Interviews 6

Interviews 6. [This is me wittering about my U.S. immigration travails, and about an electronic music duo that I was half of, named Apricot Feline. The two of us did record two or three demo tracks in small recording-studios, but it never quite got off the ground because the other half of it, my friend Shigar, had to go back to live in Japan because of his own immigration travails. He’d have been the half with the talents to write and play the actual music. Since I lacked all such skills, my own contribution would have been more of the floating-about-on-stage variety, I suppose, though the specifics of this never quite had time to become clear. Fortunately the couple of vocals of mine that we recorded did manage to hit the right notes, and if you squint a bit then they even sound kind of halfway decent—though I’m sure this was partly because I was well “tweaked in the mix”. So that’s the somewhat abridged history of Apricot Feline: a fey and lovely little electronic pop duo that was never quite destined to come properly into existence, and for me a unique and very self-contained chapter-ette that I hold in affectionate memory.] (1’21”)

The immigration thing is a little bit more of a hassle, potentially, because I’m always here on a kind of thread, immigration-wise. I’ve had to jump through various burning hoops to stay here—complicated, boring immigration law requirements. And I think that this coming year 1998 I’ll be able to renew my visa for two more years, to last until the end of January 2001. But what happens then, I don’t know.
(See video here.)

And that scenario is one of the engines that propels me to keep sending the headshots out, keep going in front of that camera, keep developing a model’s portfolio, keep—oh, the latest lunatic endeavour that promises a bit of fun is … Apricot Feline is the name of a new dynamic pop duo, a pop music duo comprising me and my friend Shigar. He’s come to me and he’s used me as his backing singer and also sometimes lead singer on a demo tape—recordings of his music. Which is fine, it’s fun, it’s great, it’s got a sort of Japanese/Asian flavour […], so we’ll be a fey little pop duo at some point, no doubt! Well, we are already—it’s just that we haven’t really performed at all yet. So that’s the latest thing to add to the other endeavours. But that just sort of came at me and fell into my lap somehow, so I decided to go with it.

 

(This video is also on Vimeo and YouTube.)