“I don’t think 20-year-old or 30-year-old me could make an album like Goh-ka.”
After more than three decades spent making some of metal’s strangest, most unpredictable music, Sigh mastermind Mirai Kawashima has little interest in chasing his youth. Instead, at 56, he’s confronting aging, impermanence, and the inevitability of death, ideas that form the unsettling heart of new album, Goh-ka, out now 4 on Peaceville Records, and stare back at the listener through its striking Kuso-zu-inspired artwork.
Joining Kawashima are saxophonist/singer Dr Mikannibal, guitarist Nozomu Wakai, Kreator bassist Frédéric Leclercq, and drummer Mike Helle. Musically, Goh-ka is Sigh operating exactly where they thrive: somewhere between Celtic Frost, Voivod, Black Sabbath, psychedelic and progressive rock, classical music, traditional Japanese sounds, and the score to a horror movie you probably shouldn’t watch alone.
Much like 2022’s Shiki, Goh-ka finds Kawashima confronting mortality head-on. Its central theme draws from Buddhist paintings depicting the stages of decomposition of the human body after death—a particularly blunt reminder that beauty, youth, and everything else we cling to eventually disappear.
“Nothing lasts forever,” Kawashima says. “You shouldn’t stick to your life. You shouldn’t stick to youth, beauty, or anything because everything has to go in our life.” Much like the themes in Shiki, Goh-ka picks up that conversation as he moves deeper into his 50s. “I’m still full of fear of death and also fear of getting old,” he admits. “I wanted to express my inner feeling as a 56-year-old me.”
Extreme metal wasn’t exactly created with retirement plans in mind. When Sigh emerged around 1989 and 1990, Kawashima remembers the genre as distinctly youthful territory. Nobody was wondering what black or thrash metal might sound like when its creators get older because few imagined they’d still be playing it. “I always ask myself, ‘what is the point in playing extreme metal when you are in my 50s?’” he says, recalling once laughing when someone asked whether he’d still be playing in Sigh at 30. But rather than that thought becoming a limitation, age has given Sigh another avenue to explore.
“Albums like Shiki or Goh-ka … Those were the albums which only 50-year-old me could make.”
With traditional Japanese instrumentation, orchestration, psychedelia, and horror-score theatrics all fighting for space, a Sigh song could easily buckle under its own ambition. For Kawashima, knowing when to add another layer (or when enough is enough) comes down to instinct rather than any songwriting rule. He builds songs as demos before repeatedly listening for improvements, adding Japanese elements or orchestration when something feels missing and strips parts away whenever the arrangement becomes too crowded.
That instinct also guided one of Goh-ka’s biggest collaborations. When considering a solo for “Unputenpu,” featuring Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt, Kawashima simply asked if he wanted in. “I didn’t tell him what I wanted, but he nailed it,” Kawashima says. “He exactly knew what I wanted for the solo.” It makes sense, as Kawashima sees plenty of shared musical DNA between himself and the Opeth frontman, particularly their mutual love for progressive rock and extreme metal.
Naturally, an album about decomposition and infernal fire also carries a healthy dose of horror cinema. Kawashima remains particularly enamored with Italian horror from the ’70s and ’80s, including the films of Lucio Fulci and composers such as Fabio Frizzi. The imagery extends to the album artwork itself, which uses Kuso-zu imagery, placing beautiful surroundings against the grotesque reality of decomposition.
For Kawashima, a great album cover should accomplish something records once did for him as a young fan: make you stop, stare, and wonder what the hell it sounds like. “I always want some cover that catches your eye,” he says, remembering the days when discovering new music could begin with nothing more than intriguing artwork in a record store. “Even if you don’t know us, you have some remembrance about the artwork. I want to make an album artwork like that—something iconic that sticks in people’s minds.”
More than 35 years into a career built on making extreme metal stranger and more avant-garde, Goh-ka finds Sigh staring down perhaps their most terrifying subject yet: time itself. Bodies decay; youth disappears, and nothing lasts forever. But as long as Kawashima keeps finding new ways to turn those fears into something this wonderfully bizarre, Sigh aren’t done pushing metal into unfamiliar places.
Goh-ka is out now via Peaceville Records. Get it here.
Featured photo courtesy of Peaceville Records
Post photos courtesy of Simmons Tobias
