Singular Balance (Jan. 2020)
Do you remember that one memory? Do you remember the one moment that, when living within it, seemed infinite? All would be bookmarked by that space in time, knowing nothing will be the same before or after. Singular Balance, both as an artist and as a term within itself, personifies the fleeting infinity of these moments. If that raindrop of a perfect second could exist somehow tangible, it would be within the sonic landscapes of Singular Balance, within their infinite space of hope.
Born in New York and currently residing in Japan, Justin Ueyama-Burke has crafted a musical home to store our most treasured emotions. He asks only for us to have, as his moniker implies, a Singular Balance amongst each other. You’re never meant to overthink much of what is around you in this quaint home of understanding. Just feel it. Just lean into the warmth of the weightlessness and allow nostalgia to become your guide upon this humanistic journey.
You stand at one platform with another across a dark gap. A tightrope extends across. You require peace of mind and a center of gravity to get across. By reaching the other side, new understanding will reside within you. You take a step onto the rope and instantly, having leaned into the understanding Singular Balance provided, are able to recall the lessons taught and emotions unlocked. You are able to reach the platform with memories intact, with love in your heart, with the world now at your fingertips and a sense of self previously unknown.
Singular Balance isn’t just the name Justin goes by when he creates, far from it. It’s the vision of a new age where peace, understanding and memory can live harmoniously. A location to visit for minutes at a time to recall all the good needed to fight through the next hurdle we face. Singular Balance is the sonic dream of human connection and the eventual universal understandings we’ll all have for one another. Endless individuals, two weights on each side with a Singular Balance existing in the middle.
Our first question as always, howʼs your day going and how have you been as of late?
My dayʼs going pretty good, I have a fever but itʼs getting a little better so Iʼm sort of alternating between laying in bed and finishing up a song that Iʼve been working on. Lately, Iʼve been pretty good, just working on music and talking to my friends now-and-then on Facetime. Iʼve realized recently that whenever Iʼm not able to work on music, I donʼt feel too great and I get pretty depressed. I think itʼs because I realized that music is ultimately what I want to do with my life, and if Iʼm not putting effort into my career or making progress, I feel as if Iʼm stuck in one place. It would be the same thing, just in a different dynamic, if I wanted to be a lawyer or a doctor or something, it would feel like Iʼm not progressing towards my goal if Iʼm not studying or something. Music has a different dynamic in that sense though because thereʼs no real ‘deadlinesʼ or ‘assignmentsʼ or ‘testsʼ, and you can easily just get lazy and not work on things. With school, there're constant goals you have to achieve, and consequences if you donʼt. I think the consequences of not working hard in music hit more in the long run.
Most of my friends in Tokyo are Japanese so itʼs nice to have friends that Iʼve met through music that I can video chat and speak English with. Besides those video chats and occasionally hanging out with my half-Japanese and foreign friends, I rarely use English anymore. Iʼm just now realizing how much easier it is for me to be expressive in English. I donʼt think itʼs necessarily ‘harderʼ to speak Japanese for me, itʼs just easier for me to be expressive via word selection and nuances in English. Whenever I say things or speak in a general sense, Iʼm always really selective with my words so that the thought that Iʼm trying to get across is interpreted most authentically, or interpreted in a way thatʼs most parallel with my original thought. I had two friends who lived here on a student visa and a holiday visa, Sol from Perth and Rick from Vancouver, but their visaʼs expired so they had to go back home which sucked. I was super lonely after that for a while but Iʼm kinda good now. One of them is coming back in April for a year, so thatʼs something to be stoked about.
What have you been up to this year specifically, both in art and in life as a whole?
Iʼm taking a year off of university to work on music and save up money. Once I graduate university, Iʼll have a degree in ‘Policy Managementʼ, which is probably the most boring string of words that Iʼve ever come across, and I have zero interest in it. But Iʼm going to graduate just for the sake of having a degree because things like that are super important in Japan.
