Sigh at B.B. Kings in New York, photos by Jon Wiederhorn
Mirai Kawashima, the frontman for Japanese experimental black-metal band Sigh, is pissed. He's not mad that the band's first New York date in years is on a Tuesday night and the venue is only half full. He's not upset that he's got a catalog of original material to draw from and certain members of the crowd keep yelling for songs by Venom, whose material Sigh cover on their new EP A Tribute to Venom. He's not even angry that Sigh's last full album, Hangman's Hymn: Musikalische Exequien, was one of the scariest, most inventive offerings of 2007, yet was but a flicker on the radar compared to a waterfall of uninspiring metalcore releases. No, Kawashima's rage has more to do with his generalized disgust for the values and beliefs of modern man.
"I hate 99 percent of the people on this earth," he says in a soft voice. "I hate weak people who have to cling to fairy tales like religion, and I hate greedy people that have nothing more than making money in their head. I just want all of them to die."
Even if misanthropy accounts for Kawashima's rage, it doesn't explain his astonishing artistry. Since Sigh's first album, 1993's Scorn Defeat, the accomplished black metal musician has experimented with classical flourishes, horror soundtrack melodies, jazz twists and psychedelic interludes that have complimented the howling vocals, roaring blast beats and free jazz saxophone freak outs, and taken the band's music to a more exotic and otherworldly place than those traveled by most of his peers. A tribute to Venom may be all Cronos, Mantas and Abaddon but Hangman's Hymn was largely influenced by Wagner, Weber and Mozart, and likely hints at where Kawashima will take Sigh with the band's next album, which he's currently writing.
During their B.B. Kings headline show Sigh combine all of their musical expertise with a visual display that actually upstages their musical performance. While Kawashima is clearly the frontman, the visual focal point is saxophone player and co-screamer, the sexy metal babe Dr. Mikannibal. Clad in a black leather bikini and a tiny leather miniskirt that starts below her hips and only reaches down to her upper thigh, Mikannibal is a whirlwind of sexual energy -- a powerful anime heavy metal babe in the flesh. Combined with Kawashima's sepulchral screams and classical keyboard sounds, and backed by buzzgrind guitarist Shinichi Ishikawa, bassist Satoshi Fujinami and drummer Junichi Harashima, Sigh create gale force currents of sound that are as forceful as Scandinavian black metal and as emotionally impacting as classical or even opera.
"Good opera is so emotional and powerful," Kawashima says. "And that's what I'm inspired by. A lot of black-metal bands use keyboards and strings for embellishments. But Sigh's keyboard parts and orchestration are not embellishments. They are as important to the songs as the guitars, bass and drums. So even though it's very metal, you can say it's pretty much classical music as well."
During their set, Sigh draw from various albums, musically shifting along a continuum of raw black metal and avant-garde adventurism at the other. But it's the orchestral thrash tracks from "Hangman's Hymn" like "Inked in Blood" and "Me-Devil" that resonate most powerfully. And the encore of Venom's "Black Metal" cements the notion that no matter how far afield Sigh wanders, their dark souls will remain rooted in black metal. Sadly, unless you're Gorgoroth or Dimmu Borgir, that kind of music doesn't always pay the bills, which is why Kawashima writes TV themes and video game melodies on the side. He also has a day job working at a Japanese telecommunications company, which explains why Sigh so rarely tour the U.S.
"I actually think it's good to have a day job because I don't have to live on music, and that lets me do anything I want musically," he says. "Of course it would be great if I could live just on my music, doing something I like, but it's very hard. If you live in Japan, it's not easy to tour the U.S. or Europe. So having a day job and a band is the best thing."
For more on Sigh, read Kawashima's recent guest blog about bleak classical music.
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