Hailing from the seaside communities surrounding Enoshima, a small island located 50 km southwest of Tokyo, Maya Ongaku is a ragtag collective of local musicians whose brand of earthy psychedelia transcends widely beyond the roots of their inner souls. The name derives not from any kind of ancient civilization, but rather a neologism defined as the imagined view outside one's field of vision.
"Our new album is filled with a kind of sensibility that wasn't a part of our first one: a desire to get anyone who hears it to get up and dance. We spent 2023 playing a good number of live shows, from touring and playing festivals throughout Europe and Japan. We are a band without a drummer, and we’ve been using synths and drum machines—jamming along with machines so to speak—to freely rearrange the songs from our debut album.
That experience is what motivated us to make this EP. Playing live in front of a crowd allowed our music to go through a gradual transmutation. It instilled us with the desire to make more people dance. The title of the EP is Electronic Phantoms.
We are reaching a point where our lives are at the mercy of electronics. With the development of new technologies like AI, it’s becoming harder to distinguish between what is real and what is computer-generated. These circumstances can be likened to the appearance of a phantom. The world of virtual reality can also be described as an electronic phantom.
What kind of music will result if we take a world lived in by spiritual beings and express it with something diametrically opposite, with sounds generated by machines? That is the main idea behind the creation of this EP. To be deceived by machines, or to have our knowledge overtaken—those ideas don’t frighten us. Rather, we’d like to reach a level of understanding with machines. Through jamming along with them. Love isn’t born out of machines; it can only come from within our hearts."
Tsutomu Sonoda August, 2024