A few months ago I kind of reached this point where I realized that music is what I want to do in the future as my career, instead of doing job hunting here in Japan and joining a company. Iʼm super grateful that thereʼs something in my life that I can spend countless hours on and not get tired of. A lot of things have happened in my life in the past year, and itʼs been a pretty emotional ride for me. Iʼd rather it be an emotional year, a year with a lot of ups and downs, with certain contrasts, as opposed to just a more compressed year in terms of things that I feel and go through. Music is just me materializing these experiences that I have so itʼs cool to be able to do that, and if these experiences were more compressed or flat in an emotional aspect, I wouldnʼt have anything to materialize into music. I would feel super suppressed if I didnʼt have an outlet like music. Skateboarding was an outlet for me too but musicʼs so much different because something materializes out of it, and thereʼs a charm in that. Some days this year Iʼve worked on Ableton for 12 hours a day and Iʼll be fine, but skateboarding, I surely canʼt do that for so long. I have some friends that could do that though. Most of my skateboarding friends here work at skate shops or clothing stores in the city, one of them works at this clothing store called Noah in Harajuku which is cool, another works at Carhartt. Noah was one of the places I would go and hang out with friends on the way home from the skatepark or something. We usually skate at this place called Komazawa skatepark or in Yokohama. I havenʼt skated in like 3 months though since Iʼve been trying hard to invest all of my time into music because I know itʼll pay off for me in the future.
If you could time travel or fly, which would you pick and why? Do note that for time travel you will cause ripple effects to the future and with flying you may be injured if not careful.
Time-travelling would be sick but the ripples I could cause seem dangerous and make me worried. I feel like time-travelling would have very bad consequences if things go bad. This movie called 'Mr. Nobody' kind of elaborates on that, not on time-travelling, but just on the concept of time and things that result from alterations involving time.
When you were growing up, who were the artists and individuals you found yourself gravitating to and influenced by? What about them caught your eye?
From when I was young, maybe 8 or so, I was really into this band called All Time Low. They had these two songs, ‘Dear Maria Count Me Inʼ and ‘Remembering Sundayʼ that I loved. My mom would listen to Queen and The Beatles, but it was hard for me to resonate with it, it kind of sounded too happy to me. I always seemed to be drawn to music that wasnʼt as upbeat, with a sort of dark energy to it. I also really liked Paramore. When I was in my early years of high school, I got really into Drake, like his more emotional songs like 'Furthest Thing', 'Days In The East', and 'Too Much'. Those are probably my 3 most listened to songs. I remember going to the skatepark after school and skating around while having those songs on repeat, it was sick. I was so into skating back then, it was all I did. I would be at the skatepark all day on the weekends and take the bus to the skatepark after school since my mom would always be at work.
I also was really into Clams Casino and Jhene Aiko. Her song ‘WAYSʼ is so good. I actually just googled it and found out it was produced by Clams Casino too. The reason these songs caught my eye was that they made me feel something, like a really good dark, nostalgic feeling about things that have happened and also things that havenʼt happened. In high school, I got pretty into like Tame Impala and that kind of music, but Iʼve distanced from that and Iʼm very glad I did. In high school, I hung out with my skatepark friends all the time and they only listened to not as melodic sounding rap and hip hop, and I didnʼt really like it. I was always hanging out with them so I lost touch with the music I liked, but moving to Japan and starting fresh has helped me reconnect with myself, in both musical ways and non-musical ways. I also like Drake and Futureʼs album 'What A Time To Be Alive'. ‘Diamonds Dancingʼ and ‘Change Locationsʼ are so good. I value the fact that I came up listening to stuff like that, like Drake, since the stuff I make right now is probably different at first glance to people on the exterior, but on a more basic, interior level itʼs pretty similar in terms of how it makes me feel. This might be hard to understand but itʼs hard for me to put my ideas into words sometimes, I have a lot of semi-formed abstract thoughts that I comprehend myself without words but structuring them into words is a bit difficult. Right now I also really like PARTYNEXTDDOOR, he produced Drakeʼs song ‘Days in The Eastʼ, which is probably my favourite instrumental ever. He also produces his own stuff which is super sick. His song ‘Optionsʼ is awesome. My friend Seungjin from Vancouver showed me him and put me on. I was listening to him the whole time when I was flying back home. I made so many good memories in Vancouver.
