That isn’t a typo.
The title of Kishi Bashi’s second album, Lighght, is pronounced “light,” but those two extra letters pay homage to an (in)famous 1965 poem by Aram Saroyan — the entire text of which is just that: “lighght.” That poem became a lighghtning rod of political controversy after a $750 award from the then-new National Endowment for the Arts sparked a debate on whether the single, misspelled word even qualified as a poem, inadvertently rendering “lighght” a postmodern battlefield in roughly the same vein as Marcel Duchamp’s repurposed Fountain.
If Kishi Bashi’s album evokes that long-running contention, though, it’s incidental. Kaoru Ishibashi — who has been performing as Kishi Bashi since 2011 — is more drawn to the lighghthearted nature of the poem, which he describes as “perfect.”
“I’d always liked it,” Ishibashi says. “It embodied this spirit of how I view art and music in general. It’s playful. It is a little academic, because it was an iconoclastic approach. It was boundary-breaking, at the time, to have a one-word poem. It parallels how I view creation and art. You can’t take it too seriously, but also you want it to inspire people to hear something they had never heard before. And then they can take their own experience to another level from that.”
Lighght, released last year, certainly seems to accomplish that goal, furthering the idiosyncratic sound established on the first Kishi Bashi album, 2012’s 151a. Ishibashi, a violinist from Seattle who now lives in Athens, Ga., admittedly works within the realm of indie pop, but he uses his classical background to give his music an experimental edge he hopes is unique.
The resulting music is sprightly and, surprisingly enough, decidedly unpretentious. “I’m not a music purist in any way,” Ishibashi says. “I don’t feel like my music necessarily has to be taken very seriously. It kind of boils down to what I think my listeners would appreciate. And also my gut; if I like a melody and it makes me feel good, I pursue it and hopefully that will translate.”
For the 37-minute running time of Lighght, it does. The album is brimming with optimistic, psychedelic energy that seems engineered to be as catchy as possible (in the case of lead single “Philosophize in It! Chemicalize with It!”, which started as a Japanese jingle Ishibashi was hired to write — that’s true). As though to hammer home the sonic giddiness of those songs, Ishibashi includes a late-album suite of two songs titled “Hahaha.”
But look at the lyrics, and what seems like simple joy gets a little more complex. “Hahaha, Pt. 1” is a song about a capricious relationship with lyrics such as, “If your love for me was an anomaly / Would you fake your death just to break up with me?” Early track “The Ballad of Mr. Steak,” meanwhile, features cheeky sexual imagery and a tragic narrative that culminates in the titular character’s death.
“I’m a huge fan of strange dualities in meaning, so there might be sexual undertones or some dark thing [under the music],” Ishibashi says. “Something that would make you uncomfortable, uneasy to see the mixture of the two [things]. I just like weird things; that’s the kind of thing that turns me on. I’ve gravitated toward movies like that and books like that, and I gravitate toward people who are weird like that.”
If anyone fits that description perfectly, it’s Ishibashi’s frequent collaborator (and neighbor), Of Montreal frontman Kevin Barnes. Ishibashi has contributed strings and vocals to several of Of Montreal’s recent albums, while Barnes appears on two tracks of Lighght.
“He gave me my start,” Ishibashi says of Barnes. “I used to play in his band, and before that I was collaborating with him in his studio, producing strange sounds. He kept making me experiment with myself to come up with new sounds I had never even dared create. He plays, like, every instrument except violin, so he just wanted me to do something that he can’t really do. That’s when I started experimenting with my violin, and that’s how I ended up getting the basics of this Kishi Bashi kind of sound.”
Though Ishibashi no longer tours with Of Montreal, Barnes remains an important influence on his career. Barnes, whose Of Montreal output is famously regular (it’s rare that more than 18 months pass without a new album from the group), provides an impetus for Ishibashi, a self-described procrastinator, to maintain a steady output of his own, in contrast to the longer periods that other indie artists spend making albums.
“I feel like bands are taking longer [between albums], but what I start to realize is that I do forget about bands after like a year and a half if they don’t put a new album out,” Ishibashi says. “Even if you’re super excited about them, if they wait like three or four years, like Sufjan Stevens or something, it’s almost out of your consciousness at that point. It’s fine if you want to take your time, but I think it’s kind of dangerous. It’s more of a way to keep myself active. It’s a self-imposed timeline. And I see Kevin, who’s down the street, and he’s always writing songs. He knows about those self-imposed deadlines.”
Ishibashi is already working on his third LP — and it, like the namesake of his second album, promises to be controversial. “The more I work on music, I just don’t want to do the same thing over and over again,” he says. “I’m starting to delve into different instruments now. I’m working on my next album now, and it’s going to be pretty electronic.”
It’ll probably alienate some fans,” Ishibashi adds. “But you have to evolve and you have to feel inspired, and that’s what’s kind of inspiring me right now.”
Kishi Bashi will perform at Saturn on Saturday, Aug. 22. War Jacket and Jeffrey Butzer & the Bicycle Eaters will open. Tickets are $13 in advance and $15 the day of the show. Doors open at 8 p.m.; the show begins at 9 p.m. For more information, visit saturnbirmingham.com.