By Keith Walsh
There’s never been a record like the debut album from Les Sewing Sisters. Based in Los Angeles, Japanese expatriates Lun*na Menoh and Saori Mitome deliver a unique pop experience based in musique concrète that’s strongly reminiscent of Kraftwerk. Aside from the vocals, the sounds on the album are generated entirely from sewing machines and processed in various ways.
Expert production by Adam Lee Miller of Detroit’s ADULT. and mastering by Rafael Anton give the set a sonic sheen that lends it immediate credence as masterpiece of avant-garde minimalism. Miller’s ADULT. is based in synthpop, while Anton’s credits include minimalist Terry Riley and eclectic composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. Both legacies are apparent here, and while the form of the album is arguably commercial, it encompasses a sound that is equal parts industrial music, dance music and work song.
Themes include the garment industry, love gone wrong and gender politics, wrapped up in a sonic palette that flirts with commerciality. This commerciality is by design, says composer/vocalist Lun*na Menoh.
“I always like the concept of a ‘pop’ band,” Menoh told me, “because a pop band is more reachable than an experimental band. I want to set the band concept, because people will look at me. It’s the same thing as a fashion show. It’s not a regular fashion show, but if say ‘fashion show,” people will come, but if I say ‘performance art,’ no one will come.”
Work Song Rhythms
The album is heavily rhythmic, in a new kind of hard electronic way that makes it ideal for the dance floor at the trendiest of clubs. As the sounds generated by a sewing machine are not necessarily pitched, I asked Menoh how challenging it is to get actual melodic tones from these machines.
“Yeah, it’s very hard,” she said. “Because the sound wave of the sewing machine noise is really, really wavy. So it’s really hard to hear a certain noise, even with MIDI technology. So when I get a certain note, I have to chop a lot, and then put it together so it sounds like one note.” Using Garageband, Menoh creates very unique electronic melodies that weave in and out of the songs’ rhythms, which is something she first experimented with for her iconoclastic rendition of Ravel’s “Bolero.”
About the work song nature of the sound of Les Sewing Sisters: both Menoh and Mitome are fashion designers, with years of experience creating costumes and clothing that defy the imagination. The fact that the sounds on the album are generated by sewing machines lends weight to the argument that this is industrial music. Menoh says the work song aspect comes from the sing song nature of the lyrics, and the function that works song has served for centuries.
“I was kind of conscious about work song.” she told me. “The history of the work song is really about physical working, but when they’re thinking of the work song, it makes the physical work more fun, those labors become a rhythm. A lot of construction working singing along, and singing together make the work more smooth, or they forget what the hard work is. Or people sing or move with a march in a rhythm that also makes it like a rhythm, or a feeling of a fight.”
The music works on both an instructive level, with its themes about the toil of labor and many metaphors that link work in the garment industry to personal power relations, as well as avant-garde pop music. My favorites at the moment are “She Sews,” “The Needle Is Damaged,” and “I And My Sewing Machine,” the latter a portrayal of the emotional connections between person and machine that develop during work.
‘Weird Coincidence’
The sewing machine at the center of these mixes holds symbolic value as well, as Menoh explains: “The sewing machine was the first machine to come into the home,” she said. “Well, a woman handles that machine. So I thought that aspect is very, very interesting. Yes. So like historically, that was the first machine, because they didn’t even need electricity to work back then. When, a few years ago, Menoh got inspired to experiment with the sound making possibilities of the sewing machine, she created her revolutionary version of Ravel’s Bolero, by sampling and processing sounds from sewing machines and arranging the layers in Garageband.
“I had a goal,” she said, “that I would like to make a sewing machine song, sewing machine music, through sampling. When I started recording the sewing machine sounds, I was just using a regular vocal mic, that we used for a karaoke machine. And them somebody said ‘oh why don’t you use a contact mic, or why don’t you use a better recording mic?’ People had suggestions, so I just followed each time using a different microphone. And some people said ‘hey, I bought sewing machine sounds from the sound library,’ so I started collecting all the sounds that are pure sewing machine sounds.”
The resulting sound is completely rhythmic, and that’s part of Menoh’s plan – to convey a deep message in the apparent simplicity of dance and pop music. She tells me she is using the familiarity of rhythm and the accessibility of pop music to reach people. “I like danceable (music), because also rhythm driven is really reachable. It’s not on the language it’s on the rhythm, the rhythm is a big concept — to make a noise, a sewing machine , technology, engines, all repetitious sounds, all this is a deep concept that the rhythm itself has. So I wanted to put those rhythms and a danceable a pop concept together.”
This is the true version of Les Sewing Sisters. Prior to experimenting with “Bolero,” Menoh had a group called “The Sewing Sisters.” “Before Bolero,” she explains, “that I call ‘pre Sisters’ now…that is a group using not only sewing noise, just using synthesizers. Just a regular pop band, with a focus on sewing. And I made all the songs about sewing, fashion, and sewing themes. That was I and my friend Tsugumi, she lives in New York.”
By pure coincidence, another of Menoh’s friends, an avant-garde composer, was experimenting with a new way to collect sounds from a sewing machine. “Sam Rowell, she was making a microphone using parts of the sewing machine. It’s a really weird coincidence. We started talking about sewing machines, and she (told me she) used a bobbin, as a part of sewing machine, and just tied lots of wires around the bobbin to create a magnet. So she created a magnet to collect sounds from a sewing machine.” Sounds collected this way appear various times on the album.
During our phone conversation, Menoh’s husband, author Tosh Berman, weighed in on the topic of the commercial accessibility of Les Sewing Sisters. “During our previous interview,” Berman said, “we were talking about musique concrète, right? That’s people like Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, who made compositional pieces, not really melody conscious, but very much a musique concrète medium or style. So what Lun*na does is use the techniques of musique concrète, but in a pop music format.”
To this Menoh adds: “And (because it’s danceable) we can reach people who don’t understand the language — kids to old people. That’s like a rhythmic, very primitive way to reach people. I thought that aspect is very interesting as well.”
Since the formation of Les Sewing Sisters, they have opened for superstar rock band Sparks in Los Angeles, and done a home tour as well. The album is the natural next step. Menoh created the original sounds in her studio in Silverlake, then went to Detroit’s Woodhouse studio to work with producer Adam Lee Miller and record vocals with Mitome.
On July 30th Les Sewing Sisters are hosting a livestream event. Get your tickets here: https://www.momenthouse.com/lessewingsistershometour/lessewingsistershometour
Lun*na Menoh’s World
Les Sewing Sisters On Facebook
Les Sewing Sisters On Bandcamp
ADULT. On Bandcamp
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