“Bright Whites”

Kaoru Ishibashi spent the 2000s in other people’s bands. He co-founded Jupiter One in New York and played violin with Regina Spektor, Sondre Lerche and of Montreal. In 2011, at 35, he moved back in with his parents in Norfolk, Virginia, to start again under his own name, Kishi Bashi. A first EP, Room for Dream, came out that May, and a Kickstarter that winter raised $20,357 from 436 backers, well past its $12,000 goal, to have the album he had recorded at home mixed and mastered properly. Joyful Noise released it as 151a on 10 April 2012, his solo debut.

“Bright Whites” is the third of its nine songs, 4:12, written and produced by Ishibashi and mixed with Drew Vandenberg at Chase Park Transduction in Athens, Georgia. Clayton Rychlik plays the percussion, and a crew credited as the Athens Biohazard Manplayers supplies the hand claps and group vocals. The lyrics switch between English and Japanese; the official translation of the refrain runs “probably impossible”, “can’t stop”, “can’t take it anymore”. He told NPR that he uses Japanese as a percussive instrument and that the words usually come after the sound. The album title plays on ichi-go ichi-e, one time, one meeting, which he described as the value of a single moment, imperfections included.

The video, directed by Brett Vaughn and premiered by Spin that April, has exotic birds trying to escape a carnival while members of of Montreal act out more than fifty idioms. Then, in late October, the song was used in a commercial for Windows 8, part of the global campaign Microsoft launched on 23 October, three days before the system went on sale. The spot shows people signing in by drawing over their own photos, set to the first English verse, which begins “You and me at the edge of the world”. On 2 November Ishibashi posted a clip of himself hearing his song on TV.

By December “Bright Whites” was on NPR Music’s list of the 100 favourite songs of the year, which noted how it had gone from nothing to a national ad campaign without losing its charm. NPR’s Linda Holmes pointed out that he had started 2012 without an official SXSW slot and ended it in a Microsoft ad. A 7” of the song followed in 2013, with a string-quartet arrangement of Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place” on the B-side. For a lot of listeners, it was the introduction.