Komorebi Finds the Human Heart At the Center of a Sci-Fi Concept Album

No matter how fantastical they get, nearly every science fiction tale has something deeply human at its core — often a reflection of the experiences of many Earthlings happening on some fantastical planet or the arrival of strange creatures on this planet that unveils our prejudices and fears.

Take the comic book created to accompany, The Fall, the fantastic new album by Tarana Marwah, the future pop artist who records and performs as Komorebi. In its pages, we follow the journey of Kiane, an alien from a distant planet who leaves home in search of some kind of meaning to their life before crash landing on Earth. The roots of this tale reach back to the life story of Marwah, a young woman who had a difficult home life growing up in India and got through by escaping into music and anime, two mediums that branded her as something of an outcast in her formative years. So while Kiane, either drawn as a comic or represented by Marwah herself in a pair of music videos, may look otherworldly, underneath the fantastical costumes and wild spacecraft is a young woman trying to find acceptance and carve her own path out in a cultural landscape that can be often unforgiving to original voices.

That theme comes out most clearly through the songs on The Fall. Over a backdrop of music inspired by the unbound work of Björk and Massive Attack, Marwah sings messages of encouragement and empathy to her younger self. “I know you’re feeling lonely,” she intones on the head-nodding “Tangled and Familiar,” “A simple disease / Keeping all the thoughts that haunt you at ease.” The words come out in hushed tones, a result of Marwah’s preferred method of recording her vocal tracks alone at night with all the lights in her home studio turned off.

The Fall is also about Marwah reconnecting with those childhood pleasures of losing herself in her favorite anime and manga. As an adult, her attention been has taken up by her work as a musician. Marwah followed a somewhat typical path into that art form. Encouraged by her parents, she played Western classical music  as a young girl, eventually moving into studying jazz music and leading choirs in her teen years. But it wasn’t until she got her hands on some production software and started making electronic music in her 20s that Marwah found the ideal outlet for her creative vision.

Since then, Marwah has been slowly making inroads in the pop consciousness, landing plum gigs at SXSW and FOCUSWALES, and releasing the well-received EP Soliloquy. She’s also found herself a steady income stream through composing scores for film and TV, including writing the theme for the popular Amazon Prime series Made In Heaven. As she told Paste when we caught up with her recently from her home in New Delhi, “I’m not as good at anything else as I am at making music. When you see something working out, you continue to do it. I’ve never felt like switching.”

Paste: Before we started the interview proper, you talked about how your current home of New Delhi is the ideal place for an artist like yourself. Why is that?

Tarana Marwah: Essentially what defines Delhi and what makes it different from other cities, specifically like Mumbai, is that Mumbai becomes very industrial. Even though it is a hub of music, everything becomes commercial in Mumbai. Delhi retains that creativity and isolation. It allows people to really be themselves and explore new sounds without any external pressure from society. Because Mumbai gets very, very commercial and you’re trying to make a quick buck, trying to pay your rent. I think that changes your music and your artistry when you’re there.

Have you worked in Mumbai at all?

I have. I’ve seen both sides of this. I feel like the work I’ve done for this particular album is far left of center and the other work that I have in order to sustain life in general can get pretty hardcore and intensely commercial. That’s the conundrum for every indie artist in the country right now.

As you mention in the press notes for The Fall, you are one of the few women making electronic pop music in India. What does that mean to you? Is that something that you take to heart? Are you trying to encourage other women to follow your lead?

I didn’t set out to have that intention. When I started doing this, I just started it very intuitively because there was some part of me that needed to be expressed. I bought a laptop in college and I realized I was really good at programming music on a DAW. It happened naturally. Almost by accident. Now looking back, I feel very shocked that there aren’t more women doing this. I think there has been a surge in the last couple of years. But still if I had to really name drop producers, I would be able to count them on one hand, which is very, very surprising to me. I don’t understand how that could be a reality, honestly.

In those same press notes, it says that you wrote The Fall about six or seven years ago. Why did it take so long for the album to finally get recorded? Was it because there were so many other elements — the comic book and the animated videos?

I think it was partly because I had a vision of what scale I wanted this to be done at and it takes time to put something like that together. And this is a perilous path for anyone who’s eager to release music because it takes a lot of time to do it properly. On the other hand, there was this eagerness and willingness to work with people who understood and were on my wavelength. I needed to find my tribe and find the right people to fund the project. People who understood the art style I wanted to achieve and to get the right sound. So it was essentially just finding the right people and dedicating a lot of time to doing the release the right way. I went full perfectionist on it. It definitely cost me a lot because seven years is not a small amount of time. I actually cried a lot the week that the album came out. I cried a lot in relief. It was finally done.

Where does a project like this start for you?

Musically, it begins with influences. Artists who have found that projecting this persona on screen works better for them than actually being themselves. I resonate with that because the person I am in my alone time is very different from the person I am in these videos. I like character building a lot. I love cosplay. I’ve always had this obsession with Japan and larger than life storytelling and anime and film. When I say obsession, I mean I really nerd out on the scores, the directors. I have archives of all my favorite films and why they’re my favorite. And artists that I follow. Their different eras and why they dress the way they do. It’s just a bunch of my influences coming together and tying them together in a big pink bow. I wanted to do this also because nobody has done this in our country. It’s a baby country in that way. It’s definitely not original because people have done it before but not here, not in India. So I was like, “Let’s make something happen.”

Are there not many fans of anime in India?

