Kikuo

Japanese artist, Kikuo, is known for his distinct musical style of pairing whimsical, upbeat music with dark themes usually pertaining to child abuse or being lost forever, whether it be in a maze, nightmares or darkness. The most famous song of Kikou is called  “愛して愛して愛して” falls right in line. It is a story about a person that wishes to be paid attention to, loved and validated, yet they twist it. They demand everyone pay attention to them by harming themself and begging others for their love. Kikuo uses his music in such an amazing way to bring this story to life.

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People are lured into the song with a simple music box, and other instruments played with mallets join in. Various runs on marimbas and vibraphones. There’s an accordian that joins the party every now and then as well. What makes the instruments feel different in the song, is how Kikuo plays with the stereoscape. People only hear certain instruments on certain “sides”. No matter how sweet these instruments are on their own, when all heard at once, everywhere it is very possible to feel overwhelmed, much like the other people in this song must feel with the protagonist of our story.

What really seals this song is the singer. Kikuo often writes his vocals using a program called Vocaloid, which is basically a computer generated voice that helps people to make songs with. This has an immense effect on the song. There is always a robotic sound to songs made with these programs since it is not exactly a real person singing. This makes this song feel all the more unsettling, especially paired with a high vocal range making it seem like the song is being sung by a child. Kikou has a quite interesting and unique style of writing the lyrics. The lyrics of this song do not sugarcoat like the instrumentation does. It is  repetitive and  unnerving. Here is a short translated part from the song’s lyrics “Love me, love me, love me more and more,  Love me, love me so much that’s it’s maddening”.  

Kikuo also shows a certain level of activeness on various social media platforms, such as YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter.

The YouTube channel of Kikuo is called Kikuo. The channel was created back on August 5, 2006. Due to his songs, uniqueness and talent, as for now, his YouTube channel has more than 599K subscribers, 71 uploaded videos and more than 127 million total number of views. The very first video that Kikuo posted is called “ Kikuo 1 2ndAlbum “KikuoWorld” X-Fade Demo PV”, posted on December 22, 2011. The video gained over 79K views, 2K likes, only 9 dislikes and more than 150 comments.

The next social media platform is Instagram, here Kikuo’s account is kikuo_sound. On this platform the young musician posts photos of random things, music videos, photos done during different concerts. For now, his account has more than 29K followers.

As for Twitter, his account is called Kikuo Sound, where he has more than 61K followers. Kikuo first joined this platform in August 2010.