Spotlight on Olivia Lufkin
September 6th, 2008
Live Studio Interview on MTV-Harajuku
by Cayce

The KDDI design studio building in the center of Harajuku is a wonderful place to go for anyone bored with shopping. The place serves as a kind of museum for the technology company KDDI, makers of the au cell phone. The building is free to enter, and on the second and third floors, there are all kinds of interactive displays of new technology, which visitors can play and experiment with at their leisure. On the fourth floor, you can buy KDDI cell phones and other products, and on the fifth floor there is a posh café, complete with a lush greenhouse dining terrace and free internet, and of course, a wonderful view of all of Harajuku. There’s even a stamp lottery game, like an Easter egg hunt: when you enter the building, you pick up a stamp card, and then go throughout the building searching for the hidden stamps. You stamp one blank spot on your card with each stamp, and when the card is full you go to the lottery booth and play the slot machine to see if you win a prize. But the most fun part of the KDDI design studio is the first floor, where there’s a small amphitheater sunk into the floor where they hold numerous events, including the filming of interviews with musical artists for the television program MTV-Harajuku.

On September 6th, their evening special guest was the elusive pop-rocker Olivia Lufkin. Of course Not Greatest Site had to be there! Though still very young, Olivia has had quite a diverse history. Born in Okinawa to a Japanese mother and a foreign father, Olivia started her career as part of the idol group D&D. Eventually she got sick of being an idol and dropped out of the music scene, returning as a solo act with a very different attitude. Her first album, Synchronicity, combined peppy j-pop energy with a dreamlike, fairytale quality, but it was her mini-albums that began to show her darker side, with song titles such as “Comatose Bunny Butcher” and “Internal Bleeding Strawberry.” With her stellar second album, The Lost Lolli, she truly broke from all genre confines. The album contains sweet pop hooks and growling rock guitars, sentimentality and anger in equal measure, with Olivia’s angelically clear voice riding above the turmoil like a rainbow in a thundercloud.

Subsequently, Olivia became the musical presence behind the character Reira (and her band TRAPNEST) for the anime version of Yazawa Ai’s wildly popular manga series NANA. She recorded the ending theme for the series, “A little pain,” as well as a number of TRAPNEST songs, and performed Nana-themed lives together with Tsuchiya Anna (likewise the musical presence behind the show's title character) When she went back to releasing her own material, her music took a mellow turn towards dreampop and trip-hop with her mini-album The Cloudy Dreamer. She has been fairly quiet for a while, but now she’s back in the scene with her new single “Rain,” an energized tune that promises a return of some of the old rock and darkness. And with her third album, Trinka Trinka, slated for release in a few weeks, we won’t have long to wait to see what she does next.

In the KDDI studio, the audience sat on brightly colored circular cushions on the blond wood amphitheater benches, looking down at the TV set, which consisted of a silvery curtain backdrop, in front of which was hung a sign for MTV Harajuku. The sign was flanked by two large, pink, fluffy, anthropomorphic cubes on long insect legs, and on the floor, there sat two white cubic benches on either side of a pink, fluffy table. Before the filming began, the studio manager instructed the audience on how to applaud on cue before the cameras started rolling, so they could cut directly to applause from commercial breaks. A camera on a track rolled back on forth in front of the audience members, panning their expressions.

“When you see the camera, it’s okay to wave, you know! You should act like you’re excited to see Miss Olivia! Waving and cheering is fine!” The studio manager gave the audience one more chance to practice applauding on command.

“Come on,” she said, growing exasperated. “Why these long faces? We don’t want you to look like you’re bored! Please, wave and cheer a little!” Probably, it wasn’t so much of a lack of excitement to see Olivia as nervousness and embarrassment about being on television that stopped the audience from going wild, but they did loosen up after the studio manager’s pep talk.

“Great!” she said. “Let’s go! Applaud!” The audience obliged. As the music came up, the cameras began rolling, and the whole set was bathed in psychedelic multicolored disco light, Teppei-san, the host, popped out through the curtain and hailed everyone. He was tall, tan young man with his hair in a heavily gelled spiked brown mohawk and more energy than the whole crowd put together.

“Hello everyone! Welcome to MTV-Harajuku! I’m Teppei, and tonight, we’re very pleased to welcome our special guest, Olivia!”

