After two decades, Quruli has crafted a brand-new album titled “Kankaku wa Michishirube” alongside the return of their original drummer, Nobuyuki Mori. This remarkable journey of album production, captured in the documentary “Quruli no Eiga,” primarily set during an intensive training camp at Izu Studio, is set to hit screens on October 13. The album’s 13 songs, meticulously crafted through raw studio sessions with the core trio, are a testament to the band’s origins as a guitar, bass, and drums-powered trio, harking back to their very roots.
Despite two decades since the last album by the trio, their shared stage experiences at “Kyoto Music Expo” and on various tours since 2002, when Mori initially departed from the band, make this collaboration a different kind of “reunion.” The documentary doesn’t dwell on the past or overemphasize the dramatic elements of their “reunion.” Instead, it offers a refreshing and lighthearted take on the production process, aligning with the spirit of their work the aforementioned album, emphasizing the importance of “living in the present.” In an exclusive interview, Shigeru Kishida, Masashi Sato, and Nobuyuki Mori provide insights into the album’s creation process.
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The First Album by the Original Members in 20 years: “It Felt Right Timing to Work on It in an Old School Way”
– How did you come to make a new album with the original members for the first time in a long time?
Kishida: Recently, I have been making music on my own and then performing it with a band, so I thought it would be a good time to start making music from scratch with a band. I have been doing that occasionally recently, but I thought it would be interesting to try it with the original members.
Sato: This time, we were already talking about a movie, so we said, “Well, why don’t you have them film it?
Kishida: So it just happened by chance.
But the reason I just mentioned explains well is the easiest to understand. I’ve been doing a lot of productive songwriting and recording recently, so I thought I’d loosen up a bit and try it again the way I’ve always done it, with a band and a session.
– The way of making music has shifted to mainly DTM, and I got the impression that this shift was further accelerated after the Corona Disaster.
Kishida: Not all of it, but not none of it. But I didn’t think separately about “what is a band”.
– I think you said in the film that you had a lot of thoughts about it at first, but how did you really feel about it?
Mori: I had no idea how the recording would turn out until I opened the lid, so I was very excited, but I was nervous until we actually did it. But I was very excited about it until we actually did it, and when we did it, it turned out to be a way of making music that I myself had forgotten about.
Mori: After I left Quruli, I worked with a lot of different people, but most of the time I had a song and lyrics, and then I had to figure out how to arrange them. It was interesting for the three of us to build it from scratch, and I was happy that it ended up as an album.
Sato: The current live performance format is becoming more and more band-like, so I think I had a desire for something like “the fun of a band. The things that I used to take for granted with Mocchi, such as making an album, going on tour, and then going back into the studio, are no longer possible in the current form.
Sato: There are a lot of conditions that come into play, such as coordinating the schedules of various people and saying, “It’s going to cost this much to do this, so we have to set this much as our goal. But this time, because we had the film, we were able to sit down and do the obvious things, and I think that was the best part.
Kishida: The band at the current concert is a different band, or rather, we have been working together for a long time and have developed a strong relationship of trust in our performances. However, the core of the band is still me and Sato, and the three of us in the original band are at the root of what Sato and I are doing now.
If the three of us had not been able to accomplish something together, we might not have been able to do what we did this time. But the three of us have a track record of making songs like “Tokyo” and “Roses”, and those songs are still popular among our fans, so I think they are special in some way. I think they are still popular among our fans and have some kind of special meaning. I think there is something that only the three of us can create, and that is what we wanted to create.
