Carving out a niche of their own in a genre filled with Meshuggah clones, London based experi-metal group Cyclamen is making a name for themselves with a fanbase growing by the day. Cyclamen boasts a repertoire featuring both mathcore chaos and technical aggression to the seemingly polar opposite with post-rock atmospheres and calming beauty in a genre I like to call post-djent.

I swapped emails with Cyclamen mastermind Hayato Imanishi for Heavy Blog Is Heavy’s first ever interview to gain some insight to the world of Cyclamen.

Revenge-of-the-Geeks1.mp3

A quick Google search for Cyclamen leads one to find out that a Cyclamen is a flower. What inspired you to name your project after a flower?

Cyclamen is pronounced “Shikuramen” in Japanese, and since “Shi” means death and “Ku” means suffer in Japanese, so even though it’s a pretty flower it’s a taboo to give it in some occasion, like to people who are in a hospital. Also its “Hanakotoba” (translates to “flower word” – In Japanese culture, pretty much every flower has some sort of meaning and it’s important to know the meaning when you are giving flowers to someone) changes according to its colour. Red means “Envy”, white means “Innocence”, for instance.
I thought Cyclamen was fitting name because my music isn’t restricted in one genre – it could be aggressive (e.g. Revenge of the Geeks) or beautiful (e.g. Senjyu) or both in one song (e.g. Never Ending Dream) depending on what songs need to express certain emotion I am aiming to translate via music.

I remember reading on the Cyclamen MySpace a while back that Cyclamen basically started out because you missed your favorite band, Sikth, and wanted to write music in the same vein as them. In light of this, getting the attention of [Sikth vocalist] Mikee Goodman must have been a surreal experience for you, to say the least. How did this collaboration come about and how did it go down?

It was very valuable experience to work with such an awesome and creative vocalist, but since we both are perfectionists we ended up exchanging mails for about 3 months until the final version was made! He was very open to my opinion and understood what I wanted – Awesome guy all around and was real pleasure to work with him. Everyone should check out his new band The Painted Smile, it’s very different from SikTh but still very exciting : )

Sleep-Street.mp3

As time moved on, Cyclamen started to sound less like Sikth and started sounding more like its own thing. Was this a conscious decision or was it just an organic change that happened as writing progressed?

It may sound selfish, but I always write music just for myself. At that time I really needed SikTh-esque tech metal, but right now I am enjoying more post-rock (MONO, This Will Destroy You) and pop (The Ting Tings, B’z (Japanese rock duo)) so that probably reflects to what I write. I am sure once I get enough of these music I will write songs with different influences. But I think there is always certain Cyclamen sound that stays in every song I write – And I always make sure they are good songs obviously haha

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