Nearly twenty years into coldrain’s career, Masato is thinking about imperfection. Not how to eliminate it, hide it or polish it until nobody can see where the rough edges used to be, but whether those rough edges might be among the most important things we have left. We live in a time when almost everything is being sold to us through the language of improvement: faster technology, smarter systems, cleaner production, instant answers, algorithms that anticipate what we want before we have even decided for ourselves. Artificial intelligence can imitate voices, generate images and produce music in seconds, while social media quietly learns what keeps us looking at a screen and feeds us more of it; the promise is usually convenience. The uncomfortable question is what we might surrender in exchange.
That question sits at the heart of coldrain’s eighth studio album, OPTIMIZE = OPTDEMISE. Still, Masato says this isn’t a record made by five musicians terrified of technology and longing for some imaginary analogue past. The anxiety behind it is far more complicated, because Masato’s problem is not that technology exists; it is what happens when tools designed to help human beings begin replacing the very human experiences they were supposed to support.
“I always thought the evolution of creation was about making things easier, so we’d have more time to enjoy the process of crafting something or trying to perfect it,” he says. “Not replacing that process.”
Then comes the part that gets much closer to what OPTIMIZE = OPTDEMISE is really wrestling with.
“I fear we’re getting to a point where we start hating imperfection itself, and where deception becomes so normal that we don’t even realise how much it’s controlling us. That’s where optimisation starts to feel dangerous,” Masato admits. It is an interesting thought from the frontman of a band that has spent so long growing together. Since forming in Nagoya in 2007, coldrain have built their career the old-fashioned way, through writing, recording, travelling and playing countless shows, while taking their heavy yet melodic sound far beyond Japan.
But becoming better at what you do doesn’t necessarily mean chasing perfection, especially when music has never worked that way. “Music is interesting because it’s completely subjective,” Masato says. “What sounds like a flaw to one person can be the thing that makes it perfect to someone else, and the opposite is true too.”
Then, almost as an antidote to everything artists are encouraged to do in an age of endless editing, analysing and optimisation, he adds: “I personally TRY not to overthink things.”
That tension runs throughout the album. OPTIMIZE = OPTDEMISE grew out of last year’s five-track OPTIMIZE EP, but Masato soon realised that he had not finished with the ideas behind those songs. “At first I thought by the time we would start writing again after OPTIMIZE, I wasn’t finished with that world,” he explains. “That’s what led to OPTDEMISE.”
The album’s twelve songs are not there to predict whether machines will eventually take over the planet; their concerns are closer to home: what we believe, how we create, what we allow to influence us, how much of ourselves we willingly give away and whether we will still recognise the difference between something honestly experienced and something convincingly manufactured.
On DIGITOLL, that fear becomes unsettling because the imagined future does not necessarily require anyone to force us into it. Human beings may simply walk there themselves, seduced by convenience.
“My fear is that one day we won’t even know the difference between what’s real and what isn’t, and it’ll be our own fault,” Masato says. “I’ll admit, the original Matrix is one of my favorite movies, but I never imagined we might actually be heading in that direction.”
It would be easy to dismiss that fear as science fiction if so many boundaries had not already become harder to see. We now encounter photographs of people who never existed, voices belonging to people who never spoke the words we are hearing, songs built around imitation and information selected for us by systems most of us barely understand. The technology itself does not need to be malicious for something troubling to happen; sometimes all that is required is for human beings to stop asking where something came from.
That idea is behind CHASING SHADOWS, which questions the boundaries drawn around us and how easily we can accept someone else’s version of reality. When algorithms increasingly decide what we see, even thinking for ourselves becomes complicated. How can we be sure a belief is really ours?
“That’s the ultimate question, and really the fear at the core of some of these songs,” Masato admits. “I do believe a certain amount of regulation is necessary, because once we lose control it becomes much harder to think or even feel something on our own.”
The word feel may be more important here than anything else. Because for all the technology surrounding OPTIMIZE = OPTDEMISE, this is ultimately an album preoccupied with emotion. FREE FALL would rather accept pain than surrender to numbness. EX-HUMANITY imagines what remains when identity begins disappearing. INCOMPLETE finds value in the parts of ourselves that cannot be perfected. Even POISON, which moves away from technology towards destructive desire, asks what happens when a human emotion becomes so consuming that it begins swallowing the person experiencing it.
“If technology can bring real unity, I’m all for it,” Masato says. “But if reduced or controlled human emotion is the only thing that brings us together, then we might be losing the whole point.”
I think this prevents the album from becoming a simplistic attack on technological progress. Masato is not asking people to throw their phones into the sea or pretend innovation has not improved countless lives; he is asking who remains in control of the relationship.
“WHY and HOW it’s being used is what matters to me,” he says. “I understand using technology to expand or support something, like medical advancements. But once it starts replacing, replicating or choosing emotion for us, or deceiving us, that’s where I start to question it.”
