Jeff Rona
From his new album Projector, Jeff Rona shared the minimalist & meditative visual for “Like Water” featuring vocals from Yoko Honda. Rona & Honda helm the experience of a new sea-bound sense of awakening where the audience is both elevated & submerged at the same time into an ocean of atmosphere. The song itself radiates with a new-age sense of presence where Yoko guides the listener into a temple decorated & designed by Jeff’s knack for audio architecture. From exploring essences from gathered field recordings sourced from the upper Amazon, obscure radio transmissions & other found sounds & objects; Jeff Rona’s collected items that contributed to the composites of elements that comprise the whole of the album Projector can be witnessed shining through as a musical art of transcendental meditation.
Sensations of the spiritual & other out-of-body experiences take flight as we see two identical screen tests of Yoko Honda reciting existential mantras that extend into the ethereal & astonishing sacred places of epiphanies & other illuminations. The calming & ambient components of Jeff Rona’s composition illustrates & underscores the element of water as an analogous force of flow & motion akin to our own life cycles of birth & death that sail through the similes of such tributaries. Jeff Rona & Yoko Honda with “Like Water” contribute to the great global canon of modern ambient classics that seek to express our purposes & motions in academic studies that fuse the sciences of the mind, the physical world & perhaps even the spiritual unknown.
Jeff Rona introduced the following prologue to both Projector & the song “Like Water” featuring Yoko Honda:
As I was writing Projector I felt a desire to do something with spoken words. And for some reason, maybe because I had been watching some Japanese cinema, I wanted it to be in Japanese. I’m not a poet or a lyricist, but these words popped into my head:
Our lives
Our lives are like water
They flow unstopping and unstoppable
Our lives are poems and stories
A small girl looks down the road at the adults and laughs
An adult looks down the road and sees nothing
But the child inside laughs again
Our lives
Our lives move swiftly
But time moves in small small small steps
What we remember
And what we forget
Will decide on how we see our lives
Flowing quickly to the sea
Or moving around rocks and bends in the river
Laughing
Even the smallest stone can change the direction of the biggest river
But the water flows with elegance and ease
Never resisting
Never worrying
And never stopping
Our lives
Our lives are like water
To me they had a Japanese sensibility to them, I’ve read a lot of Japanese literature and poetry that inspired me. But I needed someone to translate and then perform them. A friend here in Los Angeles suggested I meet Yoko Honda. She’s a composer, singer, master archery instructor, anime fanatic, and she blogs on Ramen shops here in Los Angeles. Perfect!
Yoko was happy to do the project. She did the translation, and I recorded her both in Japanese and the original English. Yoko grew up in Tokyo and then in London, so she has this amazing hybrid accent. I was thrilled with what she did.
The track starts in Japanese, switches to English, and then the two languages merge together for the final section. I did some processing on her voice to add a sense of harmony and some glitchiness to make her into more of a musical instrument the just a speaker.
Finally, I directed a music video for “Like Water” featuring Yoko as well. It’s here on YouTube:
Several people have told me this is their favorite track on Projector. Makes me happy.
Jeff Rona’s new album Projector is available now.
