INDEX
Self-titled album cero felt right
– Why did you name this album e o?
Takagi: I was very worried about it. We didn’t have a blueprint until the very end, so we didn’t have any ideas for the title.lol There was a possible title such as “TREK” the title of the tour, but I decided not to use a title that would be a receptacle for that kind of image because it would reinforce the epic angle I mentioned earlier too much.
We thought it was an album that said, “This is cero” so we thought it would be okay to use the self-titled “cero” but that would be too unconventional, so we adopted a sense of playfulness that we had been playing with a lot during the production process, and ended up with “eo” with the “c” and “r” eliminated. I took in a sense of playfulness, as I had done so many times during the production process. When you hear the word “eo” people of a certain generation may think of “Captain EO” According to one theory, “eo” means “dawn”.
– Apparently, the word came from Greek mythology.
Takagi: That’s right. I thought it would make a great meaning and be easy to design visually. So it is almost like a self-title.
– You guys made an album again the same way as the first and realized “that’s how cero makes albums”?
Takagi: It was really a very similar production period to “WORLD RECORD”. Of course, many things have changed, like Corona, children, dogs, cats, etc [Laughs].
– This album feels similar to the first album in terms of sampling. However, this album has many game music sounds like hyper pop, and the cover is reminiscent of 8-bit. Did you have any particular image in mind?
Takagi: Yes, there is a lyric in the first song that says “a terribly rough game screen”, but that’s just “if you ask me”. This time, we are only impressed by what others say to us, and we ourselves are the ones who discover things.lol But, well, if I were to force myself to continue with the impression that it is like 8-bit, the structure of micro parts forming a macro structure, like a bit picture, could be said about the content as well.
– Micro and macro?
Takagi: In terms of the structure of music, many pieces of music have a section with a relaxed rhythm and a section with a detailed rhythm, both of which are inherent in the distortion. If we consider fine-feel rhythms as micro, then there is a busy and speedy time flowing in that world. On the other hand, macro-feel rhythms have a relaxed sense of time. I think the fractal structure of micro and macro interweaves is vaguely shared, and I think the language was influenced by this structure to no small extent.
– Could you be more specific?
Takagi: In this world, the structure seems to be the same, but the macro world and the micro world operate under different rules. I think such structures are simple but interesting, and I think I spent a lot of time observing them in my work. History moves in the same way. Macroscopic movements at the national level determine history, but in the microscopic world, there are many more things happening, but as time goes by, only the macro events are adopted and the micro events are discarded. But they are not lost, and they can continue to exist if someone observes a trace of them, even if it is a small newspaper article.
I’m not going to go into the details, but I think it has something to do with quantum mechanics, and I personally wanted to include something of that interest in the content of the book.
Takagi: But I don’t think it’s a good idea to explain everything from one to ten, saying “this is how it is and this is how it is”, and music can exist in a vague way, or music is the only way to package such things in a vague way…. is all an afterthought.lol I think that I can listen to the finished work again and critique it in that way, and that’s what I think when I appreciate it myself.
– In 100 years, the past three years could be just “the pandemic,” but there were many micro-movements within that three years. But music allows us to preserve the footage of those movements, look back on them, and see the future from the past.
Takagi: That’s right. The bit painting I mentioned earlier is a micro and macro structure, but the artwork for this project is actually a textile. But the structure is the same. If you take one micro point, it is just a color, but if you look at it from a macro perspective, it becomes a single picture. I think this kind of structure is a characteristic of this album.
