加爾基 精液 栗ノ花 /Chlorine, Semen, Chestnut Flower by 椎名 裕美子/Shiina Ringo
Pretty influential j pop that is lesser known in the west but is baroque/chamber pop with strong jazz and electronica elements, not the typical sailor uniform stuff (not that that’s inherently bad, but it gets old fast imo).
Layered production (which she did herself for her the first time) with a wide degree of instrumentation including guitar, bass, drums, strings, koto, pipe organ, prepared piano, erhu (a Chinese stringed instrument), mellotron, a conch (like the actual seashell), didgeridoo, her brother’s wife’s vacuum cleaner (actually), etc
There are influences of bjork in her music. There’s some beach boys style production in here. this is, in my opinion, her best work.
The lyrics are filled with tension and provocation, discussing life, purity, and mortality
The albums name was apparently because she overheard some guys in the studio arguing about whether cum smells more like chlorine or chestnut flowers. It was originally supposed to be called something else and this created tension with the label. But anyway some interesting notes if you don’t speak the runes:
The romaji for the album name is karuki zamen kuri no hana
加爾基 - karuki (calcium) this is what gets translated to chlorine. However, these kanji are kind of old school. More typically calcium/karuki could be written with hiragana thuslyカルキ or more typically with katakana カルシウム because it’s a loan word. This was likely a very deliberate choice because these kanji mean things tho:
加 (ka) - add/increase 爾 (ru) - a old super formal you used here for sound 基 (ki) - base/foundation
精液 - this just means semen
栗ノ花 - kuri no hana - a subtle euphemism for basically “cum smell”. Quick backstory here: in Japan it’s pretty common knowledge that chestnut flowers smell like jizz. I had no idea. Perhaps you didn’t either? Now you do.
So you basically have this title that plays into the themes of the album (purity, foundation, reproduction) and has this interesting contrast between a very deliberate almost poetic interpretation of one word to include thematic elements, a very standard delivery of the next, and the final is delivered in a standard way as well but it comes as essentially a double entendre of the second.
Highly recommend