Favorite Voices #1: Miho Hatori

Lady Of The Hour:
October 25th, 1996. It is 2 days after our sweet 16. Mom has dropped us off at the Cat's Cradle in our lovely hometown of Chapel Hill, NC to see a show headlined by our latest obsession: two critically adored Japanese emigres from New York's East Village named Cibo Matto. It was noted in some magazine or another(maybe Details... remember when that magazine was FUN?) that the singer, Miho Hatori, had chosen her apartment on 2nd Ave after recognizing neighborhood landmark Love Saves The Day from the film Desperately Seeking Susan. We had snapped up their debut, Viva! La Woman, a few months prior and things were never quite the same. Yuka Honda's vast storehouse of samples, the hypnotic song structures and the ever-shifting playfulness and emotional accuracy of the more-than-occasionally-food-related lyrics all do their part in creating a truly brilliant buffet of genre-hopping genius. We can still listen to that album all the way through and be irritated if interrupted by phone calls, small children, animals, noisy neighbors or any semblance of real life in general.
Still nothing could have prepared us for the magic of seeing them live. As if the surreality of our first taste of in-the-moment rock and roll weren't enough there was the sheer density of it all to be reckoned with. Honda's mountainous samples, thrilling enough on record, became a true beast when augmented by the band of friends(including one Sean Lennon) joining our good natured and smiling heroines onstage. Recreating and reinventing their tracks(turning the usually frenetic "Birthday Cake" into a grindcore wonder and playing "Beef Jerky" at breakneck speeds) they were a living, breathing monument to how much good, sweaty, goofy fun music can be in the right hands. In the middle of this clamorous wall of sound; rising inexhaustibly from song to song and bar to bar, from a whisper to a coo to a goosebumps-worthy caterwaul, was the thickly-accented rubberband voice of one Miho Hatori.
That voice can pretty much do it all... and in at least four languages. The live hip-hop freakout "BBQ", off the Super Relax EP, shows off an impressive old-school flow that could rival Roxanne Shante's any day. As Noodle, enfant terrible of virtual band Gorillaz, Miho contributed the somewhat sinister second single "Dare" off the band's Demon Days album, proving perfectly at home rocking a bubbling 21st century disco. She and Honda's haunting, funereal French(?)-language cover of Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" renders the original still more unlistenable.
Radical reinterpretations of other people's songs seems to be a favorite pastime. In addition to those ministers of dubious prog-grunge Hatori has put her unique melodic stamp on songs by the Doors, Nirvana, Madonna, the Rolling Stones and Antonio Carlos Jobim.
Though able to deftly shapeshift her vocals to suit any number of arrangements and styles it is often in the quieter, more intimate or singsongy moments of her ouvre that Hatori seems most at home. We are hardly alone in our admiration of the sweetly forlorn warmth of those pipes. Collaboration has been a hallmark of her career. Outside of Cibo Matto, the Gorillaz, the short-lived Butter 08 and her latin-flavored releases with guitarist Smokey Hormel she has also contributed to projects by everyone from the Beastie Boys and Handsome Boy Modeling School to Kat Bjelland of Babes In Toyland, Blackalicious and John Zorn.

The Tracks:
"Apple", being the first song on the aforementioned Viva! La Woman, is the first Cibo Matto track we ever had the strange pleasure of hearing. The sparkling sampled intro crescendoes into a driving and dreamlike march on the verse, Hatori dropping acid-trip poetry about apple leaves falling, the earth "drink[ing] in squall" and a mysterious woman in tears. The "chorus" has no words, just our lady vocalizing prettily in a Bollywood fashion over a slightly menacing electric guitar. The song repeats this ghostly pattern again and again over 3:56 before dropping out into a short blur of Japanese radio chatter, the stunned listener left to wonder what the hell just happened. If this all sounds hopelessly 90's we nonetheless maintain that it could have come out yesterday and we'd be just as mesmerized.
Chief among our personal favorites of Miho's many collaborations is the one she essayed for Stephin Merritt's 6ths . For the uninitiated, Mr. Merritt is the prolific and slightly curmudgeonly singer-songwriter(or as he might prefer, songwriter-singer), dry wit and chief force behind the Magnetic Fields, Future Bible Heroes and the Gothic Archies. The 6ths exists as a platform for other singers to tackle Merritt's compositions to varying degrees of success on either side. Sometimes the singer doesn't suit the song and vice versa but in the case of Miho's rendition of "Lindy Lou" off the 1999 album Hyacinths And Thistles it seems the stars were locked in perfect alignment. With minimalist keyboard buoying her melancholic and sleepy delivery of lines like "I'll build Paris wherever you are" Hatori perfectly captures the daydreaming of one beset by unrequited love.
Due to his reputation for arch humor(and one or two flimsy accusations of racism), many have bemoaned Merritt's alleged practical joke in having a Japanese woman perform a song with the L-heavy refrain "my lovely Lindy Lou". Okay, yeah, supposing this were a Busby Berkeley musical number and Miho was expected to soft shoe through a rice paddy while take-out cartons sprouted legs and danced around her that might be a hilarious gag. As it happens, it is just a spare and simple little love song beautifully sung by a woman whose reading of the word "really" just happens to sound a little more like "ree-ree" because she grew up in a place where they don't use the letter L much... and that's only hilarious if you're already a racist. That said, we must wonder if the P.C. police are gonna be after us for thinking it's just really, really cute.
Hatori's interpretation of Madonna's "Crazy For You", thus far available only on a Valentine's Day compilation of love songs distributed by Starbucks, has eluded yours truly for quite some time. Finally having it on our hot little hard drive we could not resist sharing this little gem with you, dear reader. Hatori has taken one of the most recognizable and perfect pop ballads of the 1980's and dramatically reimagined it as a bossa nova-esque torch song from a bygone era Her Madgesty herself would no doubt smile on. You can almost hear waves rolling and glasses clinking in the background. Just listen for the final "crazy for you" of the chorus: the horns kick in and La Hatori harmonizes with them instead of herself. That's panache.

As of October 24, 2006(one day shy of ten exact years since she first bewitched us from the stage), Miho's first solo record, Ecdysis, was released on the Rykodisc label. Weird percussion, offbeat harmonies, happy-sad organ, "say what?" spoken word interludes; the album, truly intercontinental in its embrace of global styles, is "world music" without the barf factor(pinky swear) and every bit as adorable as we, the devoted, expected. Favorite moments: title track, minutes 2:39 to 3:29 of "Spirit Of Juliet".




Apple - Cibo Matto
Lindy Lou - the 6ths
Crazy For You - Miho Hatori

Also very much worth your time:

Michel Gondry's disorienting treatment of Viva! La Woman stand-out "Sugar Water".