While Olivia clearly embraces certain aspects of the Lolita culture, she has never labeled herself as “being a Lolita” or done anything to directly associate herself with the Goth-Loli phenomenon (aside from the naming her second album The Lost Lolli.) She remains true to her own aesthetic. As a result, she maintains a fairytale otherworldliness without devolving into overdone, saccharine cuteness, and she holds a childishly winsome appeal while simultaneously being a beautiful young woman. It’s to her credit—artists who refuse to be pigeonholed into any existing genre or trend make the biggest mark.

Today, she was dressed in her characteristic eccentric fairy-princess style, wearing a striking black-and-white striped princess-lined babydoll gown with exaggerated ruffles at the shoulders and back, her hair elaborately coiffed up into multiple ponytails. Shyly, she greeted Teppei-san. Clearly, appearing in front of audiences still makes her nervous. She is fluent in both English and Japanese, but it’s obvious that English is still the language she’s most comfortable with. Frequently, she would struggle to explain herself in Japanese and then lapse into English rather than bother to search for words. Teppei-san appeared to understand everything she was saying but the English must have been confusing for non-bilingual audience members. However, Olivia’s language difficulties may be comforting to foreign fans who also struggle with Japanese—even if she occasionally has trouble saying things like “Your eyes look lighter brown than when I last saw you,” (as she tried to say to Teppei-san) she’s still a famous pop star, after all.

Teppei-san began the interview by asking Olivia about routine questions.

“Do you come to Harajuku often?” he asked.

“Yes, I’ve been here many times. I like going shopping and going out to eat, and I like to visit my friend who runs a hair salon here.”

“You work with many different people when you make your music.” he said. “How is that?”

“Well,” she began, “My younger brother, Jeff, writes a lot of music for me, and it’s different working with him than with other people because when I work with other people, they always ask me lots of questions about what kind of music I want and I always have to do a lot of explaining. With Jeff, I just tell him a little bit about what I want and he knows exactly what to do.

“I don’t like to just make songs in the studio, in front of the computer,” she continued. “That feels so fake to me. Instead, I like to think of ideas more naturally, when I’m outside walking around the city. Of course when the deadline gets closer sometimes I have to make music just in front of the computer, but I still like to pretend that it’s coming to me naturally. Sometimes I get very worried and anxious about the deadlines, but Jeff is someone I know I can trust.”

Now Teppei drew attention to the large white card on which Olivia had outlined the course of the interview. She had profusely embellished it with what appeared to be children’s washable markers—she’s quite a visual artist, too.

“Wow,” Teppei said. “This is so ornate. Anyway, the first item on here is ‘Trinka Trinka.’ That’s the name of your new album, right? It’s a pretty interesting name, could you tell us a little bit about it? What does it mean?”

“Well,” Olivia said, “It’s a word that I made up myself, because I wanted to express a certain feeling and I couldn’t find the right word for it. You know, ‘the giggle trail’? That was sort of what I was going for, but ‘giggle’ has this sort of negative connotation to it. I wanted a word that meant laughing just a little, but freely and happily, like a little elf, skipping along down a road. So the album became ‘Trinka Trinka.’”

“And what kind of sound does the album have?” Teppei asked.

“I never like to assign it any one sound. It’s got rock elements, pop elements, trip-hop elements—elements of all the music I like.”

“Now we’re going to show the wonderful PV to your recent single, ‘Rain.’ Could you introduce it for us?”

Self-consciously, Olivia spoke to the camera in English: “Here’s Olivia, with ‘Rain.’” And the PV came on the screen on one side of the studio stage. Olivia took this opportunity to talk privately with Teppei-san, while the rest of us watched the PV, which is, indeed, wonderful. The song has a soaring pop melody over rock guitar, and in the PV, Olivia and her band perform in a sound stage under an ever-changing kaleidoscopic light show. While the PV was playing, studio staff brought out a number of interesting objects and placed them on the pink, fluffy table.

When it was over, Teppei-san said, “Wow, that was a great PV. Was it difficult to make?”

“Actually, it was really fun,” Olivia answered. “I was wearing 9cm heels, but it was like it didn’t matter, I was dancing around all over the place.”

“Did you put that kaleidoscope effect in later.”

“Yeah, they did that in post-production. We just filmed it all normally and then they added the kaleidoscope stuff in.”

“And I see that you’ve brought in your own personal kaleidoscope collection to show us,” Teppei-san remarked, gesturing to some of the objects on the table.

“Yes,” said Olivia, “I love kaleidoscopes, they’re so beautiful and interesting, I could stare at them for hours.”