What other aspects of your upbringing, and the environment you were in, led you towards art and creation?
I think it was because of skateboarding. Skateboarding's a creative sport where you can do things in the way that you want and express yourself in your unique way without any stable boundaries. Like for just one trick, there are so many different ways to elaborate on it and make it your own, which is the same with music. I was never too good at technical skateboarding tricks so I kind of just took simple things and tried to express them in a clean, unique way. I apply that concept to music too. I was always into really clean, stylish skateboarding, like Supremeʼs skateboarding videos and Alex Olsonʼs '917'. The Supreme videos were shot by William Strobeck, this skateboard videographer that I love. The 917 videos were shot by this guy named John Wilson. Their style of capturing skateboarding always involved having real moments in it, like recording random things that are going on around the skater's environment, like pedestrians walking and looking. That type of rawness appealed to me, as opposed to other skateboarding videos of just technical tricks. Watching skate videos aside from Supremeʼs skate videos is boring for me now. Itʼs kind of fake if you compare it to that other style of shooting. Thereʼs so much more to a 4-second clip of a trick than just those 4 seconds, and there was an emphasis on that and helping people visualize and experience that. Skateboarding is the most monumental thing that changed the way I think and creatively exercise my mind, and I was able to take that and apply it to music.
Also, I had this one friend that I met when I volunteered at this skateboarding camp in my early years of high school, he was the main teacher at the camp and we got along super well. I always skated with him around town, at the university campus or the skatepark. Heʼs much older than me, like 35 or so. He grew up in a similar environment to me but also due to the generation shift, he had a lot of cool perspectives and showed me a lot of cool music that I couldnʼt find out about since my friends were always listening to the same sounding music. He showed me this band called 'Godspeed' one time when we were riding in his car to this indoor skatepark that was a couple of hours away. He played their album ‘Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heavenʼ through the CD player and I loved it. That was probably what caused me to start to shift my music taste, and Iʼm super glad about it. I was just never really exposed to that kind of music since everyone at my high school would listen to generic rap music. This was like 2 years before I started making “loops” and posting them on Soundcloud though. That friend was a huge influence for me, a mentor to me and Iʼm really glad we met. I moved to Tokyo for university right after graduating high school, so it kind of sucks that we canʼt hang anymore. He wrote my recommendation letter for university applications and thatʼs what helped me get into the university I go to now. He also did a little video reference thing talking about me, for the application. Iʼm grateful. I also had this tutor in high school who showed me Brian Enoʼs ‘Airport Musicʼ. I loved it. It was probably my first real exposure to ambient music and influences the stuff I make right now. Itʼs cool because with music you can absorb influential energy from a lot of different genres of music that you listen to, and then compress, meld, and focus all of those diverse influences into one space and channel it to the music that you make yourself. I do this with a lot of music. Thereʼs certain parts of stuff that I like that I take and channel in an abstract way towards my stuff. For example, I like Southsideʼs percussion and how it gets you moving, but I feel like people wouldnʼt say my stuff is similar to his music, you know? But heʼs an important influence for me in terms of rhythm. In this kind of way, I focus and channel a lot of different inspirations towards my music and songwriting.
What similarities do you find in the skateboarding process and the musical one? When approaching each, what consistent mindsets do you hold onto?
Theyʼre both fundamentally the same thing, just done in a different medium. It comes down to creatively expressing yourself in the way that you perceive to be yourself. Skateboarding taught me what I perceive to be myself. Now, I can go and utilize that and apply that image of myself onto other things that I do, like music. Iʼve talked about this kind of thing with my other skateboarding friends and they all agree with me. In this sense Iʼm grateful that I started skateboarding and got really into it since it taught me who I am.
