Interview: MURASAKI WAVES on City Pop Music and Band’s Background

During our visit to the German convention DoKomi, we had the chance to sit down with the city pop cover band MURASAKI WAVES. The weekend prior, the group performed on the main stage of “Japan-Tag” in Düsseldorf, an event which celebrates Japanese culture. At DoKomi, MURASAKI WAVES delivered the best of the city pop catalog to both the conventions’ Live Stage and Hana no Machi space.

The band features Lily Aiko Mertens (vocals), Ares Gnauk (guitar), Yannick Bethmann (bass), Kenji Fujii (drums), Raphael Zuber (keys), Finley Münker (trumpet), Alex Hefny (saxophone), Felix Koch (trombone), and Alex Ehret (trombone). In this interview, we spoke with them about MURASAKI WAVES’ roots, the current city pop revival, and their journey as a cover band so far.

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Portions of this interview have been lightly edited for clarity.

Q: What does the name ‘MURASAKI WAVES’ stand for?

Yannick: We started without a name like many bands, but we needed one for live performances. We brainstormed a bit and we thought of the Ghibli movie Ocean Waves. We thought it was necessary to include something from Japanese culture in the name, and then we changed the ‘ocean’ part to ‘murasaki’ which means purple in Japanese.

We were also inspired by the work of Hiroshi Nagai, a famous Japanese pop artist who did many of the original city pop covers. A lot of Nagai’s themes are beaches or pools with purple-blue colors: the color of city pop. We thought the best decision was to combine all these concepts to create our name.

Raphael: We also thought that ‘MURASAKI WAVES’ represented city pop’s lyrics, since they are in Japanese but they use English words too. And as he said, purple is the color people associate with city pop on the Internet.

Q: Did you decide to perform city pop from the start?

Yannick: It was city pop from the start. We really wanted to bring the original feeling of the genre. Ares and I played in another band before, and he was the one who introduced me to city pop. During the pandemic, I really started to listen to it a lot. We listened to it together with Kenji too. We thought it was funky and fun to play. 

We already knew people in Düsseldorf who we could ask “Why not start a band to cover this music?” Many were new to the genre but everybody liked the first time they listened to it. Then we chose one or two songs to start playing and had fun.

Q: How would you explain the current “revival” of city pop?

Yannick: It has to do with Internet culture and the way virality works. A video of Mariya Takeuchi’s song ‘Plastic Love’ went viral around 2018. That was the first time many people outside Japan were introduced to city pop. Obviously, for Japanese people the connotation is very different. For them, it’s like our 80s rock music. 

Lily: I feel that the reason city pop resonates with Westerners is probably the current glorification of Japanese culture. Everything that is from Japan seems cool. There’s also the nostalgia of younger people for older times, like the 70s or 80s. Even the 90s or 2000s are becoming more popular again.

Q: There’s an anime currently airing where they performed ‘Plastic Love’ [ending theme of Gals Can’t Be Kind to Otaku!?’s Episode 6].

Ares: I also got the impression that Japanese people didn’t know about many artists and songs that became popular through this city pop revival on the Internet. I think it’s nice that a lot of these songs are being rediscovered and gaining a bigger fandom.

Q: There’s an artist in DoKomi who does prints with a city pop aesthetic. I bought a print two years ago.

Lily: She’s Mizucat! She designed our logo.

Raphael: She also took our first official band photo.

Lily: The photos are amazing.

Raphael: If you look at our Instagram, you will see these pictures with a white car. It’s her car! She brought it for the photo shoots.

Q: Did you know before you started with the band?

Raphael: Jannik got in touch with her through Instagram.

Lily: Yeah. She mixes the anime style with the vintage style of the 70s and 80s. It really fit us.

Rapahel: We’re still very happy with the photos and the logo.

Q: I also saw that you performed at Japan Tag last week [before DoKomi]. Is it like a convention?

