Indie Spotlight: 小南泰葉 (Kominami Yasuha)
Hi. I'm Yasuha Kominami. I live in Hyogo next to Osaka. It's really really country side. I'm the Japanese girl who loves cats and chocolates and Lolita clothes. I love everyone's birthday. But my lucky number is 666! I took the number for my car's number plate! hahaha I'm a biiiiiiiiig fan of horror movies. I write songs and I hope you like them and I love you for looking at it. xoxo
Kominami lists Janis Joplin and Shiina Ringo as major influences and Bjork and Yura Yura Teikoku as a couple of her favorite artists. Although her style carries some of the dark mood and sense of fantasy inherent in Shiina Ringo and Bjork's music. at this point Kominami's compositions lack the creativity and soulful maturity of her contemporaries. Both her folk and "j-rock" songs have a generic pop quality that fails to elevate above the myriad cookie cutter tunes that populate the opening and ending themes of typical anime shows. Her music is definitely far from bullocks but you get the sense you've heard the same "ish" before. Having said that pretty well everything else about her absolutely RULES!
Although the music may not instantly grab you, each and every one of her PVs is chock full of great imagery that commands attention. Her interest in horror movies, fantasy and the macabre is clearly evident in each of the videos.
^^ The scene @ 2:41 comes out of nowhere.
She has this crazy hand gesture she does whenever she poses for a photo. At first I thought she simply f*cked up the "rock on!" sign but it appears she created her own gangsta hand signal:
For the life of me I can't manage to curl my pinky while keeping the ring finger straight. She is clearly taunting me in each of these photos.
Kominami also makes nice homemade videos:
Um... Kominami? The pharmacist just called and said you need to get your sanity juice prescription refilled: ^^ This video is so nutty especially with the unexpected use of sound effects at the beginning.
However, the following home video takes the cake as the funniest sh*t I've seen on youtube in quite a while:
That is some ridiculously thick accented Kansai-ben. It takes her friend a good 10 seconds to rip apart the paper birthday sash. The cameraman's reaction to Kominami's cake faceplant is priceless and barely 5 seconds pass after Kominami removes her skull from the cake and her friend has practically devoured half of it with a spoon.
Her artwork is rather abstract, warped and cool:
She makes elaborate "one-of-a-kind" stick-figure dolls which she presumably sells at shows:
Her favorite movie is リリイ・シュシュのすべて (All About Lily Chou-Chou). Mine too. And she doesn't smoke cigarettes. (which is pretty damn rare for female musicians in Japan).
Even though I'm not completely enamored by her music everything else about her kicks so much ass that I'm really looking forward to seeing her perform @ Shibuya LUSH on Dec 23 with viridian and N'夙川ボーイズ