When specifically did you realize music was more than just a hobby for you?
I think I realized that it was more than just a hobby for me maybe a year ago, in mid-2019, but that was only in the same way that skateboarding was more than a hobby for me. But recently, I realized that I could probably make music work for me as a career and sustain myself off of it if I work really, really hard. Until then, living off of music and having music be my full-time career was a far off dream that I let sit in my head and float around since I thought it would be too good to true. Any path that steered away from the typical 9-5 office job path seemed like a far off dream for me, but I realized that setting restrictions on myself and putting a boundary on the extent to which I can achieve certain things is not right. Music is all I want to do with my life, itʼs everything to me. Of course, I love doing other things like reading, skateboarding and taking photos, but itʼs all centred around music and basically, all my time goes into music. Iʼve been working so hard this year, ever since starting my gap year in university. I decided to take a year off of university because I have no real desire to graduate early with a good GPA just so that I can get into a certain company at a certain position. Music is 100% the career path that I want to go down, I honestly can not imagine myself doing anything but that. Iʼve set a timed goal for myself, I have 2.5 years until I graduate, so at the rate things are going right now, I think that if I work hard, I should ideally be able to sustain myself solely off of music.
Looking both interpersonally and in your art, what goals and steps for growth do you feel important to pursue as you build upon this moment in time?
I want to establish more of an identity in my music and bring myself out in it. I want to make bolder music. Thatʼs what Iʼve been doing the past few months or so. I was always pretty scared of being bold. Up until a couple of months ago I was still pretty shy to tell people I make music. But now Iʼve started to come out my shell, and I want to keep this kind of growth going. This is all thanks to some good friends Iʼve made through music. My friends that I made on Soundcloud when I first started were in a different kind of scene, more instrumental based or IDM based as opposed to songwriter based. I realized I wanted to branch out, so seeing people like Maxwell Young, Instupendo, Lontalius, and Seungjin inspired me. What theyʼre doing is super sick and helps push me forward in a playful manner. Establishing a stronger, bolder identity in myself and my music is a really important step for me right now, and I think Iʼm doing pretty well at doing so. I have some things planned out for this year thatʼll help kind of visualize this though, so Iʼm super excited for everyone to see. One of them is a project with Lontalius. Itʼs cool working with him because he comes from a singer-songwriter background as opposed to a more IDM background, which is where I came from. Itʼs helped me realize the direction I want to take things in and helped me visualize goals for myself. Making music thatʼs true to your heart is a super scary move because it makes you bare, exposes you. Thatʼs exactly what I want to do though, and I think itʼs important for me to do so. In the past, I havenʼt really opened myself up to many people, so making music is a really good outlet for me to do this. But making music thatʼs parallel to how you feel is difficult, and itʼs something Iʼm working on, and I think itʼs something all musicians are constantly working at. I guess Iʼm trying to become more bare, no boundaries, this is me.
Between all the music youʼve put out thus far and everything to come in the future, do you feel there is an overarching story youʼre trying to tell? Whether that be an abstract one or one true to your own life or anything in between.
Thereʼs a universal story that I try to repeatedly elaborate on throughout all of my music. I think about this a lot and remind myself of it. I think I unconsciously do this so that I can give more meaning to my music, I donʼt want to just be making ‘beats.' Thatʼs not what my music is and itʼs not what I represent. I guess I try to communicate and elaborate, in my way, on the bittersweetness and darkness of life, but also how those feelings can be really good. Feelings that make you feel real. Thereʼs certain emotions in life that you feel and they make you want to grasp onto them and cherish them. The act of doing that is super important, instead of the contrary, which is letting these feelings slip by before you know it.