You can manipulate a recording, edit a video, correct a note or replace a take until it looks as though nothing ever went wrong, but a live show is much harder to control. Someone misses something, a voice cracks, sweat gets into somebody’s eyes, the crowd comes in too early or a singer runs out of breath after spending the previous hour throwing himself around the stage, and none of it necessarily makes the experience worse.
Masato’s response when we discuss whether music can still interrupt the passive consumption criticised throughout the album is one of the most revealing moments of our conversation.
“Even now some people can watch a fully lip-synced show and think it’s the best vocal performance they’ve ever heard,” he says.
For a singer who has spent years performing demanding music live, the diffrence clearly matters, but he is not interested in turning himself into some ageing gatekeeper lecturing audiences about how they are supposed to experience music.
“I don’t want to be the guy saying, ‘I told you so.’ I want to be the guy who sings live, not perfectly, but with real emotion.”
That sentence could almost serve as the philosophy behind the entire record – not perfectly, but real.
“If I get a few people thinking about these topics along the way that’s cool,” he continues. “If the lyrics don’t matter to someone and they just think the track is cool, that doesn’t suck either. Music will always be consumed by the consumer. If what’s behind it is real, that’s enough for me.”
Socially conscious music can sometimes become so determined to deliver its message that it forgets it is still supposed to be music. coldrain have not made twelve lectures accompanied by guitars. These songs are made to move, to be screamed back at the band and to survive outside whatever intellectual argument surrounds them. You can think about artificial intelligence after listening to CHASING SHADOWS, or you can simply lose yourself in the song for a few minutes. Masato seems comfortable with either possibility. And perhaps that is also why EX-HUMANITY, despite being one of the album’s bleakest moments lyrically, does not leave him without hope. Its words may imagine a frightening loss of self, but the song changes the moment another human being reacts to it.
“Every time I see someone reacting to the song live or online, I feel like that emotion is something that can never truly be replicated or replaced,” he says. “No matter what the lyrics are about, that power of music will always represent hope to me.”
POISON, featuring Bert McCracken of The Used, takes the album somewhere more personal, away from technology and into something much older and perhaps just as dangerous: what happens when love, desire or obsession becomes so intense that instead of bringing something into your life, it slowly begins to take over it. The instrumental, Masato explains, actually existed during the early stages of the OPTIMIZE EP, but its eventual place on the album grew from a contradiction he encountered while writing about the importance of preserving human emotion.
“While writing about how I wanted human emotion to survive this era of evolution, I realized that too much of anything can create a different kind of problem,” he says. “That complexity of being human is what fascinates me right now.”
And that complexity is important because human beings are hardly innocent victims in the future coldrain are imagining. We are capable of love and obsession, creativity and destruction, independent thought and extraordinary gullibility. We want freedom while constantly choosing convenience. We complain about algorithms controlling what we see while feeding those same algorithms every day; we say we value authenticity and then reward whatever looks the most perfect. In all honesty, there is no answer to any of that on OPTIMIZE = OPTDEMISE, and there probably should not be. What coldrain can offer instead is evidence that after almost twenty years, five people can still enter a room together and make something that carries their fingerprints all over it.
When I ask Masato what the band had to unlearn to find the youthful energy that comes through so strongly on this record, his answer is almost amusingly straightforward, because apparently there was no grand process of rediscovering themselves or trying to recreate who they were when they first started.
“To be honest, from our side nothing has really changed,” he says. “Same members with the same passion. But maybe 20 years with the same feelings can trigger a new, fresh SOMETHING. We love everything we’ve done in the past. There is no need to replace or recreate it.”
Perhaps that is the most suitable place to leave OPTIMIZE = OPTDEMISE, because coldrain are not asking for the past back. They are not arguing against progress, nor pretending there was some better era when technology did not shape culture. A band formed in 2007 could hardly make that argument with a straight face; they have lived through streaming, social media, smartphones and enormous changes in how music is made, discovered and consumed and they are still here.
What worries Masato is something else: the possibility that in our determination to remove friction from life, we will eventually remove too much; that we will become so uncomfortable with mistakes that we stop recognising their value, so accustomed to imitation that authenticity becomes difficult to identify, and so willing to let systems make choices for us that we forget what it was like to arrive at an idea ourselves. And yet, for an album staring directly at those fears, OPTIMIZE = OPTDEMISE does not sound defeated.
Perhaps the future will become more synthetic, and telling the difference between something real and something made to look real will become harder, especially when technology can already manufacture a version of perfection that never really existed in the first place. Let’s not forget that coldrain’s answer is not to compete with perfection; it is to remain human.
Written and interviewed by Maggie Gogler
Featured image © Maciej Kucia
View of the Arts is an online publication dedicated to film, music, and the arts, with a strong focus on the Asian entertainment industry. As we continue to grow, we aim to deepen our coverage of Asian music while remaining committed to exploring and celebrating creativity across the global arts landscape.
