to put anything out unless I’ve made some sort of progress in my own technique.
The other answer would be that it’s not really a problem. In 2017 I did a remix for Ryuichi Sakamoto, I worked on the FKA Twigs record as a producer and then I worked on film scores and other things like that. I put the same amount of effort into everything, even if it’s a remix for someone. Again, I always want there to be growth and improvement in the work. I think because it’s not under my name people might think I’ve been toiling away in the studio and not putting anything out but I always have something on deck.
Because of finances and economics, I have to do other things as well, so it’s a mixture of that and not wanting to be overly prolific unless I’m really feeling a sense of improvement in what I’m doing. Glossolalia wasn’t a conscious decision like, “well it’s time to release new music,” it was just my first opportunity to do that. I wish I could put out more music but I have to work and do other things so that I can keep my studio paid for and and just survive. It’s ridiculous [in New York City], the music community here has shrunk in unfathomable ways. It’s just not a city anymore that allows for people to take risks.
OS: Have you seen more artists moving out of the city or the music scene declining?
JW: Definitely. Without question. There’s far fewer venues, far fewer people working on the organizational side of things there, it’s in all the ways that you could imagine. When I first moved here it felt like there were as many venues as there were artists. You had so many options and choices of where you could showcase what you were doing. Nowadays, the scene that my music is comfortable in is a dispersed network of people. You would need a time machine to enjoy [New York City].
OS: Joshua Rothman of The New Yorker wrote that you create “music that sounds like the internet.” Do you agree with this comparison and how do you hope that listeners interpret your music?
JW: I understood where he was going with that. I wrote that record in 2012 and then released it in 2016. At that time, cell phones were becoming a part of daily life, and interface and social media were becoming big things. I was using that as a landscape, imitating it a little bit. A lot of the tools that I was using at the time were thought of as tacky; sample libraries that you would hear in like a television drama trailer, things like that. I was trying to think about what wasn’t being used and getting inspiration from that. So yes, there’s a technology aesthetic that went along with a lot of early Motion Graphics music.
Back then, I was trying to do something conceptual, and nowadays I’m really just trying to push the idea of studio craft. Finding what’s possible within software with as little equipment as possible. I would say that it’s about idiosyncrasies, exploring things that otherwise wouldn’t be used and trying to find ways of producing music that aren’t cliche or trendy. In general I won’t put something out unless I feel like most of the ingredients of the track were things that I was surprised by along the way of making it. Those are the qualifiers that I’m trying to look for if I’m going to release something.
OS: Going back to the early years, how did you first get interested in producing music? Has your musical journey taken you down any unexpected paths?
JW: I started playing in bands when I was pretty young and almost at the same time, I discovered music software on my parents’ home computer. So, from seventeen on, I was making music and playing on computers. The computer and digital element came at the time that I was growing up and it’s still what I’m doing now. If anything, I think of the computer software environment as pretty much my first instrument. I always come back to it because software progresses and levels up every year or two with a whole new suite of processes, which is where I like to find inspiration. I don’t like having gear or equipment, even synths. My whole life is basically centered around laptop music in one way or another as a fan and as a person who makes it.
OS: When you were first getting interested in digital music, around age seventeen, did you have access to LPs of artists that were creating that type of music or was it hard to find?
JW: I had things like Napster, LimeWire, Aphex Twin, Autechre and that type of music. The first things that I created and released, I’d make on CD-R and it was very influenced by early Warp Records. I had heard Kraftwerk and Boards of Canada and that put me on to a lot of other music. I bought a lot of records in my teenage years and the discovery of music really inspired my production.
OS: What can listeners expect from you in the future?
JW: I have another EP that I’m close to handing in, some remixes of people that I can’t say but that people will probably know. Visible Cloaks is about to start some new music so there might be something there between us and then a Motion Graphics album after that at some point but there will be an EP before that, that’s for sure.
excellent interview/article!