Mon (紋)

I've been sitting with the shamisen for a while now, trying to find where that instrument's natural aggression lives. It's in the plucking—that percussive snap when you really dig into the strings. When you layer distortion under it, when you let it breathe alongside heavy drums and fractured guitar riffs, something happens. Mon started as an exploration of that collision, then became a full collection.

“When the strings and metal hit together on tracks like Yami no Hikari, there's no compromise happening.”

The tracks here aren't trying to be polite about the fusion. Ronin and Daimyo both lean into the feudal tension—modal scales that feel ancient, then sudden metal breakdowns that have no business existing in the same space, except they do. I used alternate tunings on the shamisen to get closer to the guitar's aggression while keeping the instrument's character intact. Bushido strips back the layers and lets the distorted shamisen riffs breathe against thunderous drums. There's no orchestration masking the weirdness; the weirdness is the point. Haiku works in progressive metal rhythms underneath, so the shamisen has to navigate time signatures that don't feel natural to the instrument—that tension is deliberate.

What pulled everything together was treating the shamisen not as decoration but as a lead voice with the same weight as distorted guitar. When the strings and metal hit together on tracks like Yami no Hikari, there's no compromise happening. Just collision. The shamisen has been my primary instrument on these tracks, shredding through the heaviness the way a violin would in my other work, but with that particular wooden snap that only comes from plucked Japanese strings hitting hard.

Mon lands as a collection that refuses to smooth over its own contradictions.