Sakai Kate COLTEMONIKHA interview for SFC CLIP

publisher: SFC CLIP (Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus blog)
published: September 1, 2006

Sakai Kate (2005 graduate) debuts as a singer with COLTEMONIKHA

After establishing her apparel brand COLKINIKHA during her time as a student, designer and model Sakai Kate (2005 graduate from Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus) accomplished her CD debut on May 17th, 2006.

Her debut has come in the form of COLTEMONIKHA, a collaborative unit in partnership with Nakata Yasutaka, the head of music label contemode. He is known as a member and producer of the music unit capsule and is widely active as both a DJ and a producer for other artists, where he’s said to handle “everything but the vocals.”

On this occasion, we spoke to her about her work in the music field alongside Nakata and her experiences at SFC.

The driving force behind her work: COLKINIKHA and COLTEMONIKHA

First, please tell us about your brand Made in COLKINIKHA.
I started to set it up in my freshman year of college, or 2001, and released it to the public from 2002 onwards. The overall concept has never changed since the beginning. It’s based on the idea of a small island nation close to but independent from Russia. It’s full of forests, lakes, animals and, of course, humans. The clothes I design are based on the concept of what the inhabitants of that country would wear.

What drives you to really bring what you imagine and fantasize about to life?
Probably because it’s just fun for me, I think. Nakata-kun, who I worked with on this project, and myself are very similar in that respect. He also has an incredibly strong image of what he does, so that intersection between “contemode is this kind of label” and “Colkinikha is this kind of country” serves as the concept for our unit.

I used to think that if Doraemon had a tool for recording ideas exactly as you imagine them in your mind, that’d be the one I really, really wanted to have. However, because that’s impossible, I have to use programs like Photoshop and Illustrator in order to turn them into reality. And for that purpose, I have to develop artistic and creative skills.

At first, I believed that creative work was something I had to do entirely by myself. This time, though, in working on a 50-50 basis with Nakata-kun, I started to feel that I don’t have to be the sole creator of what I make. I’ve recently realized that even if I don’t do everything myself, as long as I can state the balance and image I want clearly when I commission my designs to be produced, and if I can hold on to my concept and not forget my ideals, it’s all right to entrust the rest to someone else’s hands.

Lately, I’ve been involved in more meetings with others instead of only handmaking it all personally. For clothes, I might suggest “put a little more gathers in here” or “increase the number of buttons and make them smaller.” In my music with Nakata-kun, I ask for things like “add stars” (laughs), which I use to mean high-pitched tones.

My driving force is… I’m not exactly sure how to describe it. What I mean when I say I want to express something is I want to show the pictures I have in my head to others, and see them for myself. I can’t record those and play them back exactly as-is, so I ask myself how I can take the fragments of that and insert them into people’s lives somehow instead. If possible, I thought it’d be better to give my art a more physical form in order for it to reach a greater number of people’s hands. Filling people’s lives with my creations through fashion is more interesting than illustrating, so I chose to produce clothing ahead of anything else. I released this CD under the name COLTEMONIKHA because I considered that all the more effective and meaningful.

Next, I’m thinking of writing and illustrating a picture book set in Colkinikha. I’ve written a rough draft already, so I’d like to look into when I could release that inbetween my upcoming exhibitions.

What gives you that desire to bring those things you imagine into others’ lives?
Well, I don’t know where it comes from specifically, but I think I just always had some conviction that “this is what I do best.” Even if not for COLKINIKHA, I imagine I probably would’ve taken on some kind of creative job. Or even if I ended up in business, I might’ve done something like COLKINIKHA down the road.

Is there a common message you hope to express throughout all of your works?
Something nostalgic with a story to it, like a picture book, I guess. If someone asked me to design a greeting card, for instance, I think I’d still sneak a story into it somewhere. I think the common factor throughout everything I create is the scope to envision stories within a similar space and time.

The whole story behind her foray into music and her days at SFC

What sort of music do you normally listen to?
Songs like this [referring to the hip-hop playing in the room] (laughs). A lot of people come to my management agency, and I put the songs on the CDs they bring on my iPod. So my iPod has everything from THE BLUE HEARTS to THA BLUE HERB (laughs). I don’t buy very many CDs on my own.

Had you wanted to pursue music for a long time?
I did think about it. Up to now, several people besides Nakata-kun had even offered to produce a CD with me in the past. But the timing was never right. Ultimately, the CD I put out with Nakata-kun ended up being my earliest work in music. I’d always had some vague idea of doing it eventually, so even if I never met Nakata-kun, I might’ve still gotten involved in music activities.

There was also a time when I recorded songs every Tuesday with one of my seniors at SFC. We recorded and held on to five or six tracks, but that ended when we both graduated. Someday I’d like to find a way to release those as well. I’ve actually done music with a lot of people before this. Even in high school, I worked on it for our school arts festival. As a matter of fact, I had around 120 songs saved up. Maybe fifteen of those are left over in data form now.

