1. I Was Swimming To The Shore And Heard This
One day in a dream, I fell from the sky into the ocean, and as I floated to the surface, I heard a synth sound pouring down from the sun above me. It sounded so good, and this track was my first attempt to recreate the memory of that dream as vividly as possible in sound. My friend & sound-designer Sato (Sountrive) came up with the idea of turning the dream into a sound source, and he mixed the song binaurally into 3D audio, which is his specialty, to give the listener a sense of reliving the experience.
2. Flower In The Dark
A lot of encounters and events that happened a few years ago led me to write this song. It is an electronica song that makes one feel as if they are lost floating around in a daydream. It's hard to say where people go after they die, but I feel like I can find hope by strongly believing that we are connected together, even if we can't see each other. I tried to express this feeling in this song as clearly as possible. I was working on this song with the aim of having the song and the various tones strongly connected to the vivid emotions within me.
3. Mist
This song, with lyrics in French, Japanese, and English, also has a similar theme of a "farewell", and I created the image of sublimating the sadness as a thrill in the latter half of the song. The early demo prototype of the descending chords and an ascending melody including their variations I first created around 2017, but the challenge was how to make the two contrasting tunes of the first half and the second half coexist. The development part of the two-part song was one of the most challenging experiments for me.
4. It’s So Natural ft. AAAMYYY
Back in 2020, I had a drum 'n' bass track that I was working on sporadically that was never meant for an album. At that time, I had just gotten into a retro RPG video game from 1997 (called "Moon"), and I was influenced by its amazing soundtrack. Once I had a clear idea of what I wanted to create as a sound, I focused on making the high frequencies, which I thought could create feedback and stand out as an accent. The refrain is "It's so natural to be in the dark," and thanks to AAAMYYY's participation in the Japanese lyrics and singing, the song turned out to be more upbeat and positive than I had expected.
5. Spider Dancing (Album edit)
This is the song that led me to get to know Saou Tanaka, who did the music video and additional artwork video content for my project. The mysterious creature on the album cover is also the protagonist of the "Spider Dancing" music video. "Spider Dancing" is a festival anthem that celebrates music in a primal way, and the story behind the music video boosted the message of the song. On the album edit version, I created another staircase to climb at the end of the song.
6. Demo CD-R From The Dead
An instrumental piece, Like M-1, this song was also aimed at re-living a dream, but the content of the dream was super weird. As the title suggests, in the dream there was a demo CD-R from a dead person. During the police investigation, the CD-R fell out of the pocket of the jeans of a corpse that was suddenly buried in a planter box on the balcony of my house, and when I played it, I heard a soundtrack that sounded like a demo of a shoegaze band. The sound was just too good to be true. In the dream, I asked the police officer who came to investigate to play the CD-R twice, and this is the sound source of this track.
7. 5AM
I wrote this song with my brother (he wrote lyrics) after our grandmother passed away. At a time when I wanted to face reality peacefully, I re-discovered the demo of this song from my PC and saw that I was able to complete the image. The lyrics say, "I float in this lake to feel safe, but the sound of water tells, I don't belong here" and the words "lake" and "water" often appear in the song which inspired me to add water splashing samples into the song. Personally it is my meditation pop song.
8. Kids On The Stage
Following M1 and M6, this is the song about reliving a dream. In my dream, I was watching a children's musical performance written and directed by some unknown adults, and I started to get frustrated because the content was terribly boring. I couldn't help but I heard a strange melody with some piano accompaniment and it was just amazing. I tried to reproduce it as vividly as possible, including the atmosphere. The children's voices were actually recorded with my own voice on top of it, using pitch correction and other techniques.
9. Broken Radio
This is an interlude that leads into the next song, "Show Me How. It's an image of a dimension in a dream being broken and being pulled back to reality. I don't really remember how I created this sound. When I recorded it, I was messing around with my favorite reverbs on a synth. What started as an accident became this tune.
10. Show Me How (Album edit)
"Show Me How" was written a little before I started working on the album in earnest, and I didn't know what it would be for the album until the end. But when all the songs came together, it was like looking in a mirror for the first time, and from there I was sure that I only needed to adjust the mix. As for the contrast with the single version, it is slight, but the second half of the song may sound particularly different. I think it made sense to sequence it as the10th track on the album.
11. Lucid Dreaming
The title track of the album. I don't know how to talk about this song now. Maybe one day.
12. System
When I was writing this song, the whole world was going through a very intense time, and I was thinking a lot about the uncanny feeling of insecurity, bugs in the social structure, and stereotypes on a personal level, all of which I put together as a "system" built into us. It was during this time that I was able to create a musical chemical reaction with Ryan Hemsworth after exchanging a few demos with him, and this was the moment when the system inside me that had been solidifying collapsed in a joyful way.
13. Nagaretari
There was a time when I was reading a lot of Kenji Miyazawa's books during the making of the album, and I was particularly influenced by the poem "Nagaretari'' which, (if I may say so without fear of misinterpretation,) is a poem that expresses human life and death through water, as if the flow of a river is synchronized with the flow of time. In this song, I think I was able to express in my own way something I felt when I read the poem, something that cannot be put into words. The pad-like voice sample used throughout the song is a reverse playback of the vocals from "Zenbu Dreaming".
14. Zenbu Dreaming
(1) Since I started my career as Maika Loubté, I feel like I've been keeping Japanese songs a secret to myself. There is no particular reason. The original form of this song was done when I was 17, but I hadn’t developed enough skills as a writer or producer to make it into a song I was happy with.. Over a decade, there was still something about it that appealed to me so I had to reconstruct everything and give it a form. For the lyrics, I chose only words that were subjective and poignant.
(2) A lot of people got on the bus. I suddenly thought of the background of the people there. I wondered how many parents, grandparents, and ancestors were behind the birth of the people there. That thought made me dizzy. I'm not talking about family structure or home environment, nor about gender, but just the fact that after love, romance, and sexuality as human activities, suddenly a human being is born and life begins. That was my question. Why is that natural? To me, it doesn't seem natural. Who makes life what it is? Where is our freedom? It doesn't really matter? There are times when I think that everything is really a dream and everything is free and unrestricted, and I'm still wondering.