ZOOM ON – LEMNA

Mashiko is a small rural town in Tochigi Prefecture, about two hours north of Tokyo. Just after 6 AM, when the light settles on tiled roofs, the town wakes up gently. The place is known across the country for its pottery, where kilns have been burning for generations and clay is drawn from the surrounding hills.

The air at that hour is cool, carrying the damp smell of rice fields stretched flat and green around the houses.

Workshops remain quiet for now, shutters still closed, but life is already in motion: farmers stepping into the fields, café lights flickering on, birds sounding off from the tree line.

In one of the houses, at the foot of a small mountain, a sweet little black cat wakes around 7 AM. He’s stretching lengthwise on warm floorboards before padding toward the window to inspect the day, as the sky lifts from blue to pale morning. In this house, he is, however, not the first one awake. His human has already lived some of her day. “I usually wake up between 1 and 3 AM every day,” says Lemna. “Sometimes I wake up as early as midnight.” Sleep still comes lightly to her, after years marked by severe insomnia. “I want to sleep more, though,” she whispers. “I just let my body wake up naturally in these early hours. Now, I’ve gotten used to this rhythm, and it actually feels quite natural and comfortable for me.”

What matters most to her happens before dawn. “The time between waking up and the sun rising is time for myself,” she explains. “I love the quiet of the predawn hours – a time of silence when all living things are asleep, and the whole town is still.”

It is tempting to view these early mornings through the romantic lens often projected onto artists, but listening to her describe them, they feel more like a necessity than a singularity. They represent a brief stretch of time during which the world asks nothing from her, and she protects it carefully.

Sometimes she stays inside, answering emails, researching, thinking, hands warming a cup of her favourite tea or coffee. More often, when weather and work allow, she steps outside. For many people, “getting away from it all” requires planning. For Lemna, it simply requires putting on shoes. Nature shapes her daily life: “I can go to the mountain whenever I feel like it,” she says. Living nearly a kilometre from the trailhead, she often hikes while it is still pitch black, drinking coffee near the summit as the sun finally breaks the horizon.

When she comes back down, the day continues at ground level: farm work, gardening, tending plants and trees, harvesting vegetables. She has green fingers. For more than a decade, she has also studied herbal medicine, growing herbs and wild plants in her garden for home remedies. “I usually get these works done before it gets too hot,” she says, treating a morning of physical labour as a casual pre-breakfast routine.

After the small morning domestic pause, the day accelerates. From 8 AM until sunset, around 6 PM, Lemna is a marvel of quiet, relentless productivity. She composes music, tends her garden, and works as a professional seamstress, running multiple online shops and handling a wide range of sewing- and fabric-related creations. She also enjoys learning new skills: her reputation as a hard worker is no myth. All her activities share the same ethic of making: everything is handcrafted, modest, repeated until something true begins to emerge.

She doesn’t divide her time rigidly. “Basically, I just do whatever job I have at the time,” she states. She does, however, divide her space, to preserve her artistic balance: sewing happens upstairs, in her atelier, while music lives downstairs, in a modest studio. It is an ordinary room that only has some acoustic panels on the walls, far from a high-end, soundproof facility, as she describes: “Since the space is built in a traditional Japanese style with sand walls and tatami mats, which have textured surfaces and porous structures, it naturally reduces unpleasant echoes and the acoustics aren’t that bad.”

The sounds of insects and birds sometimes drift in from outside, but “it actually does not matter that much,” she notes. She works mostly with headphones anyway, and for delicate stages, like mixing and mastering, she chooses the quiet hours, curtains drawn. When it’s time to record, she retreats to her bathroom to filter out the outside world.

For years, she worked without stopping, from morning until sleep overtook her. Now she slows the day deliberately. Once darkness returns, work ends. Evening belongs to rest, to quiet rituals, to the cat. “Time with him is soothing,” she says. Later, she reads or meditates. By 9 PM, she is in bed. In a few hours, the silence of the night will belong to her again.

Her silence is not empty… 

It is crowded with the layers of a lifetime spent observing, absorbing, and processing a world that often felt too loud. The stillness she protects so carefully is not the absence of noise, but the space where noise can finally reveal what it was trying to say.

To understand the music she creates under the open-ended banner of experimental drum and bass, or “dark and weird music,” as she affectionately calls it, it is worth exploring beneath the surface of consciousness. Lemna explains that creation is an act of deep diving into the subconscious, an inward descent in which personal identity begins to dissolve into a shared, universal landscape. By anchoring her production process in these internal realms rather than fleeting external trends, her music inherently bypasses the conventional electronic music patterns, resulting in highly authentic, freeform soundscapes.

Their blueprint was drawn long ago, deeply rooted in her youth: the dense fog, humid air, deep green mountains, and pitch-black nights filled with the hidden presence of wildlife that define Mashiko today are an exact mirror of the landscape where she grew up. “In many tracks, especially in a live set, my soundscape tends to reflect my innerscape,” she notes, explaining that her work captures the “delicate (or intense) transformations of the human heart unfolded in such mesmerising natural landscapes”.

