Aspidistrafly

Members and early lives

April Lee, born in 1984, picked up the guitar early and taught herself to sing along with it by age thirteen, even though no one in her family played music. She used a tape recorder to layer her voice over her guitar parts. Lee says her growth as a musician is closely tied to other creative pursuits she took up herself, like drawing, writing, working with scents, and sewing. As a child, she was especially drawn to 1980s horror soap operas, which she described as full of distorted reflections and repetitions.

Ricks Ang, born on 31 March 1980, grew up steeped in the biggest Mandopop hits of the 80s and 90s, many of which were based on Japanese originals. His influences extended beyond music to manga like GeGeGe no Kitarō and Dragon Ball, the work of early Spitz and Luna Sea, and the visuals of Rinko Kawauchi, Harata Heiquiti, and Hideki Nakajima. Ang thinks his early attraction to Japanese culture may have started in kindergarten, where he had many Japanese friends.

In his teens, he got into shoegaze and dream pop, discovering Spitz, Fishmans, and visual kei in 1995. He credits the shared influence of David Sylvian on those artists for leading him to jazz, ECM, and ambient musicians such as Jon Hassell, Mark Isham, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Fennesz, and Takagi Masakatsu. Like Lee, Ang started experimenting with a tape recorder at fifteen, and he later noted that recording in marble bathrooms produced a nice reverb.

History

Lee and Ang met in early 2000 through mutual friends, during which Ang was scouting for a vocalist for his shoegaze band. The four-person band was led by Ang as drummer and Lee as vocalist and guitarist, but split in 2001 after the other two members left. They decided to continue playing together and formulated design ideas for what later became KITCHEN. LABEL., initially called Kitchen.

Ang described that the rise of social media following their formation, particularly on MySpace, helped them build a community of like-minded artists. They formed the Aspidistra duo in 2002, having formulated the name as early as 2001, and released their debut demo EP Children's Haiku Garden that year, its title derived from sampling children playing on a playground. On 17 July 2004, they released their second EP The Ghost of Things, limited to 100 hand-painted and individually numbered CD-Rs, self-released under KITCHEN.

LABEL, created by Ang that year to allow them to release music according to their own vision. The name derives from Japanese author Banana Yoshimoto's 1988 novel Kitchen, which had influenced some of the duo's work before they began working on Altar of Dreams. In 2005, Ang founded Kitchen. as a design studio with Lee as co-founder, and within the next two years founded its record label arm, folding in KITCHEN. LABEL.

Artistry

Lee cited fashion designer Serge Lutens and surrealist Salvador Dalí as her primary inspirations, and said she often hoards inspirational items like collected memories, sounds, images, and objects. Ang cited both the music and art of German label ECM Records, and said Mandopop influences from his childhood continued to resonate with him, also mentioning a soft spot for acoustic guitar artists including Phil Keaggy, Ralph Towner, and Masami Satoh.

In a 2018 interview, Ang named his three most treasured records as Hiroshi Yoshimura's Wave Notation 1: Music for Nine Post Cards (1982), Seigén Ono's Seigén (1984), and Aragon's Aragon (1985). By 2022, he had a collection of approximately 700 albums in vinyls and CDs. Although the duo has roots in shoegaze, Ang said they were more inspired by achieving an ethereal quality à la Cocteau Twins or David Sylvian. Lee expressed that she loves hearing a melody and not being able to place what environment it was composed in.

Ang said their goal was not to become the next Slowdive or Ride. Lee said it was perfectly fine if a listener wants to decipher how she arrived at a song's story, but hoped the music gave others courage to question, imagine, remember, and feel. Lee achieves a soft-spoken vocal quality, likened to Vashti Bunyan, by recording during the witching hours and blurring improvising and composing. Ang shapes instrumentation and textures around Lee's lyrics while respecting their characteristics.

The duo hopes their dense instrumentation can act as a vehicle for musical discovery. The group's musical narrative is shaped around Lee as protagonist, and she is featured in numerous visuals including album covers.