Haiku Hands Protest Hypercapitalism And Corporate Culture On The Ravey ‘Pleasure Beast’
In under a decade, Haiku Hands have gone from being a feminist performance arts collective to an international pop group. As they release their consummate album, Pleasure Beast, Beatrice “Bea” Lewis and sisters Claire and Mie Nakazawa are definitely feeling the pressure of success. “I really miss making art for the sake of it, for fun, making it with your friends,” Mie says.
Junkee is talking to two members of the trio over a scrambled Zoom connection in a week of macro tech drama. Beatrice, based in Melbourne, is in Cairns working alongside Kardajala Kirridarra for Circa Cairns, a First Nations circus company, while Mie is at home in Sydney’s inner west. On stage, the energetic Haiku Hands don striking masks and costumes, but when we chat they’re barefaced and in civvies. The pair are reflective in person, pausing mid-question to mull on their answers.
Frequently compared to cult electroclashers Chicks On Speed, Haiku Hands launched as a multidisciplinary collective in 2016 — Claire and Mie, both visual artists, previously performed as part ofHermitude’s live show, and Beatrice was a DJ/producer. Months after their premiere at the Byron Bay Falls Festival, Haiku Hands aired the single ‘Not About You’. They’d develop their own electronic hip-hop style — a mash-up of Missy Elliott, M.I.A and Uffie, with songs revolving around community, empowerment and change.
Now managed by Perth’s Spinning Top Music (its flagship Tame Impala), Haiku Hands are favourites on the festival circuit with choreographed spectacles — and the three occasionally bring friends like Mataya Young into the live fold. Since blitzing 2019’s SXSW, they’ve established a profile in the US, playing New York’s Governor’s Ball in June, which Kendrick Lamar headlined. Scheduled early, Haiku Hands observed punters “charging towards” the stage as the gates opened belatedly. “You can’t really get a better feeling than that,” Mie enthuses.
Haiku Hands dropped their eponymous debut album at the height of the pandemic in late 2020. Diplo’s label, Mad Decent, handled the US release (they notably scored a SOFI TUKKER cameo). They admit the situation wasn’t ideal. “I was definitely sad that we didn’t get to tour it — listening to it with our audience members and [being there to] dance with them and feel that rollback energy on each other, being in the same room,” Mie sighs. Still, Beatrice holds that the timing made sense for them instinctively. “Just being able to wrap up that chapter felt really important, artistically and emotionally and spiritually.”
In 2021, Claire welcomed a baby with Hermitude‘s El Gusto (Angus Stuart) — “very joyous” for the Haiku Hands fold, Mie offers. “When we’re on tour, and when we don’t really have anything else to say to each other, we can just stare at Aiko because she’s cute.” Inevitably, it’s prompted adjustments as they promote Pleasure Beast — Claire is sitting out November’s US tour with Big Freedia, New Orleans’ Queen Of Bounce (BVT is standing in). The group will then hit Australian festivals this summer, starting with Subsonic.
Led by the self-love flex ‘Nunchucka’, with its final declaration “Nobody knows I am the greatest I make you all know it,” Pleasure Beast is an elevation. Haiku Hands embrace ’90s rave nostalgia to protest capitalist hyper-productivity, corporate culture and consumption. They teamed with producers like TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek and the Iraqi-Australian super-DJ Motez. But the biggest sonic revelation is the disco epic ‘To The Left’, a collab with Paul Mac and the queer Māori, Samoan and Australian rap star Jamaica Moana (also famed for a memorable Heartbreak High cameo).
Overall, the Haiku Hands of Pleasure Beast is more confident than its predecessor. “I feel like I changed so much personally and artistically in that time — it’s hard to even pinpoint one specific thing,” Beatrice ponders. “I think I got way better at production. I understood my vocal capacity way more — and I think maybe ’cause I felt safer…”
“We felt more like a unit, the three of us, because we were maybe all more developed as artists or something. I felt more developed as an artist. So maybe more of myself felt like it was in this album – or a deeper part of myself. I think I kind of heard that in Claire and Mie as well, which I really liked.”
For Mie, self-expression is key, though it can be discombobulating. She jokes about aspiring to channel buzzy English rappers in the vocal booth only to hear something different on playback. “I really do think that it’s important to sound authentic ’cause people can hear that — so [you should] really aim to lean into your authenticity, which is really confronting sometimes ’cause you’re like, ‘Wow, this is me and this is all me.’ It’s not 100 percent what you would completely imagine, but then you try and make the most of that and you get something. I think that what I learnt in this album was to trust myself more in decision-making.”
Haiku Hands’ music might be modishly described as postmodern, hybridised or post-genre but, given the collective’s diverse backgrounds, it’s vitally cross-cultural. The Nakazawa sisters were born to a Japanese father and Mie confides that she feels “polarised” in her bicultural identity — a recent visit to Japan was eye-opening, down to divergent etiquette. Western society is individualistic and about “being big”. In contrast, Japanese culture is collectivistic and reserved, she says. Mie discerns that duality mirrored in her personality on and off stage. “I feel both of them — and then I also feel not entitled to be either of them,” she says.
“I definitely struggle with that a lot. I can feel it in my voice right now. It impacts me a lot. A lot of my friends who are biracial – you don’t feel connected to either… and then a little bit connected. When I was in Japan, I felt an extreme compassion for everyone who is disconnected from their culture, because it’s a huge loss and really sad.”
In a press statement Beatrice heralded the album’s crux ‘Feels So Good’ — inspired by Fatboy Slim’s big beat — as “a song about speaking your truth into a world that would often much prefer you to stay quiet, polite, in line and obedient”. Haiku Hands acknowledge its topicality — Beatrice is concerned about online censorship amid the Israel-Hamas war. Yet, she stresses, activism, and speaking out, generally can assume many forms, even interpersonally.
“Activism is trying to do whatever you can within your capacity to make the world a better place — and ‘a better place’, I mean, that just sounds very loose, but it’s to try to help negate people’s suffering as much as you can within your capacity at that time,” she says. “It kind of feels like my duty — in my position as a privileged, middle-class woman in Australia — to use what capacity I have at that point to try to do something for so many different things that I see as unjust. I really feel strongly about a lot of Indigenous Australian rights — and that’s something that I’ve felt strongly for a long time. I know I’m very naive, but I just think I’d like to try and do my best in whatever way I can. Sometimes that’s just doing therapy so I’m a better person.”
Mie believes that music is a vessel for progress, too. “I feel like I understand art — and that expressing yourself is very healing and it’s very powerful. It’s one way of communicating; it’s one way of processing life. My aim is to try and be as brave as possible and take some risks — and remember people don’t really care so much about you as much as you care for yourself!”
Haiku Hands’ new album Pleasure Beast is out now.
Cyclone Wehner is a journalist specialising in hip-hop, R&B, dance music (Detroit techno!) and pop culture. She has spoken to Beyoncé, Rihanna, Pharrell Williams and a who’s who of dance music, including Kraftwerk. Cyclone has also DJed at Melbourne venues like Revolver. Her dream interview is Will Sharpe.
Twitter: @therealcyclone
Image: Supplied