You call them. A dial tone. They stopped answering the phone months ago. Still, you try. The empty space between each tone becomes unbearable. You get desperate. Despite the memories of sunset kisses along the Seine and their breath on your neck in a dark London club, there is nothing to salvage. A last attempt. Another dial tone. You get a clue and, with time, self-respect. You hang up, embrace the silence. C’est fini, mon amour.
The romantic preoccupations of Japanese vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Noriko Sekiguchi—known by the stylized mononym nOrikO—transcend language. She’s in the proud history of voices that break through the rave fog, carrying the la-da-dee, la-dee-das and the sweet dreams of rhythm and dancing. In her songs as POiSON GiRL FRiEND, she recounts love’s highs and lows with simple honesty. Her mischievous sing-song mourns and reminesces in English, French, and Japanese over layered blends of 1980s-style club beats and synthetic strings with the melancholic sensibility of trip-hop. The music blooms to fill the space left in love’s absence.
Born in Yokohama, Japan as the daughter of an international banker, nOrikO spent part of her childhood in Rio de Janeiro. She received primary education in French schools, coming home to a mother with a penchant for chanson. Returning to Japan as a teenager in the ’80s, she took advantage of lax ID requirements to attend legendary Japanese rock DJ Kensho Onuki’s London Nite parties, dancing the night away to ska, soul, and the Beatles.
After securing a contract with Polydor to make a singer-songwriter record, nOrikO embarked on a long trip through Europe. She dove headfirst into London nightlife, rubbing elbows with the New Romantics and the goths, entranced by clubs where a single night hosted wide-ranging sounds: new wave, indie rock, house, techno. One night on a dancefloor in Soho, the DJ played an ambient piano mix of Lil Louis’ acid house classic “French Kiss,” and somewhere in the transcendence of the slowed-down beat and the sampled moan and the bass’ seemingly infinite drone, the Japanese girl who’d arrived in the UK enamored by the Smiths and the Cure decided to focus her energies on the drum machine.
Back in Japan, she made friends at a new wave night called “Club Psychics,” according to one of her few interviews in English, with the blog Fond/Sound. nOrikO and two friends formed POiSON GiRL FRiENDS, taking the name from Scottish art rocker Momus’ second album, 1987’s The Poison Boyfriend. The trio released one self-titled EP, featuring a jangly early version of “Hardly Ever Smile (without you).” The more popular recording of the song opens Melting Moment, reimagined with a chugging drum machine, a low swell of synths, and cinematic strings that stand in somber contrast to the earlier “alternative guitar version.” It is now inarguably nOrikO’s signature song. Her subdued delivery strikes a nerve with the directness of its yearning, whispered over an icy trip-hop beat: “I’d give up all my life for just your kiss.”
After the trio disbanded, nOrikO retained the name. She went on to shape her debut solo EP with a motley crew of collaborators that included house producer Tetsushi Fujita, early techno producer Baby Tokio, electronic body musician and sound engineer Yuji Sugiyama, violinist and Killing Time band member Neko Saito, and keyboard player and guitarist Makoto Otsu of Phew. Like those unforgettable club nights in London, Melting Moment would be a harmonious marriage of rock and electronica.
Though it runs just 35 minutes, Melting Moment feels grandiose in scope. “Fact 2,” the song that plays out like a disconnected call with an ex, is a tense storm of competing sounds: the cowbell-like breakbeat, the low rattle of what could pass for tambourine, the screechy guitar. Apart from that opening goodbye—It’s over, my love—nOrikO’s voice doesn’t break through the hurricane until about halfway through. When she speaks, her words pierce the heart: “Do you love me like you used to do?/I still love you more than everything.” By letting the production do the talking, nOrikO invites us into the strained feeling on the far side of a tense phone call. At a 1992 label showcase, she held a mobile phone to the mic and let it screech. She ends the song on a note of longing, whispering, “I still love you.”
