Mei Ehara
All About McGuffin
Kakubarhythm
All About McGuffin is heavily influenced by Ehara’s experience opening for Faye Webster on her US tour earlier this year. Working with different sound engineers in different venues gave her new ideas about sound mixing. A tour of the anime platform Crunchyroll showed her how much depth can be added to a scene just by the way the sounds are mixed. When she was done with the tour, she decided the demos for her third album were good enough and set about giving the austere tracks the most life she could in the mix.
Mei Ehara is a Japanese musician, film maker, and editor of the literary magazine Sono. The title of her third album refers to a device in film where an element of the story seems important, but is ultimately meaningless. It’s hard for me to tell how this concept plays out on the album, since it’s sung entirely in Japanese. Obviously, there are things I’m missing.
Listening to the songs as just pure sound is rewarding enough. The songs are a delicate blending of Japanese folk melodies, indie rock, and ambient. Using her Cruchyroll inspiration, the spare instrumentation is given room to breathe. It may sound simple, but the tunes are mesmerizing. I can imagine these songs inhabiting a pastel landscape with cotton-candy clouds floating overhead, McGuffin offering a relaxing escape from the world.
