Life's weird, right? Everyone has a story, memory, or period of time that comes to mind when they hear that common idiom. Mine almost always has to do with crossing some vast reach of space and/or time and it also usually has something to do with Heavy Blog (or work, but we don't talk about that part). I've written about this several times on the blog before, about how this group of people changed my entire life and how writing about the music I love brought me to places and let me do things that I never thought I would do. This all got hyper-charged when I moved to the US, places that were far away suddenly much closer and, with them, access to more shows and, more importantly, to more people.
And so, I found myself in a (great) Indian restaurant in Providence, Rhode Island, chatting to one of my favorite musicians and one of the online friends I have been most proud of, Aki Mccullough. Aki is a central figure in some of my favorite groups, including, but not limited to, A Constant Knowledge of Death and Vivid Illusion. She was also a part of Dreamwell and has recently released an excellent shoegaze, slowcore, and blackgaze album under the ameokama name, i will be clouds in the morning and rain in the evening. Ostensibly, we are here to talk about that release, as it is the most recent one by Aki, but I have many things I've been wanting to ask her for a while now so, in between chicken tikka masala and naan, we chat touring, recording, artistic vision, and a lot more besides.
Check out some of the more interesting answers Aki had for me below and don't forget to check out i will be clouds in the morning and rain in the evening; it's a really good release if you're a fan of even one of the above cited genres!
As I said above, I had plenty of questions to get to before we dove into Aki's current work. I started by mentioning one of the more interesting things I had seen Aki point out in the past: how much Dreamwell's music and live show seemed to resonate away from the US coasts and into the Midwest and other areas of the country. While Aki told me that even when they were headlining shows they would get between 30-50 people showing up, out there there would be 80 people or more and they would be going crazy for the music. When I asked her why she thought that is, she made a fascinating connection between their presence there and the social reality of the people who live there and what music means to them:
Aki: That was the same in shows in places like Chicago, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Milwaukee. A lot of trans people would attend the shows, a lot of people who felt like they hadn't had a space before. People straight up told us that they haven't gone outside in public before (EK: since they transitioned), until this show. It was really cool to see and me realize how important it was to purposely go to spaces like that. Even when we went to the South as part of the last Dreamwell tour and we were only getting 30-40 people a night, it was the same thing; meeting someone new every night, them thanking you just for coming there. In the Northeast, it feels like more of a generational thing - when the crowd is mostly Gen Z and Gen Alpha, those are the ones where there's not so much a gender gap, a lot more people who are outwardly queer, all sorts of crazy outfits and makeup. That's really cool.
Speaking of makeup, I pivoted to discussing Aki's own use of makeup. In the clip we recently premiered on the blog, for single "i will be clouds in the morning and rain in the evening", Aki herself plays around with traditional Japanese makeup and black metal associated corpse painted. While I sort of alluded to it on that post, I wanted to explore the contrast created by these styles, and by makeup in general, and how Aki wields it for effect.
Aki: It's interesting because something like corpse paint is one of the few, not necessarily socially acceptable, but "safe" and not seen as gender non-conforming for any gendered person to do it. It gets "a pass" because it's black metal. I think it was, for some people, a way to experiment with that without necessarily "outing" yourself. For the video, I wanted it to be a crossover between traditional Japanese makeup and corpse paint; it was a crossover of the very pale look of both styles but my hair was done in a much more traditionally Japanese way. This fits into what I wanted to do experiment with the project which is ask "how do you keep elements of the metal aesthetic but introduce or reject others, whether that's musically or visually".
Speaking of musical experimentation, I asked Aki about the musical influences that go into ameokama. Aki is one of the musicians you can't really pin down, whether it's because A Constant Knowledge of Death release four (!) albums in a row, each from a different genre, or because Vivid Illusion suddenly comes back with tripped out post-metal, or the next project (ameokama) turns out to be blackgaze, she's always unpredictable. Where do these genre swings come from?
