POiSON GiRL FRiEND's Noriko Sekiguchi in the 1990s
It’s the Year of the Fire Horse. Writing in Dazed about what to expect out of the first fire horse in 60 years, astrologer Alice Sparkly Kat underlines that while horses are big and strong, they are also gentle creatures.
“They always watch out for one another,” they write. “Humans, too, become big and strong, when we watch out for one another.”
A similar sentiment appears in the song “The Future Is Now” by 1990s Japanese musician POiSON GiRL FRiEND. “When we part, divide, and nothing comes easy,” sings Noriko Sekiguchi, backed by a friendly breakbeat and an elastic synth bass line. “Don’t give up, keep thinking, I’m always on your side.”
It’s the third track on POiSON GiRL FRiEND’s 1992 mini album, Melting Moment, a record that has become a cult favourite in recent years, particularly as the definition of trip hop has expanded beyond a handful of acts from Bristol.
Through the first half of the 1990s, Noriko shared with trip hop’s patternmakers a knack for funnelling the sounds of the club into languorously sensual pop music that was psychically coherent but characterised by its stylistic plurality.
POiSON GiRL FRiEND followed Melting Moment with the albums Shyness (1993) and Love Me (1994). Across the three releases, Noriko’s vocal presence is often breathy, whispered, suggestive, like a soft touch betraying a hard desire. Her melodies are intuitively constructed but possess a consonance and harmonic resolution informed by Brazilian bossa nova, French chanson and Frank Sinatra.
The multilingual Noriko discovered the bossa nova greats Astrud and João Gilberto, Antônio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfá while living in Brazil as a child. She moved to London as a young adult, and later spent time living in France. POiSON GiRL FRiEND began in Tokyo, evolving out of a guitar-led new wave band named Poison Girl Friends. But Noriko’s come to Jesus moment was in a London night club in the late 1980s, a time when DJs were playing house and acid next to new wave and indie.
“I was particularly impressed by the mix of Lil Louis’s ‘French Kiss’ with ambient piano,” Noriko told FOND/SOUND. “Before then, I loved having an acoustic atmosphere, using piano and guitar in my songs. Many Japanese people who love techno music have their roots in YMO and Kraftwerk, but in my case, it was 808 State, Adamski, and Cabaret Voltaire.”
Noriko’s lyrics are primarily written in English and French, with many songs combining the two languages. The growing field of POiSON GiRL FRiEND scholarship often draws attention to the simplicity of her lyrics. But while there is an element of bleeding-heart candour to her songwriting, this is a reductive assessment.
POiSON GiRL FRiEND’s repertoire enacts an ambitious and deeply evocative exploration of love, longing, eroticism and shared humanity. For instance, the unflinching optimism of “The Future Is Now” is matched by an equally unflinching inspection of desire and emotional volatility in “Hardly Ever Smile” and devotional surrender in “Passage Brady”. All three songs emblematise POiSON GiRL FRiEND’s relation-oriented disposition.
“The Future Is Now” includes the entreaties “Why do we have to feel envious, suspicious, jealous?” and “Why don’t we try to live a life in peace?” – questions that might seem overly earnest on paper, but the intention is sincere: go on, Noriko urges, tell me why.
The line, “I’m always with you,” repeated throughout “The Future Is Now,” can be read as an assurance to a lover or close relation, but it also resonates as an acknowledgement of our essential interrelatedness.
In reference to the album title, Melting Moment, Noriko told Resident Advisor: “the moment you melt away is the moment of encounter with various people, sounds and things.”
POiSON GiRL FRiEND’s dialogic lyrics work in tandem with a broad sweep of songwriting and production styles. Melting Moment draws on UK acid house and industrial but also features gorgeous string arrangements and covers of Jane Birkin’s “Quoi” and “Those Were the Days” by late-60s Welsh singer Mary Hopkins.
Love Is, the artistic apotheosis of the POiSON GiRL FRiEND project, places the Balearic chugger “Slave to the Computer” next to the SAW-style ambient techno of “Histoire d’O”, the baggy beat optimism of “Communication Breakdown”, and a gliding, downtempo cover of “Love Me, Please Love Me” by 1960s French singer-songwriter Michel Polnareff.
The droning, avant-garde sounds in “Tout Est Rouge” owe more to mid-century musique concrète than to Eno. Only, the source material is not the sounds of nature and everyday hubbub, but a TV ad for the Japanese beauty brand Shiseido.
“I just added a verse to it,” Noriko told FOND/SOUND. “We decided to change the chorus a little bit and re-record it.”
Shyness is an album-length collaboration with Scottish musician Momus, whose 1987 release, The Poison Boyfriend, inspired Noriko’s proto-Tumblr stage name. Momus wrote more than half the songs on Shyness, including the opening track “Madame de Sade”, which references 18th century French author Marquis de Sade – a writer whose portrayals of characters deriving pleasure from the suffering of others gave rise to the coinage “sadism”.
“Madame de Sade” is narrated from the perspective of the Marquis’ wife, the titular Madame, who claims in the song to have “a perverse erotic imagination” and to be “callous to others’ pain.”
It might seem like a paradox that the same artist who, a year earlier, was singing “Will we save the planet for our children?” would now be interpolating the ideas of one of the most controversial figures in the Western canon. But “Madame de Sade” is just another example of POiSON GiRL FRiEND’s experimental temperament and general disregard for boxing herself in.
There’s no better illustration of POiSON GiRL FRiEND’s exhaustive lust for meaning, possibility and connection than the baroque dream pop song “Love Is…”, during which Noriko enumerates dozens of possible definitions of love. “Love is all,” she begins, before going on to suggest that love might be “light; hope; real” or “hate; passion; prison.”
The impression conveyed by POiSON GiRL FRiEND’s music is not that our life’s purpose is to chase down absolute and unchanging answers. But rather, that beauty lies in asking questions, taking risks, and staying open to a multitude of experiences – and that connection underlies everything we do.
See POiSON GiRL FRiEND perform her first ever Australian show exclusively at NTS Naarm on Saturday 28 February.
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