The uniqueness of her music also stems from a profound isolation imposed upon her during her youth. Growing up without a father, siblings, or cousins, Lemna’s immediate world was structurally small from the outset, leaving her with no one to share her thoughts with. “I’ve coped with any negative emotion, keeping it all to myself,” she recalls.

School offered no reprieve as she faced severe, insidious bullying. “I felt like I didn’t have a safe place at school or home,” she says, left to navigate her tense, internal landscape entirely on her own. From this isolation, she found a quiet, enduring ally in the natural world: “Nature was my home and my friend”.

It is difficult not to hear the importance of this statement. For many artists in ambient, experimental or hypnotic techno circles, nature can sometimes become an aesthetic language, a source of imagery, a philosophy, even a lifestyle choice. With Lemna, what emerges from the interview is something more fundamental. Nature appears before the music, before the artistic identity, before the scene. It is not merely an influence; it seems to have been one of the few stable reference points available to her. In that sense, nature did more than inspire her: it offered her a sense of belonging.

Another side of her deep sensitivity is her tendency to function as an emotional buffer for others, constantly absorbing the subtle shifts in the human minds around her. She explains that in Japanese, this constant, exhausting output of emotional energy – essentially, social attentiveness – is phrased as spending or sharing out one’s ‘Qi,’ which literally carries the image of consuming our vital energy. For her, this gives nature an even more profound purpose: “The reason I feel I can recover in nature is probably that I can recharge my Qi, which has been depleted,” she says. This gives beautiful meaning to another of her insights: “The ‘order in chaos’ is exactly the beauty I always find in and learn from nature.”

Because her childhood was an exercise in internalising this kind of tension, her inner world became a vast reservoir for it, meaning that the distinctively dark, visceral undertones of her music do not feel like calculated, edgy aesthetic choices; they are the heavy layers of an anxiety accumulated over decades. As she beautifully notes, her music became the release: “I could say it was a catharsis through the liberation of those negative emotions, like filtering and removing toxins from the body”.

Through her words, the dark and brutal side of her sound resembles pressure finally finding a way out: emotions long held beneath the surface becoming motion, rhythm and sound. Seen through this lens, the violence in her music shifts from a hidden burden into a deeply authentic aesthetic, ceasing to be destructive and becoming instead transformative.

By this point, a clearer picture of Lemna’s emotional architecture begins to emerge: a lifelong dialogue between deep internal friction and the quiet sanctuary of the earth. Yet, understanding the raw emotional material of her work is only the first step. Her music not only flows straight from her inner world but also results from a rigorous artistic evolution that has gradually transformed how she hears, thinks, and ultimately creates sound.

Her early foundation was strictly classical, starting piano lessons at age 4 and studying it for more than 10 years. As a child, she also began singing, making it an intimate part of herself, a practice so familiar that, as she puts it, “It is as natural as breathing.” Then came adolescence: “In junior and senior high school, I was in the wind ensemble club as an extracurricular activity, where I learned to play the saxophone, along with the basics of music theory, orchestration, and the mindset toward performing music from a wonderful teacher. Around the same time, I got a guitar and bass from my friend’s brother and started learning them by myself while playing in some bands.” She’s deeply a musician.

Yet, this insatiable hunger for learning collided head-on with a restrictive upbringing. “When I was a child, I wasn’t in an environment where I could listen to the music I liked freely,” she recalls. Raised by a traditional grandmother in a remote village cut off from cultural currents, Lemna had to be resourceful to feed her ears: “I used to secretly record music from the radio onto cassettes and listen to them over again.”

It was only upon entering high school in the city that she could finally expose herself to other sounds, utilising Japan’s unique “CD rental shops,” which operated much like video rental stores, albeit with a very humble selection of music. Things got easier once she started working at 17. “I was completely obsessed with music,” she recalls. “I put all the money I earned from my part-time job at a live music club into music, and listened to it ravenously every day.”

Over the years, she developed a divided musical taste between classical music and alternative rock: on one side, Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, Ottorino Respighi, Igor Stravinsky, and Sergei Rachmaninoff; on the other, Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, Sepultura, Slipknot, Nine Inch Nails, and Radiohead.

Looking closely, this list of artists shares a common thread. Different genres, but a similar subversive, outsider spirit. Stravinsky caused a historic riot with the rhythmic violence of “The Rite of Spring”; Satie openly mocked the stuffy academicism of French institutions with his minimalist “Gymnopédies”; Debussy and Ravel shattered the rigid structures of German romanticism to pioneer impressionism. Decades later, Kurt Cobain translated underground despair into a global phenomenon, while Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) and Zack de la Rocha (Rage Against the Machine) saturated the sonic landscape with noise and political fury. Alongside them, Radiohead deconstructed traditional rock into eerie, electronic alienation, transforming paranoia into a haunting art form.

These artists embodied a form of creative extremism. For Lemna, the attraction to these pioneering figures was no aesthetic accident: their rebellious music resonated intimately with her own internal tensions and hunger to create. The raging, frantic pulse of her future drum and bass tracks took root right here, in the moment her quiet anxiety met their wounded rebellion, and finally found the courage to scream.