Raphael: It’s more like a city festival organized by the city of Düsseldorf. They have been organizing it annually for almost 20 years. On the riverside of the River Rhine they put a lot of stalls and three stages for music, dancing, and traditional Japanese instruments performances. There are sports and martial arts as well.

Q: How did you get invited to Japan Tag?

Yannick: We wrote them directly and played there for the first time two years ago. The event dives into activities beyond anime. While DoKomi is more anime-oriented, Japan Tag dives into the traditional Japanese music, clothing, and more.

Raphael: Cosplay and anime stuff plays a big role too. For us, Japan Tag works better because we can put more focus on city pop.

Q: What do you think about city pop being ‘modern’ yet ‘traditional’ at this point?

Lily: Maybe I’m wrong, but during the time city pop was appearing in Japan, it was perceived as a Western thing. People thought Japanese artists were suddenly making Western pop music, mixing Japanese and English lyrics. In that sense, only the use of Japanese could be considered ‘traditional’ because the sound is ‘poppy’ or westernized.

Yannick: After the Second World War, a lot of Japanese culture faded away and gave way to Western-American technology. Even how things were made or the industrial materials used. Everything shifted to a Western style. 

Many people welcomed this change, other parts of the population thought Japan should have kept more of their heritage. While this is all debatable, I think city pop is music that Japan made its own and added their unique touch to it. 

Q: You know a lot of the city pop’s roots. Not everyone researches the heritage of the music they are playing.

Raphael: Yeah, and I wanted to add something about your question of ‘old versus modern.’ When we play city pop nowadays, it’s old music but it’s also new to the people we play for. That’s also why it works for everybody: it’s nostalgic since it sounds like the 80s, but it’s new because many people haven’t heard it before. And I think that’s why it is cooler than another cover of ABBA or Bee Gees. It brings something new but sounds familiar at the same time.

Ares: The music that came up in the 70s and 80s is also the biggest background or root for current Japanese pop music. If you look at chord progressions of city pop, 90% of it is present in anime songs and J-pop music. It’s harmonically interesting, cool music. Back then, they were influenced by the synthesizer sounds which sounded modern at that time. Right now, there’s a shift towards a ‘retro-futuristic’ style, which is really awesome. If you listen to old recordings, it still sounds high quality and pristine. It doesn’t lose its charm. 

Raphael: That’s exactly what fascinates so many young people, including the whole background and the living style, and the vibe of city pop. Back then, Japan was thriving economically, and many new things were happening on a cultural level. Traditional things were vanishing too, but overall, people had a positive attitude towards the future and the new technologies. Today we are more into nostalgia and going back to times in which the future looked cooler. In a way, it’s about ‘being nostalgic for the futuristic.’

Q: Have you felt that the attention to city pop has been growing?

Lily: I feel like it was at its peak during Pandemics and it hasn’t declined since then. It’s also a subculture, so it’s always been there.

Yannick: It’s hard to quantify or know what the interest on city pop is like right now. As Lily said, the peak came with this video of ‘Plastic Love’ and ‘Stay With Me’ going viral, the two most known city pop songs. They were all over social media. You can still see people using the city pop aesthetic which they associate with cars, for example. We also find that in our concerts there are people that didn’t know it but also people coming to us telling us they are happy to finally have the possibility to see these songs live. That’s exactly our goal, what we’re trying to do.

Raphael: Maybe we can say that, on a local level, it has been on the rise in the sense that we have constantly moved to bigger stages, like in Japan Tag or DoKomi. This year we played for a bigger crowd than we did two years ago. There wasn’t another city pop cover band when we started. On this local level, you could say it has been growing a bit; there’s an audience for city pop.

Q: What is the hardest part of being a band?

Lily: For us in particular, I’d say we are a pretty big band. We have three brass players, and in total we have eight members. The biggest challenge is to find a day when everybody can come to practice.

