Idling with i-fls (listener's guide + interview)
chatting over email with one of my favorite producers
Do you ever feel like you know someone without knowing anything about them? I’ve always felt that way about Japanese producer i-fls. Since 2012, he has released approximately 40 EPs and albums, each one accompanied by cover art that features a pen-sketched portrait of frowning character superimposed on dreamy photography. His music is equally uniform: always instrumental, propelled by soft kick drums, and laden with shimmering synth melodies.
But that’s the full extent of my knowledge. The work is raw, anonymous and off-the-cuff, as if it were made for the creator’s eyes only. Maybe I just dig the voyeuristic thrill of assuming someone else’s mind, sans context. There’s a cryptic shorthand in the track titles — recurring names of people, titles of imagined TV shows — that suggests a greater mythology you have to accept that you’ll never understand. Dig all you want into the tunes, but you’ll never crack the code. i-fls’ music is pure pathos, isolated from all else. Fragments of memory. Totally ephemeral.
+ introspective dance music: a listener’s guide to i-fls +
Dance music is, above all, denoted by purpose. The name of the genre is an imperative phrase. Even if there’s no dance floor in sight, you expect that EDM exists to serve you in some way: filling silence at the party or helping you maintain trance-like focus while playing a first-person shooter game, for example. Even IDM and Deconstructed Club, subgenres that subvert club tropes to give their producers more room for personal expression, ooze with ambition. They’re futurist movements that sought to pioneer new sounds, inevitably lending a new palette to more mainstream audiences later on.
What makes i-fls’ art so peculiar is that it feels entirely divorced from purpose. The melodies and chord progressions meander aimlessly. It’s too soft for the club, but too indebted to pop music to work properly as ambient music. If I’m compelled to do anything while listening, it’s to wander around the neighborhood at a leisurely pace, dipping into streets that divert from my usual route. Without attaching a real face or biographical information to his work, i-fls communicates the small-town restlessness of his youth by revisiting the same concepts time and time again until he’s built an entire universe in the snug confines of his sound, refining the vision with each attempt. The drawings get cleaner and the mixes sound sharper, but the lens only focuses — it never widens.
To fully immerse yourself in i-fls’ world, I recommend clicking through his Bandcamp page instinctively. Don’t proceed in chronological order. Download a few EPs and stash them in your iTunes library for a day when you’ve just got to get out and do something. You’ll be surprised at how easily memories become ensnared in these songs.
If you’re not sure where to start, here are five essential i-fls releases that make great points of entry:
1. artificial outsider (2015)
This LP dropped around the same time I first landed on i-fls’ Bandcamp page. I commuted to college by bus then, and I remember listening to artificial outsider while walking home from my stop. When the faraway chimes and wiggly synth lead drop into the mix on opener “soundcloud4", I’m transported to a specific afternoon when I stopped at a local diner, Dixie Chili, for an early dinner and finally beat Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney just before my 3DS battery died. I think there was a baseball game playing on the TV overhead?
There’s an overwhelming feeling of isolation on this record, but I wouldn’t call it sad. In fact, it calls to mind the moments I’ve been the most comfortable by myself, thoughts blanketed by impressionistic piano chords. Now that the Ace Attorney series is fresh on my mind, I’m starting to note a resemblance between its soundtrack and this record. Tracks like “CD tanida” would be the perfect accompaniment to an investigation that’s going nowhere — it’s music for aimlessly clicking through illustrations of office complexes until something happens.
2. windowsill of perception (2013)
If you’d prefer a more low-fidelity spin on the sound of artificial outsider, it may be worth digging deeper into i-fls’ earlier discography. 2013’s windowsill of perception, which was released on the now-defunct Niphlex label, is a relaxed effort full of muffled snares and clattering samples. Chords linger, then slowly disappear like exhaust fumes on snowy days: sweet and woozy. “kudo want be piano star” is a flash of brilliance, riding on trance-y keyboard chords and angelic choral pads. If Orbital were called upon to soundtrack a Dreamcast game instead of Mean Girls’ end credits scene, it may have turned out like this.
There’s a neat diversion into musique concrète territory on “rebroadcast” and a few tracks that are are almost entirely ambient — “go out” and “haluneon,” for example, but I come back to windowsill of perception for its moments of pop brilliance. At its best, the record’s sound resembles a snowy day in the city, sine waves cutting through the haze like neon lights.
3. two tracks in march (2021)
i-fls’ latest release is just a small taste of what’s to come, but it’s enough to have me itching for a new LP. These two tracks are some of his most fleshed-out and polished works to date, each stretching out to five minutes on the strength of arpeggiated synths and bouncy house beats. It’s the happiest i-fls’ music has ever sounded, and his knack for layering textures and harmonies will keep your head bobbing for its full runtime.
