In this work, built around a new song by Phantom Siita, I sought to foreground the group’s aesthetic beauty and darkness while using Le Fanu’s vampire tale Carmilla as a motif, creating a world that unfolds like a Gothic short film. I had long thought that I wanted to make a vampire film at least once in my lifetime, and when I saw “Carmilla” written in a note from producer Ado, I was extremely excited. Among films based on Carmilla, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr is one of my all-time favorites, and throughout this production I also kept thinking about the ashen, anemic pallor of Isabelle Adjani and Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, another vampire film. The setting is an old mansion that appears on a night of the full moon. Through the process of the girl Heine wandering into the mansion and getting swept up in the Phantom Siita’s—vampires’—festival, the film hints at an unnameable emotional wavering that cannot be clearly defined as romance, dependence, or illness. Visually, while drawing on European Gothic sensibilities and the decadent atmosphere of filmmakers such as Daniel Schmid, I aimed for a textured expression that combines live action and analog collage to depict “illness ≠ love.” That emotion is strictly not equal; here, I do not present it in an easy-to-understand way as “love is an illness.” By portraying, on the same plane, emotions that cannot be labeled—“I love you, I’m drawn to you, I want to hold on to you but I don’t want to, I want to run away, I want to live, I want to die, and I don’t want to die either”—alongside a body that grows weaker and more exhausted, I tried to express that this ungraspable feeling is real. As for the collage, rather than shooting against a green screen, we filmed in a studio filled with vintage props and similar items. Because the relationship between space and the people within it was necessary, and because collage needed to draw out that magnetic field in order to create a distortion of reality, I have lately tried to avoid using green screen as much as possible. By dismantling those elements, I wanted to portray a blurred consciousness and memory shaped by the dislocation of time and space. As for the collage method itself, we would print out live-action frames that had been shot and create animation while rearranging them, and even before shooting there were times when fragments of blurred consciousness, the mansion, or parts of scenes were assembled into analog collages.

Based on the imagery evoked by the title and lyrics, as well as the band’s situation in 2024, we set the theme as “resonance and collision of wavelengths.” As reference points, we drew on Guillaume Apollinaire’s The Magician Who Decays and “Holography Hymn” from Tatsuhiko Shibusawa’s The Sun King and the Moon King to build the world of the piece. To bring the collage created on a flat surface into the real location, we produced the art direction as physical set pieces. With the band’s long-established formation having changed, while preserving the empty space at the center, we sought to honor the band’s intention, and we depicted the camera dolly moving side to side as literal gods of thunder and wind. We also used the set door to suggest that this place is connected to somewhere else. The cut tearing open into a transition likewise carried the intention of representing another place elsewhere.

This music video features Ms. Hanazawa reacting as she is swept up by several motifs she has portrayed up to now. The three-dimensional physical motifs that appear in the video were created by painter Reo Sato.

“Feel free to do anything as long as it’s not obscene.” With that request, I made sure the world of the music and the poem, its mood, and its forms would become as strange and disjointed as possible. The references I drew on were works that feel feverish and nightmarish to watch, such as Stephen King’s The Devil Truck, Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy, and Ken Russell’s Gothic. Above all, I wanted to express the absurdity of a gigantic thing racing at full speed, and the image of something that crosses some kind of limit or is mixed together until it turns into an uncanny form. If you trace the history of Gothic, from the Christian view of life and death to the monsters like gargoyles placed on church Gothic architecture, there is a sense of life and death repeating like summer and winter. I am always drawn to the coexistence of ambivalent things. The zombie in the passenger seat is always embodying the ambivalent state of life and death. Though dead, he wears a T-shirt that says “flesh and blood,” or gets an IV drip, as if he refuses to accept death. The method is my usual collage, but it is difficult to create something without straying from the world I have set up. The shape of the truck, on which I put special emphasis, also has to maintain a certain level of consistency from the front, the diagonal, and the side in order to connect properly. A lack of consistency is in a sense an inherent quality of collage, but this nauseating lack of balance was the most exciting and enjoyable part of my recent work.

