Making music from your home is easier and cheaper than heading out to a studio but this approach offers its own challenges. Mayuko Hitotsuyanagi, who records as Cuushe, knows them well: “The walls are really thin in Japan, and if you sing loudly you’re going to annoy your neighbors. Plus I do a lot of recording at night.” She may try to keep her music muffled in her apartment, but she managed to catch the ear of Tokyo’s Flau records, the nation’s premier label for hushed music. Flau deals in sparseness, from the kitchen-sink electronics of Kyoto’s Madegg to the nature-loving synth-pop of Cokiyu, who has teamed up with Baths. The imprint was a good place for Cuushe to hone her restrained style, and it nabbed American performers Julia Holter and Motion Sickness of Time Travel to remix her work last year. The results are on display in her second full-length album, Butterfly Case, which exploits her space-induced limitations to create a captivating collection of dream pop.
Like the artists who reworked her songs, Cuushe lets her music develop gradually and seems in no particular rush. Many of the songs on Butterfly Case run for more than five minutes, starting in a wispy synth haze before eventually blooming into more complex structures. First track “Sort of Light” takes cues from dance music, opening with muted pulses before a minimal beat pushes the song forward. Cuushe adds sonic details one at a time, building the track into a formidable whirl of sound that could even prompt nervous shuffling on a dancefloor. On “Twilight”, Cuushe launches with lush synths, but eventually pivots the track into a gallop that ups the urgency and snaps it out of its daydream
Butterfly Case makes the most of this slowly swirling template, to the point where songs start sounding mechanical in the album’s second half. Late-album track “Swing Your Heart” sounds unremarkable after six previous numbers did the slow-build routine much better. More tedious are the instances where Cuushe just drifts, largely eschewing beats in favor of just letting the music float. While it sounds dreamy, it also rings aimless and feels like filler.
Cuushe, though, can thank her cramped recording quarters for helping to emphasize her best sonic quality and the reason she isn’t a generic dream pop peddler. Her vocals are soft, never overpowering the music on Butterfly Case; it's often hard to discern any words, so her voice acts as additional sonic texture, lending the production some extra depth. They can also add emotional impact—her drawn out syllables give “Twilight” a sense of longing, while on closer “Hanabi”, they sound hopeful.
She’s at her best, though, when her singing manages to break through the dreaminess and deliver a simple and direct emotion. “I Miss You” boasts one of Butterfly Case’s best buildups, seemingly peaking with a sing-song melody before whirring synths fade out and Cuushe sighs, “I want to be with you.” Album highlight “I Love You” layers Cuushe’s voice over itself multiple times for the first half of the song, but then she suddenly emerges clear from the haze as she bluntly delivers the titular phrase over and over again. It’s moments like these, where she imbues her songs with a breath-on-neck intimacy, when her second album stands out, and you almost can picture Cuushe quietly creating in her thin-walled apartment.