If I can manage to find the right time for it, I’d like to collaborate with many more people in the future. I’ll basically keep the stuff that’s charging or being inputted into my usual routine every day inside my own internal storehouse and take it out when the chance arrives, so to speak.

Out of your experiences at SFC, is there anything which you feel led you to where you are now or made you grateful to have gone to this university?
My COLKINIKHA homepage was made by someone who went to SFC. He’s the same person I mentioned before who I recorded music with. We’re still in close contact now, and he updates my homepage for me. He makes things that are simple and tasteful. Like if I made a flower, he’d make a vase. We have a very good balance between us. He understands me and vice versa. I think meeting someone like him was significant.

I was also taught the importance of constructing a concept from top to bottom here. I consider fashion to be one type of media, and I think SFC was where I learned how to create concepts beyond what already exists and cultivate new forms of media.

Anyway, school was fun for me. I went about three times a week, and some days I’d go home without having done anything. Like I’d run into someone as I was heading to class and get so caught up in conversation with them that it’d already be over by the time we parted ways, or we’d skip and go to Kamoike for a picnic (laughs).

What kind of lessons or study classes were you enrolled in?
For classes, I took communication design. It was about how to craft a design style and was really interesting. I took almost every design course from A to J, like learning to design book bindings. I also had lessons in typography.

Also, I took an introduction to programming for Mac. The classwork involved graphic design and writing for AppleScript. I made a dress-up doll script and put it on the COLKINIKHA homepage as a “fitting room.” Since it was online, you couldn’t try on the clothes in person, but I made it so that when you clicked on the garments, it’d show them being worn by a girl. You couldn’t tell much since they were only illustrations, but I thought it might be interesting as something to have. When I showed that to Mr. Sato Masahiko, he said, “I like that you gave it click functionality instead of dragging.” He did nothing but praise that, saying “That part is good!” (laughs)

Her meeting with Nakata and their 50-50 collaborative work

How did you get to know Nakata Yasutaka?
An acquaintance of Nakata-kun’s was the cameraman for an interview I did. He contacted me through him after that. But I’d never met Nakata-kun even once, and I didn’t even know what he looked like at the time (laughs), so I was totally uninterested. When I actually met him, though, I heard that he was in a unit called capsule, and then it was like, “Oh, I know a few of their songs.”

From there, we got to talking and he said he wished I’d use one of his songs for my fashion shows, and on the other end, I mentioned I wanted to design some costumes for capsule. Then our conversations started to lean towards collaborating on something, and then, after that, he contacted me offering to work on some songs together. He didn’t even know whether or not I could sing, and he logically shouldn’t have known that I’d always been writing songs, yet it basically got started like, “Let’s just give it a try anyway.”

Once we started working, we got onto the subject of how lyrics with a really heavy-handed message like “don’t give up” or “do your best” were different from what we wanted to make. Neither of us considers it important for lyrics to be like a story or have a message. We also see the voice as an instrument used to form the song’s image. So if you can’t hear the words clearly, for example, we don’t think of that as an issue.

Image takes priority in our songwriting style. We set the concept first, then base the song on that. The image we made for COLTEMONIKHA is luxurious, but like a fake kind of luxury. Like fake fur instead of real. And with the atmosphere of a chilly kind of place. If I want a track to have a cold feeling to it, I can say “ice cream” and you’ll get the right picture when you pair it with the sound, don’t you think? We construct them like that. Even if there’s no meaning in words like ice cream or lip balm themselves, they still bring some kind of subconscious image to mind. The atmosphere comes out through our choice of words and sounds.

Following our confirmation of the concept at the very beginning, we don’t discuss any more after that and split our work completely 50-50. When Nakata-kun finishes a song, he usually messages it to me on mixi (laughs). The track would be uploaded without any vocals yet, so I’d listen to that and write lyrics in Word or on a piece of paper. After I listen to it once or twice, the image comes to me, so then I just fill in the rest of the lyrics.

Generally, we’d record the day after he uploaded a track, so it was an incredibly hard schedule. The very last one we recorded was “Arikui Waltz.” I got the track in the middle of the night, and our manager said, “The release date is already set, so if this isn’t done by the end of today, we’re going to have a problem on our hands.”

I wrote these lyrics wanting them to sound so clear and pretty you could hear them on Minna no Uta. I wanted them to be almost believable as a nursery rhyme. So I actually felt like I came up with something good, but then I forgot to bring the lyric sheet I wrote with me to recording, and the lyrics turned out a little differently since I only sang as much of them as I could remember (laughs).

But Nakata-kun never tells me to change my lyrics, and I never tell him to change any part of the songs he makes. I do say things like “sprinkle more stars in it,” though. Visual-based expressions like that usually get my point across. If I say “sprinkle more stars,” he’ll put in more sparkly high tones just like I asked.

