Black Boboi - SILK
“SILK” is the first full album from indie supergroup Black Boboi and is a key milestone in their evolution from side project to main attraction. Haunting yet beautiful, SILK is a multi-layered sonic journey into another realm that you have to experience yourself.
When Black Boboi first came out with their EP Agate at the beginning of 2019, it was kind of a side project for members Utena Kobayashi, Ermhoi and Julia Shortreed to enjoy making music with one another, testing out ideas on impulse. This time around, they settled on the theme of "SILK" to tie the album together. It seems that they began to write music for "SILK" after their successful tour at the end of 2019, COVID-19 threw them for a loop. Unable to meet physically to jam together, and no longer restrained from the influence of prevailing trends, they were free to use their imaginations to create something more fantastic. The result is a more ambitious work - Black Boboi still explores the spectrum between black and white, darkness and light, but overall it feels more epic in scope with a sci-fi fantasy bent.
Starting with "gd612" its as if you've gone through the Stargate and ended up on another planet, complete with hieroglyphs and a completely foreign language neither Japanese or English. You're in the world of Black Boboi - ominous thudding beats, exotic string plucks, cascading vocal harmonies. There's nothing warm or organic here, it's all shades of gray, black and white. Even if the sun shines, you see it as white fading to silver.
The other image they explore is high fantasy with knights and horses galloping across the prairie. It's the "Queen of the Night" swaying with the mane of the silky horses, knights searching for their home town, witches stirring a pot. It often comes with a feeling of movement, of crossing great plains, covering vast distances, climbing stairs to the sky and falling. The sound creates a sense of space and scale, it's both cinematic and visceral with the sub bass giving the beats a lot of punch. It's an interesting contrast between the feelings of solitude, emptiness, darkness and silence, because the complex percussive elements create a sense of urgency and action. In fact, the sound of some of the synths make it video game like, and its pretty easy to imagine yourself as a hero wandering the desolate lands on some epic quest.
Listening to “SILK” makes you reflect on your place in the world by creating these grand soundscapes that make you feel tiny by comparison. It is at once beautiful and frightening to be lost alone in this wilderness, and one assumes that the effects of COVID-19 on life and society had a considerable impact on this album as its a pretty good representation of our state of being in 2020. At the same time, messages of hope and resolve are spread throughout the album. As they sing on "They", "The time has come, we assemble our wisdom, we find a way to hoist the sail higher". Indeed, Black Boboi has risen to meet the challenge of the times, putting their talents together to create something bigger than the individual. That makes "SILK" not just a great album, but also an album for 2020, one of the few bright spots to emerge from our darkest hours.
Tokyo ON also recommends: KURO - Just Saying Hi, All About Paradise - PARA, WOMAN - Beautiful