Aki: In high school I remember listening to My Bloody Valentine but it was a bug part of my listening. In college, I started listening to more indie stuff and it was actually Ant (EK: Ant Taboada) from Vivid Illusion who kind me into Slowdive, Drab Majesty, Holy Fawn and later, slowcore like Have a Nice Life, Low. Low's Double Negative is one of the albums that had the most impact on me. Ultimately all of that blossomed into something that go heavier and bigger on ameokama and had all of these big drones. Especially on the intro to the album (EK: "my fears have become fetishes"), I was trying to channel that bleak, dark, minimalist feeling. It's a different sort of heaviness than metal's, instead of a deep and heavy tone, there's a lot more fuzz and noise. Going back to Double Negative, there's no distorted guitar but it's emotionally very heavy and the sub-rumbles of the shoegaze riffs shake my speakers.
From there, I turned the conversation to something else I've been meaning to talk to Aki about for a while now: working as both an artist and a content creator. The dilemma is one we know well by now, the tension between creating the art we would like to put in the world versus what sells. As artists become more and more reliant on online followings, that tension can increased to the point of snapping, where many artists feel they are divorced from their craft and simply making more content for the algorithm to push. I had seen Aki fiercely resist this, both in her uncompromising art but also explicitly on social media, and so I was interested in diving deeper into her thoughts and feeling on this topic.
Aki: Any part of the visual style or part of the visual component has to feel artistically worthwhile for me, as much as I'd probably probably have a bigger following by now if I made little TikTok style videos. The thing is, all of those people can't translate into listeners for the content creators' actual music projects. I just try to trust that staying true to my vision is the way to go, and if it's not, if it never gets that much traction, then I still stay true to that for myself. I also wanted the music videos to emphasize the broader universe that I'm creating with the music rather than take something out of it.
My main career is music and freelancing, so it would be nice to keep supporting that, but if I find myself making any sort of artistic decisions around what people are going to think about it, I find myself losing motivation and not doing my best work.
EK: Is this true for production as well?
Aki: Sometimes when I'm mixing I'm able to take myself out of the work, especially when I'm mixing someone else's music. It helps that, in that case, I already have to stay true to their vision and not mine and basically keep them on the path they want to be on. So I'm more able to take myself out of that and be like, okay, this is what I need to make it sound like what they want, to make sure they're happy with their vision.
With production, there's so many ways to steer how a song is perceived. I could take the same exact arrangement and mix it in a way that would make someone call it "modern metal" or make someone call it "noise rock". The composition could be the complete same and it would just be mixing decisions. So there's a lot that you can do with the production and mix to position yourself as a musician and I definitely was conscious of the fact that that would happen. I mostly tried to continue making those decisions based on my intuition and artistry. I had some people saying to not over polish the album because it would lose the rawness of it. Luckily when I'm mixing in a hurry, I don't think I'm in that tier of mix engineer that will accidentally over polish it. Not quite that good.
EK: People have no idea how hard it is to mix an album and how much it's art, right? People think of it as science or done by technicians, but it has so much intuition to it. I think it's one of the biggest gaps between how hard it is to actually do it and how people perceive it.
Aki: Especially when people are trying to learn mixing, they think that they just have to learn some skills, some tools, they just have to watch some video and then they can do it. I'd say that both making music but also mixing it both have a massive mental aspect to them. In fact, the most important part of mixing is managing the mind games because there's so much in our head that affects our audio perception. There's no way that a human can hear sound objectively in a perfect way. And if they did, then music wouldn't even be very interesting!
From here, the conversation naturally drifted to my favorite project of Aki's, A Constant Knowledge of Death, where the main point is that more music is coming, which is great news for me. By then, the food was already taken apart and the conversation started to drift to more general conversation about life which was, to me at least, just as important as the "professional" conversation. I left feeling full both on a physical level and on an emotional one, sustained in more ways than one. I felt grateful for the opportunity I had been given to live where I do and to meet some of my favorite musicians and to ask them everything I am most interested in.
To tie this back to a point of Aki's, I don't think it's clear how much effort any interview takes from me and every time I do one, I swear it's the last. But then the chance to talk to a musician I love comes around again and all concern around labor disappears and I find myself doing it once again. The cost is well worth the effort (something I would do well to remember, so I can maybe do this more often) and I am every grateful to Aki for taking the time to chat with me!