Theme set as “music as an asylum (sanctuary / free domain).” The staff notation in the lyrics (music) was interpreted as an asylum, a free domain. In the lyrics, music itself is called upon as something whose inherent joy one is made to notice, and it is sung that surrendering oneself to it is an ordinary, insignificant act. It also sounded like an antithesis to the recent situation (the COVID-19 pandemic), which can even create the illusion that there are restrictions on enjoying music. But in reality, there are no such restrictions on music itself. For both its creators and its listeners, it has always been free, inviolable, a sanctuary, and sometimes a refuge. Within that, the aim was to express through collage and an allegorical story the process of simply enjoying music with curiosity. “An asylum, or asylum (German: Asyl, French: asile, English: asylum), is a historical and social concept referring to a special area also called a ‘sanctuary,’ ‘free domain,’ ‘refuge,’ or ‘place without ties.’ Its etymology lies in the Greek word ‘ἄσυλον’ (meaning a place that cannot be violated, a sacred place). In concrete terms, it generally refers to an area beyond the reach of governing power.” - Wikipedia “A place where criminals, slaves, and others flee to escape severe harm or retaliation and receive protection. The term derives from the Greek asylos (unharmed, inviolable, sacred). In premodern times, before the state’s power to punish had been organized and systematized, it was a制度 seen in most societies. Originally, this system was based on a primitive religious belief that harming (taking revenge on) someone who had entered a sanctuary was a blasphemy against the gods. In ancient Greece, temples were regarded as places of protection for abused slaves, criminals, and debtors, and it was considered a religious offense to retrieve or punish those who had fled to a temple and come under divine protection.” - Kotobank What I focused on in this work was not only using live-action cuts, but also frequently cutting by motif in order to blur the boundaries of the domain.

Theme: “Joy, anger, sorrow, and delight / twists and turns, and life goes on.” Life is full of all kinds of emotions and many twists and turns. Through it all, time keeps moving forward, leading toward the future. I wanted to depict that journey as a drive, introducing a variety of motifs through collage and tracing the path all the way to space. First, I drew a map and structured the piece as if traveling through those places. The map used as the foundation shows the route from my parents’ home to downtown Hiroshima, but places with special meaning for Taiking, such as Enoshima, also appear. As this is meant to evoke a road movie, the piece also draws heavily on films by Wim Wenders.

Theme: “From Emptiness to Shedding”. The aim was to depict, through collage, a nocturnal inner landscape that begins to reveal a strange beauty within its seemingly plain appearance. I set up the following plot, and this work is meant to visualize only the middle section of it. “After a recent heartbreak, the room and my state of mind feel empty, like an empty box. After that, I wander from place to place in a daze. Everything I see looks hollow. Even when something is moving, it is blurry and hard to make out. I can’t even keep up with it visually. The world appears as an empty box, a meaningless, flavorless void, yet it is accompanied by a suffocating feeling, as if being underwater. But little by little, all of this begins to shimmer. My heart is filled with euphoria, and the inner landscape is completely transformed.”

In the fall of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic began, this work was created to express, in line with the song’s content, the intention of wanting to meet in person while being in separate spaces, through its filming and presentation.

Description: Expressing the emptiness and confusion brought about by interpersonal relationships, as well as positive feelings, and the shifting nature of such emotions. A single word or a small gesture from oneself or others can become a source of regret, or can lift one’s spirits; people often spend their days in conflict, without a clear answer. This ambiguity, this state in which thoughts and feelings cannot be clearly put into words, was collaged together. By mainly juxtaposing the outer edges of cut-out motifs, roughly trimmed spaces, and abstract motifs cut out without regard for boundaries, the work portrays the wandering of the mind.

Conceptually, it is an antithesis to the sense of confinement and fixed ideas that living things and phenomena must be reduced to symbols. Reality in our lives often contains many incomprehensible, inexplicable things, and everyone experiences this. I aimed to depict the lived-in feel of a collage world without a protagonist, with scenes that may or may not connect to one another, and a surrealistic expression in which people and objects exist in a fragmented world while breaking free of symbols and transforming. For painting, I mainly referred to Hieronymus Bosch and Bruegel; for film, Leos Carax, Sergei Parajanov, and Luis Buñuel. Originally, this piece of music itself was composed by NISHINA specifically for a GMO CLICK Securities commercial, and since it was inspired by the rough collage I was creating for that commercial, I think it became a work with a very strong affinity.

