Who/what inspires your music?

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Okay. Going straight for the throat. Honestly, I think I find my primary inspirations to be Daft Punk, Justin Timberlake and Kanye West. I have a couple more as well, Britney Spears, Gwen Stefani.

 Portishead is a big one. Pretty much anything that kind of has a pop base to it, I'm inspired by. 

 

​How did you come up with the name?​

Well, Rec and Narukami came up at 2 different points in my life. I went by a completely different name when I was much younger, but I wanted something simpler because I realized nearly everybody who ends up breaking out in the music industry has a simple name.  

I grew up around a lot of recording equipment with my father, and I noticed that the predominant shortening of “recording” was either rec’d, or rec.  

So I picked up rec!  

I started using that for about 2 years, and then eventually  I got into anime. I think one of the first anime that I watched in full was the persona 4 animation, because I had already gotten into the games. 

I was obviously obsessed with the protagonist who was named Yu Narukami, and got the Narukami bit from that, and I smashed the two together. 

What's actually interesting about the name is that Narukami is actually the thunder god. Which is funny because I was born in a thunderstorm, so it was rather ironic. 

 

How would you describe your sound?​

Usually when people ask this question I end up just saying experimental pop, but i'm pretty sure to me personally, I fall pretty straight under the pop category. 

I got called something rather interesting the other day, someone described me as “techno emo punk”, which, I don't think is very accurate but regardless I appreciated the title, it was something different. 

 

So, in short, I would just say pop music in my opinion. 

 

​If you had no choice but to become a cover band, who would you cover?​

I could spend the rest of my life doing kanye covers, like that one guy on youtube who does “album XYZ '' but it's just his voice over the entire thing, that could be me for the rest of my life. 

 

​What is the hardest part about being a musician? ​

Honestly, finding inspiration can be a bit difficult.

This past year has been a bit strange, because I didn't really feel musically inspired until a couple of weeks ago, so I was kind of just going through the motions for a bit, which ends up taking a toll because you start feeling like you're slacking or the quality isn't the same, so you end up just continuing this cycle until eventually you start making a song and something clicks and everything makes sense again.

 

​If someone wrote a book about your band what would it be titled?​

I think it would be called “the forever funeral of pop music”.I only chose that because I think I describe my music as..not necessarily a deconstruction of pop, because in my opinion that would be leaning more towards hyperpop and PC pop, and while I do feel those influences in my music I think I take it in a different direction.

 I think I appreciate the superficiality of it, I appreciate the cheesiness and rather than maximizing it, I just do it the way they thought pop sounded good back then. So, it's just like a time capsule and the way pop music has progressed into something that can be genuinely good, is kind of interesting because, for me, I feel like im bringing back the sound of that early 2000s pop that people absolutely despised and called the death of pop. I would love for myself to be considered the DEATH of modern pop music. I'd love that. 

 

​If a middle aged white man wrote a review on your band what would it most likely say?

It would most likely say that the most offensive thing about my music is how homosexual it is. Unintentionally, I had someone just review my album Cyberspace and they gave it a 7/10, and the only reason they did is because of how short it was, and it said “how can you hate them? the only thing thats offensive about the music is how gay it is.”

 

Which song of yours was the most fun to write & make? 

I've been really thinking about this a lot lately. Honest to god, it's like a two way tie between Plum and Slice of Life (both off of Cyberspace), Slice of Life is my most popular song, it was about my ex boyfriend and it was really fun to write because it was kind of getting passed around for a bit and it was originally just me singing and performing it, but then one of my friends ended up suggesting that i make it a vocaloid track! I hadn't done a vocaloid song in a while, so I figured I would just try it and see how it turned out, and it turned out wonderfully. Mixing it and mastering it and just hearing everything come together  from stage 1 all the way to the final version was honestly really fun. 

 

  I also rank Plum as a favorite because Plum was made at an interesting point in my life. I had just gotten out of the strangest writers conundrum, it wasn’t necessarily a block, but nothing I was making was surely good and I had a lot on my mind. 

 

At this point I was really close to graduating highschool, and I was failing all of my classes with flying colors, and I was on the brink of not graduating. 

I was in my car outside of the school in the parking lot and I figured you know what, I wanna write a song about, (to be perfectly derogatory) fucking an assistant teacher! 

I had this melody in my head and I had the sonics, and I had to go back home because I was in a hybrid class (in person and online) due to the pandemic, so I had to join a zoom call and I had it going in the background, and I had thrown the iPad into a corner so the microphone wouldn’t pick it up.

 Eventually I made the instrumental and everything came together, and the song ended up NOT being about sleeping with an assistant teacher anymore.

Nevertheless, that part was definitely needed as a starting point in the writing process. It was a lot more wholesome in the end, but what makes it my favorite is just how noteworthy it would end up becoming.  A lot of people end up saying its my best song with the best melodies and harmonies, and it's interesting to see that because I recorded it all in pretty much a day if not a few hours, meanwhile I’ve spent months on other songs only to show people and them not really like it. 

But the best things do end up happening randomly, especially with music, so I'm not really too hard pressed about it, but Plum was definitely one of my favorites to make.