Sisters In The Velvet on “Mother’s Octave” and Physicality

Last Updated on 2025-11-12 by a-indie

Jacket Art and “Red Strobe”

—Maririn: Now I’d like to ask about the work itself. First, the jacket is really good. The background is a bit Chagall-like, and the figure is Egon Schiele-esque.

Tatsuro Aoyama: The bass member said exactly the same thing. Those two were active from the end of the 19th century to around the 20th century, right?

—Maririn: I thought it matched this work really well, but who did the artwork?

Tatsuro Aoyama: A former member who played bass drew it. He’s now a manga artist, and his drawings are really lovely. That picture was something he drew years ago, not for any particular purpose. When we decided to ask him this time, at first I was saying “I want to do it like this.” That was using photographs, not a drawing, but when he made it, it didn’t feel right. So I casually looked at pictures he’d drawn before, found this picture among them, and went “This is it!” Of course, since he drew it a long time ago, it wasn’t intended for this EP’s content, but there are parts that link. He also felt that, apparently, so we went with “Let’s go with this.”

—Maririn: The color scheme is really good, isn’t it? Now about the songs—track one, “Red Strobe,” was released in advance, right? This song has Japanese lyrics only at the end for the first time, so why did you decide to put in Japanese lyrics?

Tatsuro Aoyama: When it came to putting lyrics on the melody, at first I went with English in the flow, but it felt too cool. When I thought I wanted a bit more “uncoolness,” I thought singing in Japanese there would make for a good arrangement.

First Japanese Lyrics

—Maririn: Did you get any reaction from listeners about the Japanese lyrics?

Tatsuro Aoyama: No. I wonder if everyone noticed. The vocal processing is psychedelic, so it flowed without any sense of incongruity.

—Maririn: That’s true. The lyrics themselves, even when lined up with a Japanese translation of the other English parts, don’t feel out of place, right?

Tatsuro Aoyama: Right. There’s certainly an aspect of the song’s duality as well.

—Maririn: Had you ever written Japanese lyrics as Sisters In The Velvet before?

Tatsuro Aoyama: No. This is the first time for Japanese lyrics. I don’t think I don’t want to use Japanese, and I don’t particularly think I want to use it either, but I just happened to think “maybe Japanese here” and put it in.

—Maririn: In creating it, even though it’s just this one part, was there any difference or something you were conscious of between English and Japanese?

Tatsuro Aoyama: It came together so surprisingly smoothly that I wasn’t conscious of anything. I like Utada Hikaru, and I had a sense of coming up with lyrics with that vibe. On the album “Hatsukoi” there’s a song “Too Proud,” and there’s a lyric “How many years since we started living together,” and I thought of it like a reference to that.

—Maririn: Was that intentional? Or afterward?

Tatsuro Aoyama: It’s more like something that happened to be stuck in my mind came out like that.

—Maririn: From now on, there might be times when you think “maybe Japanese here.” Why did you decide to release this song in advance as the lead track?

Tatsuro Aoyama: There’s no deep meaning, but we started recording with this song. We felt “this is our groove.” It’s a rhythm that’s not very popular, but we had a sense of being able to package us enjoying that. The moment we finished recording, everyone felt the same way. It was the first one we recorded, and we had a self-awareness that while bringing out the “physicality” concept of this EP, Japanese is also in it, and we were able to do something new with the arrangement, so we released it as the advance single.