After over a decade in the music scene, Kawabe Taigen, performing under the name Ill Japonia, has finally issued his first solo collection, titled Ill. This five-track EP is also the first original release by British label Eastern Margins, a collective focused on organizing shows for London’s East and South-East Asian diaspora communities.

On Ill, Kawabe blends his interest in trap with years of genre-hopping. Kawabe is perhaps best known as the frontman and bassist of Bo Ningen—a similarly unclassifiable act that draws broadly from acid rock, noise rock, and psychedelia. However, his past experimentation has seen him work with collaborators ranging from experimental electronic artist Foodman to psychedelic rock group Mainliner.

This diverse background gives Kawabe a unique entrance point into his explorations of trap. Signature elements of the genre emerge on each track, but trap acts more as a common thread than a dominant feature, leaving room to display a larger fabric of ideas. As Kawabe says, he is “not new” as a musician, and he’s by no means trying to obscure his history or diverse sonic interests by blindly replicating what he hears from the trap scene. “I’ve got different backgrounds, different roots,” he says. “So the way I make music is different from the usual trap, which I sometimes think is a struggle that’s also my strength.” Trap seems less like the foundation of the project and more like a reference point, or a lens through which Kawabe is peering to see what he can learn about his relationships with music, with the world around him, and ultimately with himself.

Listen to some of our favorite tracks from Ill Japonia below:

Indeed, Kawabe’s particular relationship to trap seems as much an exercise in the spiritual as the sonic. Though he acknowledges that typical trap lyrics are often about what he calls “teenager goals”, he finds the genre’s energy and bluntness to be refreshing. Adults often criticize young people for never thinking about the future, he says, but he finds it invigorating to hear artists ten years his junior rap about what he calls “the now.” The mindset he grew up with in Japan, by contrast, emphasized the importance of working hard now for long-term gain that could be enjoyed in ten or twenty years’ time. “I do still believe this,” he says thoughtfully. “I grew up with those kinds of thoughts. But now I feel that now is the most important moment, and it’s the healthiest way to think about the past and future.”

Kawabe initially learned about this focus on the present through reading about trap artists’ improvisational workflow. “They’re in the studio for one day and the rapper just writes lyrics as the producer makes the beat,” he marvels. “They make five or six songs per day, and finish everything in a day. They focus more on impact than hook or structure.” As Ill Japonia, Kawabe tries to keep some of this creative agility, saying that he uses a different part of his brain than with Bo Ningen. With the band, the process is much more methodical. “We bring ideas to the studio and jam, discuss between each song, come to a decision, go play the songs live to find out audience reaction, then build up the songs in response,” he says. “It takes a really long time before we do the actual recordings.”

On Ill, though, he approaches the recording like a one-man jam session, building his beats from the ground up and freestyle rapping as he goes. He finished the lyrics for most of the tracks in the space of a couple hours, and the first basic takes were done within a day, though he took longer to fine-tune them afterward. The lyrics are full of personal musings on growing older, learning from younger artists, looking for answers, and finding peace. “Touring through Japan, people would talk to me more about my lyrics after Ill Japonia shows,” Kawabe says, clearly gratified. “They’d ask how I see a line, and tell me what lines resonate with them.”

Yet even as Kawabe explores the communicative power of rap, he’s also pushing at its lyrical limits. Where others freestyle rapping in a recording session might have stumbled over a rhythm, or paused at the end of an idea, Kawabe instead steamrolled forward, mashing together syllables and words that sounded good together, whether Japanese, English, or a language of his own invention. Between takes, he listened back to the recordings and directly transcribed the resulting mix of intelligible, partially intelligible, and totally unintelligible lyrics. Sometimes he even tried to “turn off his brain” and intentionally mishear the recordings, writing down entirely different lyrics in the process. The final product is playful yet sincere, echoing his journey to both harness rap’s liberating energy and reflect on his life.

The first and last tracks stitch together his lyrical and musical exercises with poise. The opener, “Sauna Mizuburo,” is a track that draws an analogy between music and the feeling of plunging into the mizuburo, the cold pool at a Japanese sauna. “Listening to and playing music are a kind of detox, a purification,” Kawabe explains. Fittingly, the track ends with an anecdote about some friends telling him that he looks the same onstage as he does in the mizuburo. On the closing track, “Lounge Muzak,” he reflects on the concept of kakugo, which he describes as a mix of a sense of awareness and determination. “I wanted to make music because I wanted to find answers,” he says.

Thus, as much as the music on his first EP is about positive energy, purification, and simplicity, this final track reveals that it’s also an extension of his goal of living life with kakugo, and using music as the vehicle to do so. No wonder Kawabe Taigen’s search has led him through so many musical styles. “Now, at 33, I can say that I can be anything and I can study anything, that now is the most important moment.”

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Contributor: Kiril Bolotnikov
Chinese Translation: Olivia Li
Images Courtesy of Eastern Margins & Adjorka