4. reality hallucination (2014)
Short but densely packed with ideas, reality hallucination zeroes in on i-fls’ psychedelic inclinations, dabbling in dissonance while bitcrushing his drums into noisy abstraction. On “M. Yamashiro,” synths and piano chords weave in and out of melody, guided by a curious sense of indeterminacy. Opener “theme from yamane loneliness” sounds like it’s being played on the aux cord from the cockpit of a tiny UFO, heavenly bodies passing through the windshield. There’s no tonal center to keep things on the ground. This is the sound of racing thoughts; dreams jumping from setting to setting without warning.
5. nighthawk (2018)
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this EP were named after the Edward Hopper painting. i-fls shares in Hopper’s affinity for urban ennui and isolation, even when the music’s on the more upbeat side. nighthawk sounds like an early morning expedition to grab gas station coffee, hi-hats sizzling like hot dogs on metal rollers. The included version of “private waster” is worth the download, each layer of synthesizer finding a new way to make its pulsing kick drum just a little more uplifting. Who needs caffeine?
+ residential town loneliness: questions answered by i-fls +
Thanks to the magic of Google Translate, i-fls was kind enough to chat with me about his work over email. Learn more about Bandcamp’s most elusive producer below:
Tell me about the character that appears on all of your album artwork. When did you first draw her?
Those aren’t a fixed person and character, but this uniformity is made by my style of drawing. This style is fixed half under my intent, and the other half is a technical problem.
The basics for this style were made when I was a child. But that wasn't the intent. It was made from a mistake in the tracing a painting by Pablo Picasso for fun. That was simply the impetus, my style has come to this current form by the accumulation of various transformations. For example, I think I got more or less under the influence of Japanese manga culture, to the current style.
So I think even if Picasso sees my drawing, he won't notice my drawing style was made by mimicry-play from work of himself maybe. Of course, there is no way to be sure of that, though.
I love the photographs you integrate into the drawings. What are things like where you live? Does your hometown inspire your music?
I live in Tokyo now. Here is halfway between downtown and the suburbs. It is an inconvenient and strange place. Not that it's not safe, but this town has contradictions and discord. I like that.
I grew up in a region that is kind of called the "countryside." In honesty, I don't have a good impression of my hometown. At least when I lived there, it had a very closed environment, the same as other countryside regions, and for all that, it did not develop its own culture like Cornwall had. I had an aspiration to live in the city for a long time.
But in hindsight, I actually catch the atmosphere and emotion of specific life in that environment actually. Loneliness of the local TV show, night drive with family, beauty and boredom in twilight, silence and gloom of the night, and more. That has made the essence of my musical works, I admit.
How long have you been producing music for? Do you make everything in Garageband?
I started making music with conscious of an "activity", roughly between nine to seven years ago. I had done some recording before that, but it was just for fun. The "Selected works" series was selected from tracks created in the subtle period in between "just fun" to "activity".
Yes, In fact I use some hardware equipment (volca beats and DR-550 and some extra gadgets), but the DAW is Garageband, always.
What musicians inspire you? What artists or things unrelated to music inspire you?
One of the most direct sources of influence is vaporwave and works of online friends.
And the music that has been my source of inspiration for my life is citrus / yoga'n'ants, SUPERCAR / Koji Nakamura, group_inou / imai, BECK, and etc etc... The most direct effect to the i-fls work is group_inou / imai works maybe.
There are more details, but there is no end to them... To be precise, I get influence from every music that I've listened to.
"What artists or things unrelated to music inspire me" is real daily life, characters of horror comics, Fumiko Takano, some comedy animations, weather, memory, and internet.
You've only released music through Bandcamp and netlabels. Why is it important to you to let fans name their price?
I have received the benefit from a free download culture on Bandcamp for a long time so I want to make the repayment to it in this way. At the same time, I have become aware of the job side of this activity recently a little. I'm trying to find a way to convince the listeners and me to that end. (Bandcamp Friday is a big inspiration for that.) But I'd like to keep the "name your price" as long as possible. Cuz I think that's one of the most widely listened to ways to do it.
Which of your releases is your favorite?
Releases from other labels are about giving all of i-fls at that time, so all of those are very important.
...OK, This is not a good answer, I know. Put that aside, I select from self-released works... Yeah, I think "uncomfortable chill out" is very important work for myself. I think it's one of those pieces where the output is almost perfect for the intent. "not beautiful view" is very important (as same.) but If I hadn't made "uncomfortable chill out", I wouldn't have been able to make "not beautiful view" either.
What does the name i-fls mean?
This is an acronym for "i from listening suicidal".
i is my basic handle name, and "listening suicidal" is the name of my site for the drawing artist side. (it's not "I f__king love science")
"listening suicidal" was taken from the title of the album by Japanese great alternative band BOaT.
Do you have any daily routines?
I can't think of anything in particular that is conscious. If I had to say, I have a threatening aspect in my mental, so I wash my hands often. and I also take medicine for pollen allergies during this season.
How do you think of names for your songs?
(Almost always) When I make a track, start with the title. I think the title is a very important essence of my works.
It's an important area that could determine the concept of the song or album, so I use both deliberation and intuition when I get the decision of title. If I remember correctly, for "windowsill of perception", it took a few days to decide on the album title maybe.