Courtesy of Ki/oon

“To be honest, I’m really not much of a conversationalist,” admits Koji Nakamura in his first proper interview with the English-language press since branching out as iLL after the breakup of his popular band Supercar. “But since I ended up having to do interviews for my career, I’ve had to learn how.”

With Supercar, Nakamura was the main singer-songwriter for one of Japan’s most popular and admired bands of the last decade. Artfully blending aspects of classic rock, indie rock and electronica, the group achieved that rare balance of popular acclaim and hipster credibility before parting ways after a decade in 2005.

Nakamura started the band with friends from Aomori Prefecture in the far north of Honshu, but Supercar reached a national audience even before they’d played in their hometown. “Our first gig was in Shibuya,” he explains between cigarettes at his record company’s Nogizaka office. “A talent showcase for a Sony sub-label brought us to Shibuya. I don’t really remember it too well—it was a stressful experience.”

Finding success with Supercar straight out of high school means that a life of music is all Nakamura has known. In many ways, he seems the quintessential otaku who prefers to let his music do the talking. On iLL’s new, second album Dead Wonderland, that means an improbable but satisfying fusion of brooding indie rock with a battery of searching strings—often reaching a point where the music tilts on the verge of chaos.

Nakamura’s collaborators for the album were two formidable presences in contemporary Japanese music: violinist Yuji Katsui, known for his work with improvisational collective Rovo, and cellist Hiromichi Sakamoto, who is notorious for deploying power tools on his cello. At a packed showcase concert for the album in Shibuya a few days prior to the interview, Sakamoto whips out a power sander, showering the stage with sparks as he presses it into the pin of his instrument.

After the more conventional song structures of Supercar, iLL has clearly been a liberation for Nakamura. “I felt like we’d already explored our potential and that nothing new was going to come out of that lineup,” he says. “I wanted to play freely with different musicians, and experience a range of musical environments. To be honest, I never really thought Supercar would last that long.”

Nakamura says he chose the name iLL because of its dark connotations, and because it could be applied to beautiful music, noise rock, pop, and everything in between. “I’ve been into classical music for a long time, and was also influenced by Nico’s album Chelsea Girl and Lou Reed’s recent work with cellist Jane Scarpantoni,” he says about the new album. “I wanted to create something along the lines of that sort of music—something very Spartan with little in the way of drums—but that would reflect my own sensibility.”

The songs on Dead Wonderland vary from more straightforward vocal numbers featuring Nakamura’s understated, impressionist lyrics like the brooding, delicate “Call My Name,” to instrumental tone poems along the lines of “Snake Head.” “For the instrumentals, usually we’ll form something out of a jam session,” says Nakamura. “Songs with lyrics I prepare beforehand and bring to the group for arrangement. Usually I create the chords and melody first, and add the lyrics at the end. I’m not deliberately aiming to be impressionistic, but my songs may end up sounding that way.”

Nakamura says he rarely goes out to see bands, and when pressed to make a recommendation, admits he doesn’t find much of interest in the Japanese music scene. “I think the current popular bands have a clean sound that isn’t very interesting. I like music with a darker, more underground feel. The Japanese music scene was more interesting a few years back than now.”

It’s perhaps Nakamura’s evolution away from the conformist pressures of the Tokyo-based entertainment industry, and his continued seclusion from the present-day pop scene, that has allowed the music of this self-taught musician to evolve into one of the more distinctive visions on the pop scene today—the aural equivalent of a greenhouse orchid growing in splendid isolation.

Unit, May 24. See concert listings (popular) for details.

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