Commentary: Before COVID, even a few years earlier, around the time when people had become nervously hypersensitive in times of emergency, there was already a sense of suffocation, as if only things that were useful or meaningful were being demanded, and it felt as though that atmosphere had been cultivated after COVID began. As we were forced to relearn that no one had knowledge of this unknown virus, and that people held different ideas and opinions about how to deal with it, I imagined a sense of futility and of coexisting with various forms of life, drawn from the parallel between having no choice but to barricade ourselves in and the fact that everything is always passing. The track “The FOG” itself is by John Carpenter, but I think it also referenced films such as Fitzcarraldo, Straw Dogs, and The Wages of Fear.

I aimed to express encounters with others and growth, as the childlike and adult sides within a person shift back and forth. Because I am also close with the band members, I created this work while imagining their feelings about childbirth and their children. The way parts of the grown figure change from one body part to another is a depiction of how human beings themselves change and remain ambiguous.

A story of a man who, after enduring countless torments of hell, comes to possess himself. I aimed to depict universality that feels real to myself and to Velladon by projecting it onto Trinitarian thought and Kafkaesque absurdity. The work was created while evoking mythology and history around the Roman Empire. The black figure is Y, the silver figure is N. Y and N are the same person, and by driving one of them to the extreme, the other breaks free of absurdity and comes to possess himself as one being. Compared with my most recent works, the darkness of the story and the worldview express my direction much more purely.

Color emerges through the effects of light and shadow. As the stage expanded from small-scale activities to a larger platform, I likened the conflicted feelings—being manipulated by the adults around them—to the diverging light and shadow, and to the situations within the constructed collage. While depicting the past that one does not want to deny, and the longing for a future that was originally expected, I aimed to express how the people around them and the self gradually come together, using the contrast between the front stage (the dazzling stage) and the back stage (the dark street corner) to portray the future that will become visible even more from here on. The stage was actually handmade in an analog format as a box of roughly 300 mm in circumference, and the collage was attached to that three-dimensional form. In particular, apart from the chorus, I paid close attention to which direction yama is moving toward within the frame, and to what the shadows and the stones are. Because the theme is introspective, the influence of German films from the 1920s to 1930s (German Expressionism) is strongly reflected.

Created a video as a new landmark/concept icon for FLAGS. Under the theme of “SHINJUKU REMIX,” the aim was to depict FLAGS as a symbol of the Shinjuku cityscape.

The aim was to create a direction that reverses the seemingly negative image of meeting through mistakes and presents it in a pop and positive way. Mistakes and errors are something everyone makes in life, and whether a judgment made at the time is right or wrong depends on the surrounding circumstances and the timing. In reality, when something happens, there is a time lag before you can take it in and make sense of it. In the midst of that, people often go through situations that seem inexplicable and cannot be clearly judged as right or wrong. By rolling along and falling like that, we directly expressed the image of “this is life, and yet there is something compelling about it, and it’s not all bad,” in sync with the lyrics. Being unable to resist and getting totally absorbed in something is neither justice nor evil, but a helplessly human side of us; it can be a mistake, or it can be desire. From there, the first image that came to mind was “missing an aerial trick in a circus.” Also, since a circus is on tour, I had a slight image in mind of messy romantic entanglements developing among the performers during that time. Also, in terms of falling from heaven to earth, and because this was pop music x hip-hop, the first things that came to mind were Wenders’ Wings of Desire and American pop art, so I referenced those. The quotation of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks comes not only from the fact that the title is Night Owls (this work is the theme song for the TV anime Yofukashi no Uta), but also because it is frequently quoted in Wenders’ works. I also referenced the image of pop-art-style silkscreen prints and the imagery of Romare Bearden. In addition, when considering Creepy Nuts, I was mindful of their broad appeal, especially their exposure on variety shows, so the roulette was inspired by Jungle TV Tamori no Hōsoku, and the confession scene was inspired by Ore-tachi Hyokin-zoku.