Mesmershade is a dark electronic duo made up of Hawaiian lyricist Juniper Jow and Tokyo-based songwriter M. Munigant. The pair recently put out their bold debut EP ‘Echoes of Elegy’, and I’ve been pretty obsessed with it ever since. An ominous soundtrack with emotive, poignant, and relatable themes, it’s a record that I feel deserves to be widely heard!
Wanting to get to know the talented duo a bit better, I was over the moon when they agreed to an interview! Taking us through their early years, how they came up with their name, and what they have next up their sleeves, please give a big welcome to our new friends Mesmershade!
Hey, you two! I’m over the moon to be able to introduce you to our ever-expanding audience! Before we get into the nitty-gritty, could you tell us a little bit about your musical journey? What has led you to where you are today?
M. Munigant: For me, I’ve been playing in bands since I was 13 years old, albeit with some very long gaps in between. I started playing in mostly hardcore and screamo bands during the mid-90s up until the mid-2010s. After a bit of a break, I decided to start writing music again, but instead of starting a band, I chose to write all of the instrumental parts myself.
Since then, I’ve just been learning lots of new things while applying all of the musical things I already knew to compose what became this EP. I think a lot of the sound of it is due to applying a lot of non-electronic music influences to an electronic format, giving us our unique sound.
Juniper: As a kid, I took piano lessons and played clarinet in my school band. I also used to rewrite the lyrics to songs for fun, like for my grandfather’s 70th birthday, I changed all the words to ‘A Whole New World’ from Disney’s Aladdin to “A Whole New Age,” and all of my cousins and I practiced it for weeks so that we could perform it together at his birthday party. I never thought I would pursue a serious music career, but looking back on it, I guess some of those early experiences prepared me so that when I decided to try my hand at songwriting, it was really easy for me to pick it up very quickly.
I have to wish you a massive congratulations on your debut EP ‘Echoes of Elegy’! It’s simply superb! Is there an overarching theme to the record or is each tune meant to stand on its own?
Juniper: Thank you – we are incredibly proud of our work. ‘Echoes of Elegy’ as a whole explores the theme of lost love. Each track also stands on its own, with a personal story behind it. For example, I wrote the lyrics for ‘Moth’ on the day after my grandmother passed away. Several members of my family, including myself, separately saw an enormous black moth in the days immediately after the death. In Hawaii (which is where I’m from), the Black Witch Moth species is believed to embody the soul of a recently passed loved one, coming back to say goodbye. You can hear about each of my family’s moth sightings in the lyrics, and the lyrics were also kind of my way of just wrestling with my grandmother’s death – she was 93 when she passed and had lived a long, happy life. Her passing was not exactly a sad or unexpected event, but of course, I still experienced it as a loss.
‘The Best That I Could Invent’ and ‘Vicissitude’ are both songs that deal with feelings of unrequited love. ‘We Sleep’ was actually inspired after hearing native Hawaiian rights activists speak, but the lyrics were intentionally crafted in a way that it almost sounds like it’s about a dysfunctional love relationship. ‘Death’s Lover’ was partially inspired by a short story one of my sisters wrote about a woman who falls in love with the Angel of death, so it’s technically not about lost love, although in a way, it is – because it’s about the sort of relationship where the life is so doomed from the start that even in the excitement of finding love, you already in the back of your mind also know it can only end in loss.
The EP’s opener ‘Moth’ is a track that I’ve fallen seriously in love with. Those melancholic and dark synths along with Juniper’s haunting vocals are just inescapable! What made you pick the song as the very first to introduce yourselves to the world?
M. Munigant: Of the songs on this EP, I feel like ‘Moth’ best represents the potential of Mesmershade. It has a range of layered sounds that go from a calm sadness to an almost angry white noise to a snappy time switch in the chorus, combined with a great showing of the range of Juniper’s vocals. The song is about grief, and I think ‘Moth’ does a really good job of representing the stages of grief through its composition and in the emotion of its vocals.
Who would you put down as some of your biggest musical influences and who would you ultimately credit for helping shape and mould your overall sound?
M. Munigant: In my case, I have a wide range of influences. I draw inspiration from bands like Rye Coalition, who are masters of making discordant noisy parts come together into something spectacular. Today is the Day, who is always making the heaviest, evil-sounding music I can think of. The Mars Volta for their progressive epics. Soundtracks to 80’s horror movies, especially stuff from John Carpenter and David Cronenberg. And gritty-sounding hip-hop production like you’d hear from the RZA or Blue Sky Black Death.
Juniper: For the lyrics, I’m mostly influenced by stage musicals and older popular songs. I look up to all the famous songwriters from the last century, like Lennon and McCartney (or really any of the Beatles), Paul Simon, Stevie Nicks, and Rodgers & Hammerstein.
If each of you could claim any song in the world as your own, which one would you choose and why?
M. Munigant: This is actually a really hard question! If I had to choose any one song, it’d probably be Talking Heads’ ‘This Must Be The Place’. Talking Heads was maybe the first band I ever really loved and this specific song always hits especially hard for me. It’s maybe the most perfect love song, which is fitting.
Juniper: I don’t think I would claim it as my own, but I would love to write a song that’s like Billy Joel’s ‘She’s Always A Woman’. I love it because it’s a very personal love song that is obviously about a specific person’s quirks, but at the same time, it’s so universal in the feelings it expresses.
I’m a sucker for having to know the origins of a band’s name. I just can’t help myself! How exactly did Mesmershade come about?
Juniper: We brainstormed band names for a while. A few of our earliest ideas turned out to be names of other things that we didn’t want to be confused with, so that’s how we came around to deciding that we would make up our own word. We came up with lists of words that we felt described our music, like haunting, mesmerizing, nocturnal and shadowy. We smashed parts of those words together and it only took a couple of passes for “Mesmershade” to stand out to us as a clear winner.
M. Munigant: What Juniper said is true, but how it actually got decided was I asked Juniper to think of a word that could describe what was happening in the music video for the song ‘Self Control’ by Laura Branigan. That is a great song, but the video is a dark and bizarre experience. “Mesmershade” was sort of the word that came out of that thought experiment.
Which of your lyrics would you like to see printed on a T-shirt?
M. Munigant: From ‘The Best That I Could Invent’:
“You were so lovely in my dreams. The actual you’s all extremes.”
Juniper: Oh yeah, that’s a good choice because one of the sneaky things about this couplet is that there are two interpretations. You were so lovely in my dreams because you were at the brightest, most extreme end of your personality as opposed to the real-life boring you. Or, you were lovely in my dreams, but the real you is an all-extreme, less appealing version. So no matter the personality of the listener and their desired partner, it can be interpreted to sound like it fits.
M. Munigant: I never even thought about it like that! Though it’s a bit long for a T-shirt, maybe another good one might be “At night we sleep, defiantly” from ‘We Sleep.’
I have no doubt that there are many more songs up your sleeve, and I truly can’t wait to hear what else you have in store! But in a broader sense, what do you hope for in your musical future?
Juniper: We have a few songs that we are polishing up to follow after this release. Going forward, we are planning to release new singles every 4 weeks or so.
M. Munigant: Indeed, we have a few songs that just need a little bit of tweaking before release, but we plan to have a pretty steady stream of singles coming out relatively soon. I hope we eventually have a full LP out on vinyl as well, but that’s probably a bit farther in the future.