To create in a language that is not your mother tongue can feel like a form of displacement, an attempt to locate one’s intended meaning in a completely different landscape. Often the writing produced is simple, to the point, and (sometimes, to native speakers) strange; consider the reception to Shakira’s Laundry Service, where the Spanish-speaking pop star jumped boldly into writing in English after studying the poetry of Walt Whitman and Leonard Cohen. nOrikO’s early cultural adaptations surely informed her writing: From a Japanese-speaking family, she learned some Portuguese as a child, attended a French school, and eventually spoke English in London. nOrikO is humble about her lyrics, describing herself as a musician who writes first from the melody. The language the lyrics come out in is a matter of channeling. Chalk it up to the ways our brains transform in diaspora.
nOrikO’s music is affecting because it also plumbs another form of displacement: that of the heart. If we gain a different perspective from migrations, what do we gain in expanding the geography of our feelings? If we boil it down, nOrikO’s emotional core is very French. It’s a tendency most prominent in her cover songs, gentle transformations that feel emblematic of a particularly Parisian mode of longing, like her gossamer version of French singer Michel Polnareff’s 1966 ballad “Love Me, Please Love Me,” or a 2014 recording of “Light My Fire” that turns one of the Doors’ signature songs into something akin to bossa nova.
But the first time nOrikO tapped into romance à la française was her version of Jane Birkin’s “Quoi,” which appears near the end of Melting Moment. The bilingual cover song, which also draws English lyrics from the jazz standard “All of Me,” is driven by an omnipresent piano riff, downtempo breakbeats, string and guitar melodies, and a vocal delivery so breathy it could have made Birkin blush. nOrikO’s voice is a bell on the high notes, capturing the doe-eyed softness and shameless romanticism that keeps yé-yé divas like Catherine Ribeiro and Françoise Hardy eternally on lovers’ mixtapes.
For all its ethereal fancy, nOrikO’s romance is grounded in a real search for meaning. On the following year’s full-length for Columbia, Love Me (named in part for the Polnareff tune), she spends a whole song attempting to define the feeling: “Love is light/Love is hope/Love is real/Love is hopeless/Love is lose/Love is hate.” At times her yearning is platonic, too: The second half of Melting Moment opens with “Those Were the Days,” a song popularized as Welsh singer Mary Hopkin’s 1968 debut single. Over a beat reminiscent of UK garage, a jolly bar song becomes filled with melancholy nostalgia. nOrikO’s voice rumbles deep and tired, stirring low as she contemplates days when she and her friends “would fight and never lose.” In her assessment, the rapture and dissolution of love and friendship is also an apocalypse.
Melting Moment appeared just after the golden age of Western-inspired genres in Japan such as city pop and shibuya-kei, but despite taking inspiration from England and France, the EP’s snapshot of a wandering soul seeking absolution in big-city nightclubs was never a mainstream success. “In Japan, it was popular among young people who like edgy music, but it didn’t resonate with the general public who listened to J-pop,” nOrikO told Resident Advisor in 2024. After Melting Moment, she released a few more albums as POiSON GiRL FRiEND before taking an extended break from the project. She went on to live in France, occasionally DJing or performing live, collaborating on music under the names Dark Eyed Kid and Kiss-O-Matic, and documenting her life on her blog.
In recent years, Melting Moment’s borderless viewpoint and open-minded approach to genre has attracted a global audience that recognizes it as a quietly revolutionary piece of music, and its creator as an unsung electronic pioneer. In 2021, “Nobody,” a song from POiSON GiRL FRiEND’s 1993 release, Shyness, was included on the well-received compilation Heisei no oto: Japanese Left-Field Pop From the CD Age (1989-1996), sparking renewed interest. In 2023, Melting Moment received a vinyl reissue, and nOrikO’s distinctive, feather-light voice featured on “So Many Ways” by Kiss Facility, Mayah Alkhateri and Sega Bodega’s shoegaze duo. As POiSON GiRL FRiEND found new audiences, a world tour took nOrikO to China and the U.S. In 2025, she’s set to tour Europe, starting with a sold-out show in Paris.
On Melting Moment’s closing title track, nOrikO sings in English, French, and Japanese, her voice piercing as she makes peace with a relationship that’s evaporated into words left unsaid. The record ends with a violin solo and elegant piano, a moment as restorative as the sunlight and breeze on your face as you exit the party, body depleted from dancing out a broken heart. Perhaps what continues to draw new generations to this underground gem is its sense of fragile hope. Over ambient textures and breakbeats on “The Future Is Now,” nOrikO contemplates a crumbling world and grabs our shoulders to give them a shake: “Why don’t we try/To save our planet for our children?” (Another simple, key exclamation: “Don’t be negative!”) Melting Moment is a small utopia, radiating human warmth to resist the modern world’s ever-encroaching isolation. It’s an invitation to step into the present.