Raphael: We don’t make money from it, so we also need to work in other jobs. It’s kind of hard to find time to play on stage.

Q: Now that you mention it, what do you do outside music?

Raphael: It’s very different in each case. I’m studying for a master’s degree in economics and political science.

Ares: I study jazz bass, but as a passion project. I don’t do much besides music. I work in a wine store.

Yannick: I live with him and sometimes he brings some [laughs].

Lily: I study art at the Dusseldorf Art Academy. I started studying in 2023, which is also the year we started with the band. It was a very good time to start the band for me, because as soon as art became my main thing, it was nice to balance it with music and just have fun with it.

Kenji: I’m studying marketing and management, but also working as a freelance musician, and in different other projects too. I’m also playing in a different band in which we write our own music.

Yannick: I work in IT at Vodafone. It’s difficult at times, but it also gives me financial freedom, which I’m thankful for. You also have to prioritize and decide what to spend your time on. Talking about how it is to be in a band, I always compare having a band with having a relationship. There are many qualities that you need in a good relationship that you also need in a band; most of all is just communication. 

As a band with this many people, you have different ambitions and opinions. People come from different backgrounds and then they are put together and have to solve problems together, which can be hard at times. But if you have good communication, that is the starting point to solve the problems that get in the way.

Ares: And nobody is as organized as Kenji. The main reason for a band to fall apart is when there isn’t an organizing, driving force behind them. It’s very important. 

Raphael: You can repeat that “we would like to play a gig” but you need to reach out to someone first, send emails back and forth, discuss how you are going to do it, money, what songs are you going to play, who is gonna arrange those songs, when and where you’re gonna rehearse them. So many questions that need someone to look over them.

Q: Have you ever considered producing an original city pop song?

Raphael: Not really. Except for myself, all four members that are present at the moment, are also playing in other bands and musical projects where they do original music but in another style. As a city pop cover band, we want to focus on playing live and performing covers. There is not much sense in “going back somewhere.” For example, you can paint an illustration in the style of Michelangelo, but it defeats the point. There is already a lot of good music from that time in city pop style. For me, it’s not something that makes sense to try to imitate in the present.

Q: I never thought of that point of view. 

Raphael: Art always happens in specific contexts. If you want to make music today, you have today’s approach. If you try to sound like a genre from the past, you will be limited.

Q: Do you have a goal for the near future? A place you would like to perform?

Ares: Japan [everyone agrees].

Lily: If you had asked us three months ago, we would have said Japan Tag’s big stage, but now we have already done that. 

Yannick: Once we were in the rehearsal room joking about “We are gonna be on the big stage once in ten years, let’s just have fun with the process. Maybe sometime we are gonna achieve that.” It’s hard to put into words, but we’re happy that we had the opportunity to do that. 

Now that you ask us about the next step, the process is still the most important thing, but I think Japan would be the biggest goal ever. Before that we would also love to play in other European countries, like Spain. It would be an improvement to play outside of Germany.

Q: Finally, could you share a message to your fans?

Yannick: Be inspired, make music, make art, do some cooking, do programming, make something, do anything.

Lily: And anything is possible if you have the right surroundings and the right people. If you have the right people, you will just know it. 

Ares: Also thank you! There are a lot of sweet people who come to our performances and express their support over the years. We have a good feeling knowing that we can create happiness.

Raphael: We are moved by all the people reaching out to us on Instagram, commenting that they are coming to our concerts, buying T-shirts, asking for autographs, or giving us presents. Thank you, keep it up, and come to more of our concerts.

Yannick: Yeah, it’s all about human connection and love. Music is a good platform to make it possible. Love always wins!

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We’d like to thank MURASAKI WAVES for the interview opportunity. As fans of Japanese culture, we appreciated the opportunity to experience these catchy city pop songs live. We look forward to seeing them on stage again soon.

If you’re in Germany, be sure to check if MURASAKI WAVES has a concert scheduled near you!