Sigh Frontman "I Hate 99 Percent Of The World"

MTV.com reports: Mirai Kawashima, the frontman for Japanese experimental black-metal band SIGH, is pissed. He’s not mad that the band’s U.S. dates with MAYHEM were canceled when MAYHEM drummer Hellhammer broke his hand, or that SIGH’s U.S. headlining shows were nixed because they were improperly booked. And he’s not even upset that SIGH’s seventh studio album, Hangman’s Hymn — one of the most innovative, unusual and brilliantly assembled extreme-metal discs this year — will be dwarfed in sales by some upcoming release by the next metalcore flavor of the month. No, Kawashima’s rage has more to do with his generalized disgust for the values and beliefs of modern man.

“I hate 99 percent of the people on this earth,” he said in a soft voice. “I hate weak people who have to cling to fairy tales like religion, and I hate greedy people that have nothing more than making money in their head. I just want all of them to die.”

Well, that accounts for the rage on Hangman’s Hymn, but not the artistry. Since their first album, 1993’s Scorn Defeat, SIGH have incorporated jazz twists, psychedelic interludes and orchestral flourishes into their songs. Hangman’s Hymn, which was largely influenced by Wagner, Weber and Mozart, is less jarring, but it’s even more creative. The tempos of songs like “Inked in Blood” and “Death With Dishonor” are still fast enough to trip up a NASCAR champion, but the way they’re constructed — by incorporating violins, cellos, horns, bells, keyboard and choirs — is more akin to classical opera than high-rise demolition.

“Good opera is so emotional and powerful,” Kawashima said. “And that’s what I was inspired by. A lot of black-metal bands use keyboards and strings for embellishments. But the keyboard parts and orchestration on Hangman’s Hymn are not embellishments. They are as important to the songs as the guitars, bass and drums. So even though it’s very metal, you can say it’s pretty much classical music as well.”

Like many operas, Hangman’s Hymn is divided into three acts. There’s no distinct story line, but each act represents a different set of ideas as presented through symbolic references to heaven, hell, earth and death.

“Act one and two is about the greed of humanity on this planet,” Kawashima said. “And act three is about destruction and images of burning like an inferno. Then, at the end of act three, there’s an image of heaven in the song ‘In Paradisum‘ and lots of Latin chanting to create the image of the funeral. I didn’t want to have a plot because it’s more powerful to create strong images.”

As multifaceted as Hangman’s Hymn is, Kawashima said it was the easiest SIGH album to write so far. On past releases, he has painstakingly written, arranged, recorded, re-written, re-recorded and rearranged for months on end. This time, however, the songs practically created themselves and there was no shortage of ideas. Three months after he started writing, he was done.

“I was just driven over a very short amount of time and I came up with many ideas in that time,” he said. “I think it happened so fast because I had such a clear vision of the concept from the very beginning.”

Kawashima, who works on video game and TV music when he’s not writing for SIGH, created 70 percent of the music for Hangman’s Hymn before inviting his bandmates Shinichi Ishikawa (guitar), Satoshi Fujinami (bass) and Junichi Harashima (drums) to add their input. After that, the entire album was recorded quickly, scheduled for release and came out June 12.

As talented and prolific as Kawashima is, he is unable to support himself strictly with his music. So, in the morning, he heads downtown to work at a Japanese telecommunications company, then works on his sinister songs at night.

“I actually think it’s good to have a day job because I don’t have to live on music, and that lets me do anything I want musically,” he concluded. “Of course, it would be great if I could live just on my music, doing something I like, but it’s very hard. If you live in Japan, it’s not easy to tour the U.S. or Europe. So having a day job and a band is the best thing.”