We each have our own roles; for mine, I listen to Nakata-kun’s music and use the image it gives me to write lyrics.

There must be a kind of experimental fun involved in doing work like that.
Nakata-kun and I are on the same wavelength, so when we go out for drinks or a meal, we never stop talking. We get more and more excited as we’re chatting, and our conversations become so animated, we start talking about impossibly wild ideas (laughs). The two of us get so fired up, I forget what we were even discussing in the first place.

Once, when we were going off on some topic like that, we started talking about how interesting it’d be if English sounded like Japanese. To use “Soratobu Hikari” as an example, “so a lot of…” would be soratobu, wouldn’t it? So I wondered what English would match hikari and thought maybe “heat curry”... Then what would “so a lot of heat curry” mean? … A ton of hot curry? (laughs) It went like that.

I think Nakata-kun has probably forgotten that exchange, but a few months went by and I wrote those lyrics based on it. When I did that, Nakata-kun kept going “Whoa, this is so cool! Awesome!” (laughs) He’s the kind of person to show his emotions clearly. When we had recording and I brought him some mandarin oranges as a present, he was like “Wooow, wooow, oranges!!!” (laughs) He looks cool at first, but he has a cute personality.

Your singing voice in the songs is very cute and sweet.
My voice isn’t normally like that, right? (laughs)

The feel of your voice is completely different from song to song.
Most of them use something called vocoder, a type of effect used on the voice. It can alter your voice naturally or give you a falsetto-like tone. There are songs which use my natural voice without vocoder and some which use two of my vocal takes layered over each other. The style of processing differs on each, so maybe that makes my voice sound different, but I also consciously varied how I sang on every track.

Which songs use your natural voice?
“Arikui Waltz” and “Yum yum yummy” are unedited. The first track “fantastic fantasy” is also nearly unaltered. “Soratobu Hikari” and “communication” feature vocoder which gives them more of an electronic-sounding feel.

Did COLKINIKHA’s concept find its way into COLTEMONIKHA?
Yes. We started it with that concept in the first place.

Along with capsule, Nakata-kun had another unit called “NAGISA COSMETIC” before. He took the image of this CUTiE reader model Ichikawa Nagisa-chan and the two of them released a CD that came with a nail polish. Nakata-kun does stuff experimentally like that. COLTEMONIKHA will be his second time putting out a CD in that vein.

Nakata-kun factors my vision into the process first and foremost. In our first meeting, he asked me to draw out what I had in mind on a piece of paper, so I drew a conifer forest, a lake, a girl and a swan, then the moon going over the lake, then a whole sky full of stars, then I made the lake frozen over, and then once I’d finished the drawing, he told me, “OK, OK, I’ve got it. I’ll make a song with this.” The song that came out of that was “fantastic fantasy.” After that was “Yum yum yummy,” a fantastical track based on the image of sweets and candy.

After that, there was a blank period of about a year. I wondered when we were going to do the rest (laughs). Nakata-kun’s style did a complete 180 in that time and his songs started to take a turn for the more dancefloor-oriented, and I felt like, “What if it’s not COLTEMONIKHA anymore like this?” So we decided to tie it up with a waltz at the very end. It starts out like a fantasy and ends with a waltz — I said, “There, it’s like a sandwich this way.” (laughs) It’d be hard to listen to even if we did the whole album in a fantasy style, so we put danceable tracks in the middle. It’s consistently different from capsule, and we stressed the image of COLKINIKHA and that fantastical essence in making it.

You’ve been modeling and designing since you were young, so what position does your music debut fall into between those activities?
COLKINIKHA is rather close to art for me. It feels like I’m putting my world out there in a form as close to 100% as possible, so I’m extremely serious in how I go about that. However, while the music I do with Nakata-kun is one part of COLKINIKHA, it’s very rough around the edges and I have fun making it. I think that’s actually a positive. I’ve never once felt bothered or troubled while doing COLTEMONIKHA. Nakata-kun and I both enjoy ourselves working on it. If there was anything bothersome for either of us, it was Nakata-kun’s bad temper in our morning recording sessions at most. He’s a nocturnal type (laughs). It’s new for me to have fun creating. Until now, I’d never trusted anyone but myself to do it. But this was the first time I’d ever split the creative process 50-50 with someone else, and we trusted each other mutually. I felt that Nakata-kun had the right idea with the sound he produced, and Nakata-kun left my aesthetic, the lyrics I wrote and how I chose to sing up to me. It was my first time making something that way, so it became like a relaxing space for me.

Will there be a sequel?
I think we’ll probably continue it. I’m already discovering a few pieces I think could serve as my next source of inspiration for that. I’ve been sketching out some potentially interesting concepts in my head, so I think I’ll share those with Nakata-kun when the timing is right.