How Experimental Composer and Performer Kishi Bashi Brings New Ideas to Life

Whether Kishi Bashi is composing new music or performing it on stage, he is open to improvisation and imperfection. This might explain why he’s not afraid to release albums that experiment with genre and keep fans guessing. Kishi Bashi’s music moves between classical, rock, electronic, and indie pop — his lyrics are a combination of English and Japanese.

At his home near San José, Kishi Bashi demonstrated his spontaneous approach to composition. “If I want something super epic, I imagine what that could be in my head, and then I try to verbalize it,” he said, beatboxing an epic fanfare off the top of his head as an example.

Kishi Bashi is also an accomplished multi-instrumentalist. He picked up a guitar and made up a riff on the spot. As he strummed, he began humming and then singing, not worrying if his stray phrases about love and longing made any sense. Kishi Bashi called this “mouthing words.” Even as improvised sketches, his easy playing and sweet falsetto were captivating.

Kishi Bashi took the same playful approach to demonstrating how he composes, using each of his violins. The first violin he picked up was tuned differently than a Western classical violin. The second was built with an extra string so that Kishi Bashi could play the violin down into the lower range of a viola. He was playing around on that five-string violin-viola when he composed “For Every Voice That Never Sang.” The finished song is rich with musical layers, but you can hear those initial arpeggios in the background.

Whenever Kishi Bashi explores an idea for a new song, he records it onto his phone so he can review it later. For example, “Violin Akai” is the first song on Kantos, his latest album. In the recording he made of his initial “Violin Akai” idea, he sang a melody with a swinging beat, his voice serving as the violin. It’s a very rough sketch — a few pencil lines, really — that Bashi later built into an exuberant, multi-instrument song for his band.

Before Bashi became the solo artist Kishi Bashi, he was born Kaoru Ishibishi (now Kaoru Dill-Ishibashi). Kishi Bashi’s parents grew up in Japan and met at the University of Washington in Seattle. Kishi Bashi was born there, though the family soon moved to Ithaca, New York.

“My parents moved every 5 to 10 years,” Kishi Bashi said. “So I never felt grounded anywhere.” Bashi also regularly visited family in Japan while trying to fit in with predominantly white classmates at school.

In Ithaca, Kishi Bashi started learning the Suzuki violin, a method created by Japanese violinist Shinichi Suzuki that teaches children to learn violin as though learning a second language. Kishi Bashi started playing violin at age 7 — relatively late for a Suzuki student — yet he was soon called a child prodigy. By high school, Bashi and his family had moved to Virginia, where Kishi Bashi was exposed to jazz violin and improvisation.

After high school, Kishi Bashi attended Cornell University, where he continued playing jazz violin. Officially, though, he was majoring in engineering. It took him a couple of years to realize that music could be more than a hobby. Once that realization hit, he dropped out of Cornell and went to the Berklee School of Music to study film scoring. After graduating, he moved to New York to score films and write jingles for commercials.

Kishi Bashi’s true passion, however, was composing indie rock songs and playing in a band. In 2003, he founded a band called Jupiter One and explored another instrument: his voice. He recalled the moment things started taking off.

“[Before], we had tens of people — maybe all our friends — showing up at our shows,” Kishi Bashi said. “But then, once I started singing, more and more people started showing up. Girls and their boyfriends show up when you start singing.”

In 2010, after touring with Jupiter One and opening for Sondre Lerche, he decided to go solo. This was when he became the artist “Kishi Bashi.” He was 35, married, and had a young daughter. He and his family moved back in with his parents while he made the Kishi Bashi leap.

Kishi Bashi was no stranger to the challenge musicians face in making a living and being creative. Going solo was both exciting and risky.

“When I was starting my debut album, I was kind of struggling with the idea of imperfection,” he said. “I’m very self-conscious and afraid of judgment because one negative thing can crush my excitement. To me, that’s dangerous.”

Bashi needn’t have been afraid. Once he finally released his first album, 151a, in 2012, it was well-received. When read in Japanese, 151a resembles the Japanese phrase ichi-go ichi-e, which Bashi explained means “that one time, that one meeting; it is unique to itself, even with its imperfections.”

That debut album launched a successful solo career. Kishi Bashi recently released his fifth solo album and went on an international tour. At his San Francisco show last September, long-time fan Kevin Adamski described a typical Kishi Bashi concert as “a very joyful experience, very optimistic, very hopeful. The whole crowd is dancing. There’s confetti.”

Much of that San Francisco show was upbeat and celebratory, but in the middle, there was a moment of calm. The band exited the stage for a costume change, leaving Kishi Bashi standing alone in a spotlight with his violin. He plucked a rhythm, which continued looping as he added layers of mournful strings. Then he sang. As though under a spell, the audience’s boisterous energy settled into momentary stillness.

Kishi Bashi looked utterly at ease on stage with the surprises and improvisations of live performance. At one point, he started a violin loop for a new song and then stopped and restarted, saying he could do better. Everyone cheered.

Early in Kishi Bashi’s career, messing up on stage felt like a big deal. One time, back when he was opening for Sondre Lerche, he had to restart a loop over and over again because the timing was off.

“I started to realize that I was just really not nailing it that night,” he said. That might seem like a panic-inducing moment for a live performer, but Kishi Bashi kept going, and the crowd started cheering. They kept cheering until he finally got the loop right.

“They wanted to see me succeed,” he said. It taught him a valuable lesson about live performance. “[The audience] are not just there to hear a perfect iteration of something … they [like] the idea that they’re supporting someone.

At the end of every Kishi Bashi show, the band does an acoustic encore. Kishi Bashi said it started when a venue told them to stop playing. “I got really annoyed and took the music to the crowd.” Taking the music into the crowd was an unexpected, almost spiritual end to the recent San Francisco show.

After playing with mics and amps on an elevated stage during the entire show, the band left the stage, grabbed acoustic instruments, and walked down into the middle of the audience. A couple of hundred fans clustered around the band, and then Kishi Bashi led everyone in a giant and intimate sing-along. Whatever improvisations and imperfections led to this unique moment, it was the perfect experience to share with other people.