Now, the kids are really into anime. The iPad kids are obsessed with it now. I grew up loving it, but it was difficult to find people. I was an outlier in a sense. I do think that what I’m doing — the concept album — that’s a first. Nobody has really done that. And nobody is really into that either. To get a bunch of Indians interested in something like this is a task, I must say. It’s not the easiest thing to really get across.

When it comes to the influences you were pulling from to create The Fall, what were the artists or shows you were most inspired by?

I took a lot of inspiration, visually, from Gorillaz. Their campaigns and their characters and how they represent the 3D characters to tell a story with each album. When it comes to costumes and out of the box thinking, I took from Björk who I think is one of the greats. I love Bowie as well. I love that he had so many different personas. He really bled each character into the album. I really love ’90s hip-hop, which you can hear musically. And industrial rock also. In terms of shows and films, it wasn’t really a show in particular. I drew from the aesthetic of ’90s post-apocalyptic Cartoon Network. The color palette. The neon, the cyberpunk, the futuristic styles and the larger than life portraits and landscapes.

You wrote the bulk of the album on your own. That seems to be your preferred method of working, at least at the start of a new project. Why is that? Are you making sure that it is strictly your vision from the jump?

No, I think I just write well in isolation. I do bring a lot of people on board to collaborate later, but I’m able to tap into something more spiritually when I’m alone. I don’t think I can do that if I have eyes on me at that moment. It’s definitely why I work more at night than in the day. I’m not at all fond of it otherwise. I don’t like being alone outside of my work at all. It’s a weird binary there. It’s really strange.

At what point, when you were writing The Fall did you know it was time to bring in other players and other voices?

Once the songs are fully composed and arranged, at that point I look at my session and I see parts that are programmed that could sound better live. That’s when I look at my archive of friends and start reaching out to them and bring them on board. I work a lot with Gaurav Raina who’s my mixing engineer and co-producer. He’s like my mentor, in a way. He guides the process when I’m writing. He’s probably the only person that’s involved much earlier than anyone else.

With that, are you willing to bend a little bit or change things if someone like Gaurav or another player has an idea that could improve a song? Or do you hold on to a very specific vision of how a song should be?

It depends on the song. For example, we did have an argument over the song “Better Not Bitter” because I felt like my vocal take was imperfect and Gaurav really appreciated the emotion in that take. He was like, “Whether it sounds perfect or not, you’ve captured the emotion really well.” And I wasn’t able to do that again after that take. Stuff like that is where we get really technical and start pushing our creative weight. Otherwise, I think I’m pretty malleable. I don’t have to stick to one idea. I like exploring new things and finding new sounds. I think that’s why you can’t tie the album down to one genre. Everyone that hears the music has a different opinion of what genre it is, which I think is nice. It’s nice to be genre fluid in that way.

Another aspect of the recording process for you is that you record your vocal tracks alone in the dark, which definitely lends a sense of intimacy to the music on The Fall. But does that make it challenging when you’re performing these songs on stage in front of a crowd of people?

It’s a struggle. I’m not as evolved as I should be as an artist because I feel like an artist should be detached from their surroundings. I’m definitely not. If you put me in front of an audience and they are excited, then I get excited. If I’m not happy with my environment, that might reflect in my voice. I am very sensitive to sensory input in that way. It’s a learning curve. I really have to work on that.

But you still love performing for people?

Absolutely. When you look past the endless cables and the technical issues and laptop issues and picking up your gear when you’re only 5’3”… when you get past that part, I love it best.

Let’s talk about the visual side of this album. You have the comic book that was created alongside the album and the videos that you’ve released so far. How was it to put those together and find the right people to work with?

The Unreal Engine video for “I Grew Up” just happened by chance. The head of Media Monks, which is the Unreal team from Delhi, attended one of my shows and approached me after and said he wanted to work with me. I honestly was expecting this kind of opportunity at this scale. Then it just became an ambitious project. We were very passionate about doing something different. For “Watch Out,” again, somebody from Starving Artist Films found my work online and approached me and said he wanted to work with me. We aligned our visions of wanting to do something different yet again. We shot it in the mountains in Leh, which is some of the most otherworldly landscapes in India. It’s really insane, the scale of it. You can’t even capture it on camera. Everything else was more by design. I wanted to work with the right makeup artist and the right costume designers. Luckily, by virtue of knowing the right people, I was able to put a team together. It was really nice that everyone was as excited about working on this as I was. The opportunity to get to do something different. Like I said at the beginning of this conversation, the commercial side of things is bringing everyone down here. So when you get an opportunity to do something different, it’s just great.

You talked a little about your interest in anime as a kid, but what was the ultimate attraction to that? Was it simply an escapism thing?

Yeah. I think I used those mediums to really zone out of what was happening around me. I come from a dysfunctional home and I needed these things to survive that time. I used it as a coping mechanism that I now draw from creatively. Another cool thing about the record is that I’m tapping into these things that made me happy as a child and I’m presenting them now as an adult to my audience.

And hopefully in presenting these things, you can help someone dealing with the same issues of dysfunction in their home cope with it a little better.

People who have reached out to me usually come from a place of, “We really resonate with your art because we’ve been through similar experiences.” And these are strangers. That’s a really amazing feeling. But then, of course, you can’t please everyone. There’s also a large section of the audience who’s not interested in such heavy topics. It’s not the most palatable album, I would say. But I feel it’s important to tell the truth. This is my truth and I have to write about it.