Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, heroic challenger to male authority, has stamped her identity on Western culture over millennia, the subject of ancient Greek tragedy and French drama, European operas and world cinema. In Sophocles’s play, she ends up hanging herself rather than being walled up alive in a tomb. Eiko Ishibashi’s latest album may share a name with the tragic heroine, but there’s no melodrama here. The prevailing mood of Antigone is a stalling world nudged by invisible forces off its axis, beginning its slow spin into decay or disaster. Which makes it a pertinent listen for the wobbly historical moment we find ourselves in.
The sleeve art sets the tone perfectly. Computer generated blobs and geometric solids loom above Taro Mizutani’s monochrome land- and cityscapes. They are like stills from an alien disaster movie, where an unimaginably advanced civilisation arrives in unfamiliar, gigantic craft and floats, menacingly and soundlessly, above our home planet, making us feel suddenly very, very small.
With Antigone, Ishibashi’s music has reached an astonishing level of maturity – at the level of tone, texture and text. The creative partnership she has achieved with the mercurial Jim O’Rourke, since they met over 15 years ago, continues to pay wonderful dividends. They share an interest in film soundtracks by Jack Nitzsche, Lynch and Badalamenti, and Ennio Morricone. And like O’Rourke she is also the master of numerous instruments – from drums and keyboards to composition and electronics. The palette of her band – a mix of Japanese stalwarts and a few US and European emigres – is similar to the one on her soundtracks to the films of Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car (2021) and Evil Does Not Exist (2024). Eiko herself sings and plays keyboards, including a Fender Rhodes. Her chord and key changes make unexpected offramps and u-turns; her melody lines are artificially sweetened – a grin without a cat. She has expressed her admiration for films where what you see in the frame seems disconnected or belied by what you hear on the soundtrack. David Lynch is one example, and tracks on Antigone like “The Model” and “Nothing As” seem to have traces of Julee Cruise’s still-incredible, Twin Peaks-related album Floating Into the Night identifiable in their DNA. Eiko sings in a similar register to Cruise, and her compositions are similarly treacherous. Sickly-sweet cocktails with a nasty spike at the bottom of the glass.
The presence of Norwegian accordionist Kalle Moberg lends two tracks a continental European air, or a tinge of Latin saudade. Elsewhere there is a small string section, saxophones, deployed where needed. O’Rourke plays the Bass VI, a rare Fender guitar with six low-end strings. Arranged with a beautifully light touch, the eight tracks bob like soap bubbles, sparkling with as many rainbow colours. Eiko mostly sings in Japanese, but the lyrics – helpfully printed inside the package – tell other stories. In the opener, “October”, a watcher in a control tower observes an aircraft, “a pale baby in an empty sunset’s hold”, slipping out of the sky towards a tall skyline. A ‘disaster’ is mentioned, ashes falling and blood, but that is as much as we get. This is Eiko’s method – suggestion, inference, impressionistic lines freighted with tantalising specifics. Songwriting as speculative fiction. The post-disaster setting of “Coma” is “covered with ashes”. It evokes a traumatised “survivor in Eden”, forced to stay within a grid watched by security cameras. The universe of this music includes security cameras, hospital gurneys, fractal patterns, cocaine and thongs, air ionizers. There are repeated references to defying gravity, and to graveyards. In “The Model”, a digitally distorted voice reads (the sleevenotes tell us) a passage from Michel Foucault’s The Politics Of Health In The Eighteenth Century. Where that fits into the song’s conceptual framework, which may have something to do with pandemics and the medical market, is hard to identify, as the words are sadly inaudible.
Still, Antigone is one of the most intelligent, beautiful and entrancing albums you’re likely to hear all year: a delivery system for a collection of lyrical conundrums and end-time pastel-blues. Even though the mythic heroine’s persona is difficult to locate within the final song, “Antigone”, it’s a gorgeous piece of chamber pop, blurry with melancholy, drifting across datelines up to the edge of outer space, floating inexorably into the night.