Iʼve had moments where these feelings have slipped by me without me knowing that I was even feeling them in the moment. But in the past 6 months, Iʼve learned to try to be aware of these things in the present moment, and value them, no matter what happens afterwards. These moments are special and theyʼll be gone before you know it. These kinds of moments Iʼm talking about are very vague and can be defined across a wide spectrum of qualities and characters. For me, some of these moments have been with really close friends, some of them with past romantic partners, some with family and some with myself. 2019 was a super emotional and rough year for me, but it also came with a lot of good, bittersweet moments that have made me feel things that Iʼve never felt before.
One of my favourite ‘momentsʼ Iʼve had this year was when I walking to the train station after having a coffee date with a girl I liked and going over our conversations, feeling the wind hit my face and seeing the leaves fall around me. Also being on the train and staring out the window, seeing the sunset over the river and then feeling my phone vibrate to notify me that I got a text from a girl I liked. Or waiting to meet my friend at the train station entrance and seeing a bunch of couples around me waiting for their girlfriends and boyfriends to arrive, keeping an eye out to see when they arrive and pass through the train station exit. Seeing the moment they meet and hug each other, stuff like that is heartwarming to see and is the backbone of my music. For the outro to my remix for Instupendoʼs song, I had a lot of these kinds of ‘momentsʼ floating around in the back of my head, and they kind of all formed into one big mass and clicked, materializing into music. I just remembered that my Japanese friend Yuki is the one who mentioned the train station thing. One day we were just hanging out after getting dinner in the city and we were in front of the train station entrance drinking 7/11 canned beer. We were just people watching, which is something I love doing, and he mentioned how itʼs heart warming to see the moment someoneʼs significant other arrives at the train station and they spot each other.
My good friend Yutaka Hirasaka, whoʼs a Tokyo-based musician as well, and I have talked about these special ‘momentsʼ one time when he treated me to dinner. I felt like he was somebody who would be on the same frequency as me in terms of expressing these types of ‘momentsʼ sonically through the medium of music, and I was right. He told me about how he would experience certain things, like seeing the sunset from the window of the train in the evening and being taken away by the beauty of it. He would kind of grasp that moment and hold onto it, and then kind of express that moment in a sonic way through music. There was a special word for this in Japanese that he told me about but I forgot what it was. It resonated with me though and kind of strengthened the way that I already perceived my music to be. It was just sick to see that somebody besides me held a somewhat similar perception towards the act and art of making music, a perception that perceives the act of making music to be something more than ‘ordinary.' Itʼs just a form of very raw self-expression that involves a lot of technicalities and obstacles, but once you learn how to work around those, you can utilize them to your advantage. But I also think that emotions override these technical aspects easily, in a good way. That conversation with Yutaka was memorable for me and was one of the moments throughout the year of 2019 when something clicked within me. I remember sitting at the table drinking my sake and thinking that there is something bigger, something more to all of this, and weʼre so lucky to be in the middle of it, creating. I also felt this when Seungjin and I were walking to the train station in Vancouver to go downtown. We were talking about how our encounter involved way too many coincidences and ‘chanceʼ happenings for there not to be something bigger involved in all of this. Some magical element. My music is simply a memory box for me to hold all these past moments.
Having released a couple projects last year and many singles, itʼs clear youʼve been through the entire creative process more times than you can count. Which important lessons do you think you came to understand in that time and through those projects?
My way of working in the past is much different than it is now and Iʼm glad it is. I used to rush things and place value on quantity over quality. I felt like I was so late to the whole Soundcloud thing and felt like I had to rush to get as much quantity out before everything dies. I wouldnʼt put my all into projects and songs, I would kind of half-ass things just so I'd get things done and have more output, but that was a terrible mindset. I realized that quality is exponentially more important than quantity. A 15-minute album can have a much stronger impact on the listener than an album thatʼs an hour-long if the songs are powerful. Nobody is going to truly remember a ‘decentʼ song or album in my opinion, no matter how much output there is. Quality over quantity as well as trusting your gut. Having a mindset of quantity over quality will dilute your art, whatever it is, and thatʼs the worst feeling. Iʼve completely reframed my creative and structural approach towards songwriting, production, and everything related.
