Make Believe Mailer #132: White Girl
Winter Has Arrived
White Girl arrived after several months where my life was dominated by Vocaloid. The Red Bull Music Academy was coming to Tokyo in late 2014, and the accompanying music editorial site needed articles on Japanese music. I truly forget how it came together, but I had the chance to write about Hatsune Miku and the singing-synthesizer software she represented.
I interviewed artists who used Vocaloid software. I talked with professors who developed synthesized singing. I chatted with the guy at Yamaha who spearheaded the whole shebang. I sat in on a voice recording session, where women took turns saying single syllables over and over again. I went to Vocaloid parties galore.
By the time the story was published in November 2014, my brain had been rewired by Hatsune Miku. About a month later, Tokyo electronic artist mus.hiba released his debut album White Girl, utilizing similar singing-synthesizer technology, but approaching it from an entirely different angle than what I’d heard nearly nonstop for the weeks prior.
It sounded nothing like anything I’d heard before. A decade on, it still does.
Streaming link here, but you should really buy it
White Girl turned ten this week, on Dec. 10. It’s never been canonized by any major music publication trying to make sense of the 2010s, and has always been more of an online cult favorite, at best. Yet it’s one of the most dazzling albums of the decade, both in how it offered a peak at the singing-synthesizer-rich future ahead of it and also purely in how it sounds.
Producer mus.hiba first popped up in 2012 with the woozy “Magical Fizzy Drink,” included in his eventual debut album. The song was far closer to the bedroom fever dreams of chillwave or witch house than anything I’d associate with the contemporary Vocaloid scene. The latter conjured up images of electro-pop bouncers and rock dashes, enjoyable and interesting in their own right but always fast. Vocaloid and its assorted corners were always uptempo in my mind, moving at the speed of the internet.
Yet “Magical Fizzy Drink” was slower and headier. The synths swirl even as a piano emerges and a beat helps nudges everything along. Still, everything turns near ambient at points. Drifting through it all is a synthesized voice, more ethereal detail than something demanding attention in the way other creators treat Hatsune Miku. This vocal ripples and fades, added texture rather than a digi diva commanding attention. There’s a very real chance I listened to “Magical Fizzy Drink” on loop in winter of 2012 after I caught a bad cold, it’s head rush made all the more effective by my own zonked out state.
Part of that effect came from the character singing those words. mus.hiba used an Utau — a fan-made Vocaloid, often free to use from online — named Yufu Sekka. “I always try to include the character's theme in the song," mus.hiba told me when I interviewed him in 2014. "I'm always thinking about her image within the song. With Yufu, that includes snow, the winter, being cold." A glance at her appearance makes that clear, with the grey-haired avatar perpetually sporting a coat and gloves. It’s something that tends to influence the bulk of songs featuring her whispery voice.
Yet nobody found a way to make it work as wonderfully as mus.hiba did, using her winter personality to create music both enveloping and unsettling.
A snowstorm can be among the most unnerving natural phenomena. I didn’t experience one before I moved to Chicago for college, having spent the previous 18 years of my life in a California desert where a light dusting was enough to have school cancelled. Yet when I did, I saw how the outside world gradually vanished under a blanket of flurries until nothing appeared to be visible. Who knows what’s happening out there in a virtual blackout, but it sure looks beautiful.
It’s that same creeping feeling underneath something gorgeous that makes White Girl such an absorbing listen. mus.hiba’s commitment to the deep-winter atmosphere his preferred singing-synthesizer avatar inspired result in an appropriately icy set, where songs unfold slowly and prettiness conceals something chilly. The bell chimes and singing on “Slow Snow” play out against synth drones and vocal samples moving at a frozen pace. “Ring” opens with one of the prettiest melodies on the album only to be turned fever-dream by repetition and the machine-beat pushing it forward. The lurching “Hitori” features some of the lushest synth patterns here…but joined by heavy breathing and distorted vocals, which erase any of the glitz in favor of something making hairs on one’s arm stand up.
White Girl doesn’t even have to be subtle about it. “Darkness” starts soft as snow with cascading melodies and Sekka occupying a role as close to traditional singer as she comes on the album. Yet then the beat skitters more, the bass intensifies and the song plunges into a sonic avalanche of noise, with those once calming melodies trying to cut through the mess. “Magical Fizzy Drink” sounds as disorienting as ever, while the seven-minute-plus centerpiece “Yuki” features both the prettiest and most disorienting moments of the whole album, often times intersecting with one another.
Part of the appeal is timing. Like city-pop-meets-vaporwave idols Especia’s Gusto from the same year, White Girl could only exist at this moment, when the trends it helped connect were at perfect equilibrium. Vocaloid music spurred a massive online community spilling over into the physical world, but in 2014 it was still all about the spectacle of Miku rather than the songs from a mainstream perspective. Soundcloud was enjoying its golden period of being a harbor for electronic experimentation, while netlabels were cresting1. mus.hiba connected with all three, but offered a different perspective.
“I was influenced by chillwave artists such as Slow Magic, Sun Glitters and Taquwami, and the Los Angeles beat scene," he told me ahead of White Girl’s release. "When I started out, there wasn't really anyone using Vocaloid as an instrument in the way I was."
On White Girl, mus.hiba made something that could exist in the cracks of all those worlds — a touch cuddly but mostly cold thanks to the synthesized voice at its center, but deployed over lurching electronic backdrops shaped by the buzzy sounds of internet music, but pitched down. It never settles for what’s expected from any side, instead trying something different, revealing both the potential that Vocaloid has as a pure instrument but also how much more depth very-online tracks could have.
It’s often gorgeous…but always hiding what’s lurking in the distance over a flurry of synthesizers.
It came out on Orange Milk Records too, get it here.
For a bit there, mus.hiba was getting attention from artists around the world. He’s almost certainly best known as a guest on British artist bo en’s beloved internet album pale machine, where the familiar whisper-sing of Sekka sounds a touch more chipper while mus.hiba himself offers some disorienting touches on “Winter Valentine.” He would go on to work with human vocalists too, most notably Abigail Press after White Girl.
Then he…sorta vanished. Talking with mus.hiba back in 2014, it was very clear he was a low-key and often shy guy, a blue-collar dude coming from the hardcore scene who loved creating Vocaloid music once he clocked out. After a few years, mus.hiba just stopped posting, without much of a trace. He emerged earlier this year to share some new tracks on Soundcloud, but remains seemingly content to be off the radar.
All good, especially given the legacy he left behind with White Girl. The predictable bit is mus.hiba hinted at the way Vocaloid would be transformed in the ten years ahead as primarily a textural element, to the point where today some of the biggest Vocaloid hits are frantic or fragmented. He also offered a preview of a younger generation where the software was commonplace — back in the early 2010s, Hatsune Miku certainly crossed over to other indie electronic scenes, but Vocaloid still felt like its own planet compared to everything else…in much the same way netlabels and simply the community of people uploading work to Soundcloud was. Now, it’s far more common, with hyperpop rappers are leaning into Miku’s world.
Really though, trying to tie mus.hiba to future developments isn’t necessary, because the legacy is White Girl itself. The very idea of using singing-synthesizer technology in a different way — as a texture, as something that could be slowly moving rather than hyper — was exciting in theory, and that he approached it in to create a dizzying electronic album that feels like being caught up in a blizzard is even better. It’s a snapshot of a specific time, but also a full-length that still thrills…and chills…ten years later, with nothing coming close to it.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
Bluesky — @mbmelodies.bsky.social
Follow the Best Of 2024 Spotify Playlist here!
To the point where I wrote that Pitchfork feature…ten years ago, published days before this album came out.