Back then, her interests also expanded into world music, ranging from Celtic and Slavic melodies to African, Arabic, and Latin rhythms. Traditional music introduced her to polyrhythms and non-Western scales, structures that rely on hypnotic repetition, unexpected accents, and vast space rather than standard verse-chorus patterns. It was an early training in how to build tension and atmosphere through pure rhythm, a skill that would later define her signature, boundary-pushing percussive arrangements.

This is where it gets particularly impressive: though her complex, primal drumming forms the backbone of her music, she has never taken a single drum lesson. Some musicians spend years trying to unlearn rigidity; Lemna simply skipped that step altogether. For her, rhythm is not an academic exercise but an entirely distinct, instinctive, and deeply spiritual language, channelled from somewhere deep within. The resulting polyrhythms feel authentic, organic, shaped by her innate love for world music, yet inherently brutal as the core expression of her anxious energy. Her drums capture the raw internal friction, while the enveloping atmospheres mirror her personal depth and close connection to nature.

This instinctive grasp of sound extended far beyond instruments; it reached into the very hardware that captured them. It was during that 17-year-old stint at the live music club, amidst the noise of local ska and punk bands, that she experienced her first true encounter with audio machinery. Standing before a large mixing console, she felt an inexplicable, magnetic pull toward audio electronics and acoustic engineering. She fell deeply in love with the tactile, sensory language of the studio environment: “I was always so excited just seeing the piles of cables, rows of faders and meters, and I loved the unique smell of studios, which always made me feel at ease,” she recounts, fully aware of how rare it was for a young woman to be drawn to the highly technical, male-dominated side of the field at the time.

Years later, she would finally learn why this lifelong fascination felt so familiar. Her mother eventually revealed a long-held secret: her biological father, a man Lemna had never known, seen, or named, had spent his life working as an engineer for an audio manufacturer, deeply passionate about sound equipment. “Everything made sense then,” she concludes, “and I realised that it was in my blood.”

Yet long before she knew this, she had instinctively moved to Tokyo to attend a sound engineering academy. In the capital city, she lived on a schedule that would have broken most mortals, juggling 4 jobs to survive. She combined sound crew work at a small concert venue and a position in a music shop’s PA and software department with morning shifts at a convenience store and late-night hours at a karaoke bar. 

This total immersion into the technical world sparked an alchemical obsession with music production itself. It was during this period, as she first began mastering DAWs, that her creative drive mutated into an extreme, nearly all-consuming passion: “I didn’t need to eat or sleep, nor did I need any rest or leisure. I wanted to eliminate everything unrelated to creation from my life. As I didn’t want to waste even a single second, I would study during my commute on the train and the bus, during lunch break from work, and even in the bathroom. After coming home from work, I would make music while learning how to use plugins/hardware until midnight every day, and my usual sleeping time was only 3 to 4 hours back then. I didn’t want to waste even that sleep time, so every night I would put on earphones as soon as I went to bed and listen to various music to learn composition, arrangement, audio processing, and mixdown, believing that my brain was working at a subconscious level even while sleeping.”

Listening to her describe those years, it feels more like total absorption than ambition. Music was not simply a career path or even a passion. It became the organising principle around which everything else was arranged. The intensity is striking, but so is the sincerity behind it: she genuinely believed that every spare minute carried the possibility of learning something. As she puts it: “I think the most important thing for musicians is to have a good ear. And this absolutely requires a massive amount of time spent listening to music, since music is a time-based medium. I believe that improvement in any skill is always proportional to the time we spend on it, so I tried to maximise its density.”

This total surrender to sound, however, came at a heavy cost: “I don’t recommend this approach to everyone: it involves too many sacrifices, and I myself wrecked my health as the price to pay. Ideally, there is no need to do it this way. I was never smart, capable, nor gifted, so that was simply the only way I knew how to do it at the time,” she admits. As her life eventually found a more natural rhythm, she learned to soften this intensity. “I don’t do it that way anymore. Now, I try to maintain a balance between creation and my own well-being: I eat meals, I get moderate rest and sleep, spend leisure time watching movies or reading manga, and enjoy hiking and gardening. This kind of life is very new to me. It feels like a second life, and I’m feeling way more deeply, gently, and peacefully happy than when I was absorbed in music with a concentration and enthusiasm that was almost ‘madness’.”

Lemna, live at Mutek

If her early obsession pushed her to a dangerous edge, it was the discipline she grew up with that ultimately saved her from burnout and structured her art. Her strict grandmother, a professional tailor, showed her what rigorous perseverance looked like. From this matriarch, who demanded absolute perfection and earnestness in every single stitch, Lemna learned that success is not measured in status or commercial triumph, but in the quiet satisfaction of making a beautifully crafted, honest product. “There was no notion of success as status or honour in the environment I grew up in,” Lemna recalls. “The goal is always just to make a good product earnestly and sincerely. That’s the value I learned from her.”

This heritage is what saved her intensity from becoming purely destructive. Her grandmother’s influence allowed Lemna to translate her monastic work ethic into a lifelong respect for craftsmanship. It is a thread that runs through her entire life. Whether the material is fabric, soil, herbs, or sound, the question remains constant: Have I made this with sincerity? Even as she stepped back to protect her health, she never lost that foundational devotion to the work itself. She simply learned to channel the chaotic fire of her youth into the steady, enduring patience of a true artisan.

