“Blue Eyed Doll” starts off with a recording of a Japanese choir woman from the eldercare facility Hiroki’s grandmother was staying in. They are singing the Japanese folk songs “Aoi Me No Ningyo” (trans. “Blue Eyed Doll”) which leads into the album track of the same name. Each percussive soundt in Hiroki’s “Blue Eyed Doll” was collected from the house, and includes everything from the sound of a cupboard closing to the clinking of two glasses together. This “found-sound” approach to percussion is what gives every sound and melody in “Kaigo Kioku Kyoku” significance.

Kaigo Kioku Kyoku

Blue Eyed Doll

Inori is based off of the hymn of the same name by Genzo Miwa. I took the harmony and melody of Miwa’s hymn, and wrote about my feelings of helplessness when caregiving for my uncle and grandmother. 

The lyrics at the beginning of the song are about the first time I had to take my grandmother to the hospital - the first of many - and it was a real shock to see my grandmother so frail. It was complicated too by this feeling that if she didn’t return from the hospital, that this would be it, that I would lose my grandmother, the house, a lot of my childhood memories. 

The word “Inori” means prayer in Japanese, and I think the song captures that feeling of a desperate prayer, when you feel out of control, and it’s all you can do to try and cope with the inevitable.

Inori

When I first started thinking about this project, my sister had already recorded a lot of my grandmother talking and singing folk songs or hymns. My sister sent me the recording of my grandmother singing “Jesus Tender Shepherd Hear Me”, and I suppose I felt inspired to create something about this experience based on that recording. 

Bare Hallways was written as I was reflecting on my experience as a caregiver for my grandmother, and the feeling that everything was slowly falling apart. My grandmother’s Alzheimer’s was inevitably growing worse, the house was falling into disrepair, and the family had started the very necessary process of clearing out what items they could get away with, without sending my grandmother into a panic. 

There’s this dichotomy between the menial and tender tasks that were required of me as a caregiver in the verses, and then the refrain of the chorus “In The End”. I think I couldn’t look away at the truth of it, that death is isolating and painful. That there was an inevitable ugliness to it that you needed to accept. 

A lot of this album is about confronting the difficult aspects of dying, and attempting to find grace and solace in the pain that death causes.

Bare Hallways

Hiroki’s debut solo album “Kaigo Kioku Kyoku” speaks to the celebration of brightness, while reckoning with darkness. 

“Kaigo Kioku Kyoku”, which translates into “Caregiving Memory Songs” in Japanese, is the culmination of his two-year long experience as a live-in caregiver for both his grandmother with Alzheimer’s and his uncle with terminal cancer. 

In a further nod to the circular nature of life, the house in which Hiroki cared for his relatives was also the one he was born in. Combining the sounds of objects collected from the house, voice recordings of his relatives, and structuring the songs off of hymns and Japanese folk songs, Hiroki has created a “sonic archive” to preserve his unique family history, and document the stark reality of being a caregiver. 

 “I wanted to create a sonic archive of the space that had provided me life, and served as space for transformation and shedding. I wanted to provide a voice that I hadn’t heard before, one that illustrated the experience of being a caregiver in stark detail. I wanted to create an album that celebrated my family's multicultural heritage and created a snapshot of a family's history.”

Utopia

Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence (arr. & perf. by Jacqueline Goring)

Snowdrops

Kaigo Kioku Kyoku early roughs

Inori Intro (ft. Excerpts from the hymn "Inori" by Genzo Miwa)

Eternal Host


https://linktr.ee/hirokikyoku

Musician and poet writing about his experience as a caregiver for his grandmother and uncle who both suffered from terminal illnesses. 

Hiroki Tanaka

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