“May I look?” Teppei-san asked. Of course he could look. He admired and exclaimed over each kaleidoscope in turn, as Olivia explained the unique features of each one. There was one that contained liquid, and thus its images appeared to float dreamily into new configurations. There was a tiny, tiny one by a Japanese maker through which the real world was partially visible. There was one with flashing lights inside that looked “like a dance party,” according to Teppei. And there was Olivia’s favorite, a handmade glass one with an eyehole shaped like an eye. We all knew what the kaleidoscopes looked like inside, because Teppei-san had an ace up his sleeve: a miniscule camera that he held up to the eyepiece of each kaleidoscope. The camera projected its image on the studio screen that was visible to all.

“So where do you get these things?” Teppei asked. “Are they expensive?”

“Yes, they’re very expensive,” said Olivia. “There’s this shop in Azabu-juuban, and they have all kinds of kaleidoscopes—huge ones, tiny ones…some of the ones there are really, really expensive. I got that handmade glass one there—it’s my favorite.”

“How much was that?”

“Um, it was 120000 yen.”

“120000 yen, wow!”

“Yeah, it was soo expensive, and you know, I’m not really the type of person who buys stuff that expensive all the time. But the first time I went to that shop, I was in there for hours, looking at all the kaleidoscopes, and when I went home, I could still see the kaleidoscopic images in front of my eyes for hours afterward. And you know, I’m a very creative, artistic person (the audience all laughed at this.) So I thought well, this would probably be good for my creative consciousness! So I went back and bought that glass one.”

“Wow, kaleidoscopes…that would be a great birthday present for a girl, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, it would. And you know, you can make your own, too. You can buy a kit for about 3000 yen, and you can paint the outside however you like, and you can put whatever you like inside, too.”

“Wow, I’ll have to try that!” Teppei said. Perhaps it was just his television personality, but he looked very impressed. “Anyway, what else do I see here on the table?”

“Oh,” said Olivia, “These are things that I made. I like to make crafts a lot. So many of my clothes are things I only wear once, so when I’m done with them, I cut them up and make them into decorations. Most of these are hair ornaments, see?” She modeled one. They were all large and ruffled. Some of them were printed with her own drawings, and others had miniature animals and people attached to them. Teppei-san took a shine to one with a small crew of miniature animals atop a large ruffle.

“Can I wear this?” he asked, trying to affix it to his Mohawk. For a moment, we thought it wouldn’t go on, but somehow, he managed it. “Oh man, I’m not sure this works on me,” he said. “I’m worried it’s going to fall off. But it’s cool anyway.” He preened for the camera.

“Now, as the last part of our program today, you say you have a special ‘Trinka’ to show us? What is it?”

“It’s this,” Olivia said proudly, pointing. “This is my toy piano. I love playing it, I love the sound it makes, and recently, I’ve been playing it onstage at lives. It’s also on the recording for the new album.” The toy piano was pure white and shiny, with its own little white bench.

“Oh wow,” Teppei-san said. “When did you start using that at lives?”

“I think it was about two years ago…no, more like one year ago,” Olivia said.

“Well, would you be willing to play something for us now?”

“Okay,” said Olivia. “But I’m nervous.” Slowly, she went over to the tiny piano, pulled out the bench, and sat down, neatly tucking her legs underneath. Carefully, she spread out a tiny music book on top of the piano.

“Oh that’s so cute!” Teppei-san said. “You made that yourself?”

“Yes, I did,” Olivia answered.

“Now won’t you play for us?”

“Okay,” said Olivia, “Here goes. This is my song, ‘Trinka Trinka.’” She began to play.

“Oh wow, it sounds cute, too!” exclaimed Teppei-san, and then Olivia began to sing over the tinkling notes. She sang one verse and chorus and then stopped. The new album will surely be interesting and unique.

“Whew!” she said after a pause. “I did it!”

“Thank you so much for playing for us!” said Teppei-san. “I can’t wait to hear the album!”

“Yes, and I’ve got a live planned in October, and I’ll be playing this piano then, too, so everyone please come!”

“Well, that’s all the time we have, folks! Thank you so much for coming, and let’s all thank Miss Olivia! You’re watching MTV-Harajuku, and this is Teppei, signing off, till next time!” Up came the music and down went the lights, and off stage went Olivia and Teppei. Leaving, the audience still looked slightly glazed, but what a fun interview, and how special to be able to see it in person. If you love Olivia, too, I’m sure you’ll be eagerly awaiting the new album. And if you haven’t heard her music yet, it’s time to give her a try. She’s not your average girl, and not your average singer. She has trinka trinka, but she’s got depth, too.
 

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★★★★★