That disciplined work ethic also served a highly practical purpose: it funded her expansion, not just musically, but also in her willingness to meet the world. The money saved from her relentless side jobs in Tokyo allowed her to finance a trip to Ireland, whose traditional music had long captivated her. And it was there, almost by accident, that she stepped into a nightclub for the very first time, having previously only sworn by live-instrument music halls. Back in Japan, she continued to explore club culture until destiny struck at a local event: “A drum and bass party was going on there. That was my first encounter with drum and bass,” she said. “The deep bass sound and the 170 BPM fit me perfectly, and I was instantly hooked.” After years spent searching through classical music, rock, world traditions, recording technology, and live performance, it sounds almost suspiciously simple. Sometimes, however, the most important artistic encounters happen exactly that way: a door opens, and you instantly feel at home on the other side.

For her, it was the dancefloor, and she didn’t stay a bystander for long. Recognising her background as a band vocalist, a local DJ invited her to come on stage and step up to the microphone. Thus began a ten-year run hosting the crowd as an MC. Diving into Tokyo’s underground circles, she toured the country alongside DJ Velocity and made a name for herself as a regular performer at the legendary “Human Elements” nights, hosted by drum and bass icon Makoto. Reflecting on this era of collaboration, she smiles: “DJ Velocity is a good friend, like trusted family to me, and not only did we work as a DJ and MC, but we’ve also produced tracks and performed live shows together. Working as an MC gave me the chance to travel to various places around Japan and meet so many wonderful people. I still love them all and look back on those days with great fondness. I absolutely loved that community for its gritty yet warm humanity, and its pure, earnest dedication to the music, and I still do.”

Yet while everyone else saw her as effortlessly smiley and lighthearted, her own mind was a completely different story. Behind the frantic energy of those 170 BPM sets, the experience was a constant test for her anxious nature: “As for MCing, since I used to be a vocalist in a band, improvising melodies and singing itself was fun, but I always felt that I wasn’t very good at hyping up the crowd through freestyling, so I never really had any confidence,” she confesses. To survive the stage fright, she relied on a time-honoured remedy: “I drank a lot of vodka and tequila every time before going on stage, trying to hype myself up.”

There is something poignant about this period of her life. The woman who would later become known for deeply immersive, introspective music spent a decade standing in front of crowds while privately battling intense anxiety. It is difficult not to notice a pattern that reappears elsewhere in her story: despite her sensitivity, she repeatedly finds herself in roles that involve giving energy to others. The idea surfaces clearly in her own words: “To me, the MC at drum and bass is like a bridge between the DJ and the audience, so my only thought was just to let the DJs play comfortably and ensure the audience had fun.” Perhaps this, too, was another way of pursuing the harmony she has spent much of her life seeking.

During her MC years, she crossed paths with key figures who deeply impacted her musical journey. Alongside DJ Velocity, comrades like the French producer Naibu, with whom she collaborated as a vocalist many times, gave her a sense of artistic community. On a deeper creative level, the Tokyo-based artist Ena became particularly important during her formative days: “I’ve learned a lot from him; he’s like a mentor to me. When I was just starting out, he often listened to me and gave me great advice. He is always calm and centred, rich in knowledge, and I truly look up to his professionalism and stoic approach to music.”

Working in the studio with Ena and Naibu bridged the gap between her vocal contributions and her background in sound engineering. Immersed in these deeper, more experimental corners of electronic music, she slowly stepped away from the microphone to focus entirely on production. This gradual transition laid the groundwork for a complete artistic rebirth, making way for the hardware-driven, live-set electronics of Lemna.

Around 2015, she began uploading raw, unvarnished live recordings to her SoundCloud channel, where they caught the attention of Sam KDC. “He reached out to me, asking if I could send him some demos,” she remembers. This connection became her gateway to the world of Samurai Music, the legendary drum-and-bass label run by Presha, and, more specifically, its sub-label Horo, co-curated by Presha and Sam KDC, which focuses on boundary-pushing, polyrhythmic techno.

Lemna debuted on the label with an EP alongside Sam KDC under their collaborative alias “Ourea.” Just months later, she followed with her first solo EP, “Urge Theory“, a deeply symbolic title to capture her relentless creative drive, including the impressive, minimal and surgical track “DLPFC“. Around the same time, she recorded a live set for the Horo Vision Podcast, a masterpiece that left listeners stunned, with critics and fans alike declaring, “She is the future of hypnotic techno.”

Of her connection with Sam KDC, she smiles warmly: “He is the person who broadened my horizons spiritually and enriched my mind. We had deep conversations about things I wouldn’t normally share with others. So much of his perspective resonated with me; he was a friend on the same wavelength, more so than anyone I’ve ever met.”

Beyond her mentors in the club world, she also found crucial encouragement closer to home through Shingo Aoyagi, founder of the record store and label Art into Life, based in her hometown of Mashiko. “I learned a great deal from him about experimental music and sound art,” she says. “He is one of the few people who truly understood and appreciated what I was trying to express, which gave me the courage to keep creating. I deeply admire his vast knowledge, profound insight, unwavering commitment and sincerity to his beliefs.”

