Kimiyo

The whole project was initially perceived as an instrumental one by Lemelin, Foster only being able to whisper when the idea was brought up, but the latter rather had the idea of inviting Momoka with whom he had worked on several occasions – dating back to his tenure with Your Favorite Enemies – to be the voice of the first incarnation of his project. Little did she know she would become the focal point of what would become the album titled Kimiyo, which became a catalyst for what would follow afterward. 

“I have always been looking for a pretext or an excuse to work with Momoka. She’s got a very unique type of spirit and she’s a very inspiring and insightful person. We have a common view about life in general and spirituality in particular, but most of all, she is a fantastic artist for whom I have the utmost admiration. When it became obvious to me that I would be in no way capable of singing or speaking on the songs we had sketched, Momoka was the only person able to transcend the project’s spirit in my opinion. The poetry of Voyage à la Mer was to be the core holding the whole project together, but I wanted Momoka to make her own interpretation of the lyrical undercurrent and to express herself in her native tongue, so she wouldn’t have to be my voice nor try to emulate what my words might convey. We set the canvas, laid down the color palettes, but it was for her to express herself and be the painting,” says Foster.

Foreseen as a story within a story, Kimiyo bloomed into a multi-layered entity, the album is inspired by the testimonies of the people Foster met in Japan back in 2010. Kimiyo’s main narrative focuses on the journey of a young person who wrote to Foster years after their encounter to share pieces of her journey about how she found a new sense of self after thinking of taking her life upon becoming unwillingly pregnant, but unable to fathom the idea of ending her life or her pregnancy, she became hateful towards the burgeoning existence slowly taking over her body, but found a fulfilling form of hope for her present and future self emerging from feeling the baby starting to move inside of her body. She then envisioned a life of her own, a purpose she had never imagined being able to find anywhere – especially not within herself – but lost the child following a miscarriage, leaving her empty again, but somehow transformed. She had learned that happiness is a measure of the heart and soul, accepting that purpose is something that grows from within, but, as Foster exposed it, while the tree might too often hide the beautiful density of a forest, there are lights that are simply way too bright to be hidden.

“I’m always very reluctant to explain what might have been the original spark of the projects I share with the world, as much as I’m deeply hesitant to offer specific hints on what they mean to me. I believe that real art has the ability to evolve and therefore outgrow its origins and connectors. Since Kimiyo has such an emotional depth, I thought we all needed to know what the starting point was, as tragic as the story it was inspired by is. I think it represents a lot more than what we used to settle for with our propensity to only look at the surface of the elements we don’t want to explore by fear of changing or evolving. For me, while Kimiyo can be imagined and even touched, it’s nonetheless a metaphor about finding ourselves, our purpose, our own trajectory from human isolation, escapism and denials, as much as it is an allegory of our longing to be free, unique and significant in regards to a world designed to format identity, to maintain absolute over emancipation, and to produce self-serving commercialization for the same few instead of being at the service of equality of chances. Even if it takes place in Japan, it’s a universal canvas on which we all have to decide what we want to express, but mainly what we are willing to expose about ourselves in order to rise anew. Sometimes, the colors we see and the shades we perceive can be incredibly deceptive…” 

As Kimiyo evolved into its own entity, Voyage à la Mer slowly started expanding its expressive universe into a vaster and more wide-ranging affective scope than Foster had first envisioned. An additional album companion would soon emerge…