If you can remember, whatʼs your favourite dream youʼve recently had and why do you feel you remembered it above others?
I donʼt remember any details as to the dreams that Iʼve had lately but the concept of dreams is intriguing to me. The fact that dreams are just your subconscious self trying to push things to the surface, to your conscious mind, is really interesting. This person from my university was saying that she took classes on dream perception and dream interpretation and how to intake the message from a dream and figure out what your subconscious self is trying to bring awareness towards. I remember in elementary school art class we made dream catchers. It was something that I didnʼt really think too much of, as it was just a normal school assignment, but thinking back to it now, itʼs cool. I passed this stall selling dream catchers in the city during a date last year and we stopped and talked about them and our perception of dreams, like what we each thought they meant. One of my good friends from my hometown in North Carolina taught me a lot about dreams and Freudian psychology, how dreams hold heavy meaning and dream analysis was a method used within therapy. I remember he told me that everything that arises in dreams has a symbolic meaning, they never represent what they physically appear as within the dream. For example, if youʼre reading a book in a rocking chair on your porch, the book in itself represents something other than a book, and so does the chair. If you drop the book and it falls on the floor and slips through the porch crack and you canʼt reach it anymore, that series of events represents something and is just your subconscious using these symbolic items to bring awareness within your conscious self towards it. This was a long time ago though, and Iʼm not too sure to which extent itʼs true, since Iʼve never really studied psychology or dreams or anything of the sort, it's just something that interested me. A lot of my songwriting is tied to dreams too, back to the question of universality within my music. That's what dreams mean to me, understanding why certain moments of my life reappear within dreams. Dreams are kind of like distorted memories if they appear in this manner, and my music is pretty centred on memories, nostalgia and past moments.
And finally, what excites you most walking into this new decade and how do you hope to exit it in 10 years? As difficult as that is to say.
I guess I would say that what excites me the most is the fact that Iʼve realized what I finally want to do with my life and what direction I want to take it in. Itʼs sick because this realization only fully solidified recently, so itʼs cool timing. I remember in high school, teachers and my family would tell me that college isnʼt about the degree or studying, itʼs about the experiences you go through during those ‘peakʼ years of your life, which result in you realizing what you want to do with your life. I always heard this and thought to myself that it seemed cliche and irrational, but this moment finally came upon me, and it came in the best way possible. I always thought that this would come to me differently like I would take classes and see what classes I would have interest in and that would help me realize what kind of job I want to work when I graduate, but it came in a much bigger way. Itʼs made me realize what my dreams are within my life and realize what my dreams enable me to work towards in achieving those dreams. Throughout my high school and early years of university, I couldnʼt do that because I hadnʼt hit the moment where I realized what my dreams were. It took a long time to realize it though, a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. But after it all, I know this is what Iʼm passionate about.
Are there any thank youʼs you want to say or any thoughts you want to put into the air? The floor is yours.
Thereʼs a lot of people Iʼd like to thank, literally too many. First thank you to Eric Tsui for taking all the sick photos of me. Thanks to Seungjin, Yuki, Kogane, Nuum, Lontalius, Middle School, Parkbird, Rhoda, Mbrr, Derrick Boo, Bonjr, Bounds, Harvest, Garrett, Palence, watercolorsunshine, Instupendo and his manager Janice, Light Blending In, Maxwell Young, Stupid Rick Kid, Combination Lock, Idealism, Lucid Green, ILIVEHERE, San Holo and Bitbird, Yuragi, Code Abi, Evryn, Dead Esther, Yutaka Hirasaka and Shikada, Outgrower, Yuragi, P.ThePi, Pat, Hamulkid, Alex Dayer, Feltbattery, Ito Kaoru, Jbuddy, Lux Natura, Exitpost, Evryn, everyone whoʼs ever shared any of my music, and my family members. So much is coming, so much. Thank you to everyone thatʼs ever shared any of my music, and whoʼs supported me. I appreciate every share and every listen.
Photos by Eric Tsui