The importance of encouragement is sometimes overlooked in artist biographies. Yet for creators, working alone in the studio, far from trends and commercial expectations, being understood by even a handful of people can make an enormous difference.

In the end, these milestones set her on a very promising course to develop her musical career. It has since expanded through collaborations with respected labels, from the hypnotic, like-minded output of Sacred Court, KHIDI, to the legendary Dutch imprint Delsin, before ultimately leading her to her current chapter: releasing music entirely on her own terms. A fitting illustration of this creative independence can be found in her recent “Storytelling” trilogy. While the first two volumes remaster material from different stages of her journey, the third pushes further into new explorations. Across the three volumes, she revisits, reshapes, and guides her sound into increasingly experimental territory.

More than a collection of releases, “Storytelling” feels like a map of the territory Lemna has spent years exploring. Dreams, memories, insomnia and the subconscious are not treated as abstract concepts, but as places she has quietly inhabited, observed and translated into sound.

Looking back, the chronology of her life almost becomes secondary. What remains are the places of refuge she gradually built for herself. Nature is one. Music became another. Craftsmanship, gardening, hiking, and the quiet routines of Mashiko seem to answer the same need in different languages.

Perhaps that is why her work feels so distinctive. It carries the feeling of someone patiently transforming friction into balance, noise into meaning, restlessness into form. As such, what makes Lemna so resonant is not the darkness, the production skills, the drum & bass pedigree, the insomnia, the work ethic, or even the music. The “order in chaos” she speaks about is not merely a production technique or simply an artistic concept; it is a way of moving through the world.

Long before there was a record label, a live set, or a reputation within electronic music, there was a child finding comfort in the mountains surrounding her home. In many ways, that conversation never really ended. The tools changed. The sounds became more sophisticated. But the dialogue remains the same.

Before sunrise, while Mashiko is still asleep, Lemna continues listening. And from that listening, music emerges.

#3

Lemna – Acceptance
[Self-released, 2025]

To represent the raw, anxious side of Lemna’s music, tracks such as “Tesseract” or “Dodecahedron” would probably have been more obvious choices. Yet “Acceptance” feels like a more mature and complete statement, embodying the same emotional weight without relying solely on intensity.

The track originates from “Marga“, a remarkable self-released trilogy that stands as perhaps the purest illustration of Lemna’s artisan spirit. Whereas artists usually delegate tasks, she chose the opposite route, personally composing, recording, mixing, mastering, designing the artwork, painting the covers, directing the visual identity, and even sewing the fabric zipper pouches that housed the cassette tapes. The trilogy is more than a musical release; it is the product of a singular creative vision carried through every stage by the same pair of hands.

That independence was no accident, as she explained: “I wanted to be 100% authentic in my expression, free from any restrictions or pigeonholing, keeping myself apart from factionalism or commercial competitiveness. It was my first attempt, but it was truly worth trying. Feeling that I was able to deliver my music to the people I wanted to reach, in the way I always wished for, is truly the greatest happiness.”

As for the track “Acceptance” in particular, the title inevitably resonates with another recurring theme in Lemna’s story: resilience. Throughout our exchanges, she spoke openly about isolation, bullying, fear of rejection, and the silent battles that shaped her youth. Yet she also spoke about learning, understanding, and ultimately making peace with those experiences. The contrast between the title and the sound is particularly evocative. “Acceptance” doesn’t translate into serenity; it remains restless, driven by rolling tribal percussion, unexpected impacts and a haunting, mysterious atmosphere. As such, the piece doesn’t sound like a victory over anxiety, but like learning to walk beside it.

#2

Lemna – DLPFC
[Horo, 2017]

If “Acceptance” reveals the introspective side of Lemna’s world, “DLPFC” captures the producer as a master of tension. Released on her debut solo EP “Urge Theory“, the track remains one of the clearest early demonstrations of Lemna’s talent for tension and hypnotic movement. While much of her discography would later embrace increasingly dense percussion work and immersive sound design, “DLPFC” achieves a similar depth through remarkably economical means.

At first glance, the premise appears deceptively simple. A sharp burst of filtered noise enters into a relentless dialogue with a series of hammer-like strikes through a regular mechanical pattern. Yet this apparent minimalism is precisely where the genius lies. Beneath the surface, subtle layers of percussion rise, tightening the tension almost imperceptibly.

Then comes the masterstroke. At the peak of its ascent, the central motif suddenly disappears, leaving only the underlying rhythmic machinery exposed. In a club, the effect is devastating: the stripped-down groove becomes almost hypnotic in its purity, creating the kind of suspended moment that dancers instinctively feel before they even analyse it. When the full pattern finally returns, the release feels both inevitable and electrifying.

The title itself offers an intriguing clue. “DLPFC” stands for “Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex”, a brain region associated with planning, decision-making and cognitive control. Knowing how much of Lemna’s work emerges from dreams, subconscious landscapes and emotional intuition, the choice feels almost paradoxical. Yet the track mirrors that tension beautifully: beneath its hypnotic physicality lies a relentless sense of focus, as though instinct and intellect were locked in a conversation of their own, pointing toward the pursuit of control, structure and stability amidst emotional turbulence.

In many ways, “DLPFC” occupies a place in Lemna’s discography similar to that of “Spastik” in Richie Hawtin’s: a lesson in how repetition, restraint and rhythm can become more powerful than maximalism. No distractions here; only an unwavering commitment to movement and tension. Long before her later works expanded into increasingly cinematic territory, “DLPFC” demonstrated Lemna’s ability to turn the smallest sonic gesture into something deeply physical, immersive and unforgettable.

#1

Lemna – Lapis Lazuli
[Delsin Records, 2024]

Contrary to “Acceptance”, which spoke of resilience, and “DLPFC”, which explored tension and control, “Lapis Lazuli” feels like a piece about trust. Not necessarily trust in others, but trust in time, in silence, in nature that doesn’t need to be fully explained.

Released as part of Delsin‘s forward-thinking “Mantis” series, the track occupies a unique place within Lemna’s discography. While her music is often associated with dense percussion work, hypnotic pressure and raw emotional intensity, “Lapis Lazuli” reveals another side of her artistry. The groove remains intricate and unmistakably hers, yet every element appears to move together, like complicit voices taking part in the same nocturnal conversation.

This approach reaches its peak around the three-minute mark. Helped by a subtle riser, an additional layer of percussion quietly joins the existing dialogue. On paper, not much happens. In practice, it feels enormous. Much like hypnotic techno at its finest, emotion is not measured by the quantity of change, but by the quality of attention given to it. A new rhythmic voice enters the discussion, and suddenly the entire conversation takes on a new depth.

Like the two previous tracks, the title itself offers an intriguing clue. Lapis lazuli is a deep-blue semi-precious stone that has fascinated civilisations for thousands of years, finding its way into jewellery, sacred objects and some of history’s most celebrated works of art. Over time, it also became associated with wisdom, introspection and the search for inner truth. It would be tempting to disappear down a rabbit hole of symbolism from here, yet doing so would somehow miss the point of Lemna’s music.

As she explained during our conversation, “I’d like to leave some ‘blank space’ for listeners to think and feel, with their own senses.” Reflecting on the differences between Western and Japanese approaches to communication, she added: “I’ve always felt a difference in how we see and shape the world between high- and low-context cultures. This should stem from the fundamental language structures and cultural backgrounds, and it’s not about which is better or superior, but it’s just a difference that I sense:  people in many Western cultures tend to emphasise clear, logical, and detailed explanations, whereas in our culture, as the Japanese proverb “Silence is a beautiful flower” indicates, leaving some things unsaid tends to be regarded as a virtue. It doesn’t just mean that modesty and quietness are good, but it’s worth cherishing and letting what we feel or think mature within our hearts, and pondering and imagining various things thoroughly before putting everything into words and letting them all out. I believe this helps foster our deep imagination, compassion, and respect for others. Of course, there is some truth in the saying “if you don’t tell me, I won’t know”, and it is also true that in some matters and situations, it’s necessary to clarify every nook and cranny to avoid misunderstandings, but when it comes to music, ideally, I prefer not to explain too much in words. Because everything in this world – things we can see and things we cannot see, natural phenomena, our experiences, or our feelings – is often more profound than words can express, and I think to define something with words and give it a definite meaning or shape is to lose something.”

Perhaps this is the most meaningful way to approach “Lapis Lazuli”. Not as a puzzle to solve, nor as a key to unlocking more of Lemna’s psychology, but as an invitation to resonate with the values that quietly emerge throughout her music: introspection, imagination, and a willingness to embrace uncertainty rather than immediately explain it.

On the subjective, emotional side, “Lapis Lazuli” offers an enduring feeling of welcome, rare enough to stand out within a discography often shaped by tension, darkness and struggle. The track is not alone in this regard, though. The wonderfully singular “Dreaming within a Dream within a Dream within a Dream“, for instance, opens with a surprising sense of lightness, evoking distant echoes of her classical background. Yet while this piece carries a more nostalgic and inward-looking quality, “Lapis Lazuli” feels unusually open and shareable, with a warmth that evokes the beauty and the reassuring, rock-solid strength of nature, as though it was meant to be experienced collectively. Even its most exhilarating moment does not come from impact, but from the subtle addition of another voice to an already harmonious conversation.

After spending months exploring Lemna’s music, her story, and the reflections woven between the two, that warm sense of openness becomes difficult not to cherish. The track does not stand at a distance waiting to be deciphered; it quietly extends a hand. Perhaps that is what makes it feel like the natural conclusion to this selection.

Calling “The Five Elements” a live set almost feels misleading. During our conversation, Lemna repeatedly insisted on a perspective that fundamentally sets her apart from many electronic performers: “I see myself more as a composer than a performer.”

She’s not a DJ, but a creator whose meticulous work begins long before stepping onto a stage. She explained that every live appearance begins not with a selection of existing tracks, but with a blank page. Once a booking is confirmed, she sketches a storyline and patiently crafts an entirely new body of music around it; compositions that are often performed only once before being shelved indefinitely. In her own words: “I’ve been doing it this way since the very beginning – writing music from scratch for each event as a ‘one-off’ performance.”

There is something strikingly generous and respectful about Lemna’s approach. Each location is treated not as another stop along the route, but as a unique encounter deserving its own story, music, and moment in time. “The Five Elements” is best understood not as a standard live recording, but as a rare opportunity to step inside one of those ephemeral worlds.

Created for a performance at Mononoke Matsuri in the sacred mountain village of Togakushi, the set translates the elemental energy Lemna felt during a preparatory visit to the site. While exploring the area, she recorded sounds associated with each of the five elements – wood, fire, earth, metal, and water – later weaving them into a dialogue between field recordings and electronic textures. Nature converses with art, the organic meets the electronic, and order quietly negotiates with chaos.

For Lemna, the narrative dimension is equally important, as she explained: “As for my live set, I always weave a story through the music.” Rather than focusing on individual tracks, she approaches each live set as a complete narrative arc, often structured around the traditional Japanese Kishōtenketsu framework, built around an introduction, development, twist, and conclusion. As such, her live performances are carefully crafted journeys, composed scene by scene, much like a film without dialogue. She detailed: “I compose the tracks for each scene and arrange the structure while designing the sound. Lastly, once all the tracks are completed, I export the stems for the live set, and it’s done.”

Expanding on this cinematic vision, “The Five Elements” featured a live visual projection created by videographer Kohei Makita using photography taken in Togakushi by Mitsuaki Koshizuka:

In many ways, “The Five Elements” serves as the ideal gateway into Lemna’s universe. It doesn’t merely present her sound; it reveals her methodology, the way she creates. The result is an immersive, rewarding listen, one that slowly opens up for anyone willing to sit with the recording in full and let its world unfold.

So, dear Lemna, why do you make music?

Lemna: It is, just because I needed it, as one of the means to maintain the homeostasis of my mind, I guess. I think I am someone who has a big gap between the inside and outside. It doesn’t imply “two-faced”, as I never say what I don’t mean. I just tend to prioritise harmony as a whole over showing my true emotions. Since childhood, I have always been inclined to carry myself in a light-hearted way to keep the mood around me pleasant, in contrast to my introverted nature and the underlying turmoil. This degree of internal disconnect is probably much greater in me than in most, and it was even more intense when I was younger. Therefore, I have many words I swallowed, feelings I bottled up, or thoughts I didn’t manage to express, and they unknowingly settle on the layers of my past sadness and indignation at the bottom of my heart as if sediment accumulates. I think the outlet for those emotions is music, for me. I’ve always been told by people who know me that my impression and my music do not match at all. People often say that I look like I should play breezy, peaceful indie folk songs. At the end of the day, these numerous emotions I abandoned for the sake of the harmony of the world outside of me shape the world inside of me, and I express that world, which I usually never show, through music.

How do these profound inner landscapes become music?

Lemna: When I make music, there are times when I try to portray my inner landscape as if painting on a canvas, and other times when I try to express my emotions directly. Sometimes, I just sit down at the keyboard and try to write intuitively or mechanically, but it tends not to work out well in my case. It rarely reaches completion, or even when it’s completed, it usually doesn’t turn out to be something I like very much. Whether it’s scenery or emotions, when I have a clear vision of what I want to express, I often get results I’m happy with.
I consider human consciousness to have multiple layers. The surface is the conscious mind, and the shallow layer below is the place where consciousness exists when we daydream or think about the past or future. The further down we go, the closer we get to the subconscious or unconscious mind, like a hazy state of dreams, deep slumber, and deeper within that lies something like the collective unconscious, the bardo, and even death. This is just my personal theory, but I somehow feel like that.
And I believe that artists, not limited to musicians, are those who dive deep to access the lower layer and convert the abstract phenomenon they found there into any perceptible form. As for me, when I can dive deep, I’m almost always satisfied with the work. When I start writing on a whim, I feel like I can only float on the surface and can’t go under. When I start writing while having something clear to express, it serves as my anchor, guiding me to dive straight down and keeping me from drifting. I can’t really explain it in words, but I feel that way.
As I am a typical visual thinker, I tend to think in images rather than words, and always have various multi-layered visual elements in my head. So I feel like it’s much more natural for me to put it into music than to translate it into words. And electronic music is completely free. It allows me to create any sounds or depict any world, whether it’s real or imagined. I think electronic composition suits me well as my way of expressing, because I can complete the whole soundscape as I envision it, in every detail, all by myself.

Would you say your sensitivity is particularly high? How does it impact your daily life and how does it feed into your art?

Lemna: I have to admit that the answer is yes. I’ve been hypersensitive since childhood, especially to sounds, lights, smells, and the subtle shifts in the moods and minds of others. I tend to constantly pick up too much information from my surroundings, and this overload causes various physical ailments, making me easily fatigued and leading to insomnia and other chronic health issues. To me, it mostly just makes life difficult with hardly any benefits. However, if I were to look on the bright side, I can find myself deeply moved by the beauty of nature every single day, and I think having such a receptivity to beauty is one of life’s privileges. Also, while this trait may not be suited for aggressively pushing forward in life by actively socialising or competing with others, it can be a great help if it can somehow be used to show compassion to others. And above all, perhaps, it is precisely what led me to art, serving as the very source and origin of my creativity. I want to believe so; otherwise, I just can’t find any point for me in all this difficulty.

Is compassion something that comes naturally to you?

Lemna: I wonder… It might not necessarily be so. I wish to remain magnanimous no matter the situation, but I’m not quite there yet. Though I want to be full of compassion to anyone, anywhere, and at any time, I still get annoyed when people take a rude or hostile attitude. Or even when I hold compassion in my heart, I am still so clumsy at putting it into words or acting in a smart way. And even before that, while I wish I could be of help to others, I actually live a solitary life away from people. I constantly realise how far I am from an ideal of how I want to be. So, my goal is still far off, and I am still learning and training my mind.

Don’t you think that hostility, in the end, is simply the problem of the hostile person, not yet wise enough to control it?

Lemna: One could say so. Not limited to this, most problems are caused by our ignorance and immaturity, in my opinion. This is why I believe that we, myself included, need to go through a wide variety of experiences, both joys and pains, and learn from them to humbly grow toward inner maturity.

What is your input on pain?

Lemna: I believe that pain does cause damage to us, but at the same time, it gives us profound thoughts, brings dimension to our insights, nurtures empathy in our hearts, and ultimately leads us to maturity.

What role does fear play in your life and music?

Lemna: I think, in most cases, fear lies at the very root of our strong urges. For instance, if we dig deeper into the root of actions like attacking or deceiving others, competing to prove one’s superiority, or succumbing to various types of addiction and dependence, we will find fear there. In my case, that fear leads to a tendency toward “avoidance.”
In essence, I have a fear of humanity. It is not the commonly talked about fear of abandonment or loss, but rather a more visceral fear of rejection and hostility. I suppose many who experienced bullying as a child tend to have a similar sense of fear, though. The perception that the reality of who I am is an ugly weirdo welcomed by no one, and that others exist only to hurt or reject me, is programmed into my mind as a default setting. Now that I am older, I know it is not true in my head, but it is deeply imprinted in my heart, and I think this serves as the motive for my behavioural tendency to avoid any trouble or conflict beforehand.
To put it the other way around, I feel like I don’t have many fears other than of humans. I have no fear of death whatsoever, nor do I have any phobias. While I hate wars and natural disasters, that is a different kind of feeling. I am a little afraid of ghosts – which I believe stems from a view of life and death unique to East Asia – but this is only because they are, more often than not, the afterimage of human grudges.
So I suppose, after all, what I truly fear is human emotion.
If anything, the feelings that are related to my music should be sadness and loneliness, rather than “fear”, I would say. Since I chronically lacked the experience of love, security, and acceptance, I’ve always had a deep-seated, strong sense of isolation in my heart, and as I confronted those emotions, I think I was seeking salvation through music.
There were various aspects to music for me, but one of them was that of a “letter”. Whenever I released my music, I always felt like I was setting a “message in a bottle” afloat into the sea from a deserted island. Once in a few years, when I can feel that it has reached someone, it is definitely the most rewarding and happiest moment for me.

This is a beautiful, deeply moving way of putting it. Let’s carry on this luminous side: what is your personal definition of success?

Lemna: “Success” is one of the things I don’t quite understand, even though many people often talk about it. If we take it as a goal to aim for in life, I think it all ultimately comes down to being “happy.” And if you ask what happiness means, I think of it as a state where the mind is calm in peace and stillness. I might even call it a sort of enlightenment. That’s what I’m aiming for after all. If we were to look at success as a goal to aim for at work, I would probably say it is to create something I can be satisfied with, and for it to reach the people and places it needs to.

And what about lasting success?

Lemna: I personally think there is no such thing as lasting success. Nothing lasts forever. Life has its ebbs and flows, which is the natural way of the world. I think it is better not to aim for lasting success in the first place. When things are going well, instead of pushing our luck, we should be even more careful about everything. When things aren’t going well, we must simply embrace reality and just think about what we can do within it. Sometimes struggling is important, but forcing it always creates a disconnect somewhere. In the end, I think we just have to sincerely do what we can do at each moment. Personally speaking, I believe that always staying humble and living naturally while going with the flow is far more important than trying to chase success.

What advice would you give to artists trying to find their own voice?

Lemna: I think it is important to always deeply face yourself and have a dialogue with your heart, to know what you are thinking or feeling at every moment. If you do that, I believe it allows you to dive deep into your consciousness by going through your authentic thoughts and emotions as the gateway, and pick up your own music naturally.

Thinking of another potential piece of advice: would you say that your instrumental skills have served your electronic music?

Lemna: Yes, I think so. To make electronic music, we need to convert the images in our head into electric signals, and for that, we need some kind of interface. The keyboard is one of the most useful ones, so I can say instrumental skills can be somewhat of an advantage when making music. And also knowing the characteristics of each instrument, such as keyboards, strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion instruments, is useful for expressing various nuances. But above all else, I think the most important and valuable aspect is that playing instruments with our own bodies and hearts enriches and deepens our expressiveness.

Finally, could you share ten tracks by other artists that you particularly love?

Lemna: Sure. It’s hard to choose just ten, but I’d go with these:

LEMNA: Homepage, Facebook, Instagram, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Discogs, RA