There's a compelling origin story that details why Amber Bain, a young solo female artist from Buckinghamshire, England, decided to release music under the stage name 'The Japanese House'. It hints at the aesthetics of elegance and evanescence favored by traditional Japanese teahouses and poetry, as well as Bain's personal ambivalence about gender:
"I was thinking about what I wanted to call myself as I didn't want to put my name out or my gender [...] I began to think of things that had happened to me, and I remembered going to Devon or Cornwall with my parents. I was between six to eight years old and pretended to be a boy for a week by dressing in dungarees. I felt really cool. But, a girl that lived in the house next door had a crush on me. She wrote me love letters and at the end of the week I revealed I was a girl, and she broke down and cried, which I thought was really sad. I spoke to my mum about it, and she said that the house that we were staying in was Kate Winslet's, and it was called The Japanese House."
Amber Bain, Dummy Mag
All this filters through The Japanese House's latest single "Saw You In A Dream", which amounts to a bittersweet haunting by the memory of a former flame:
'I saw you in a dreamYou came to meYou were the sweetest apparition, such a pretty visionThere was no reason, no explanationThe perfect hallucinationAll good things come to an endBut I thought that this might lastBut you came alive so fastAnd when I'm awake I can't switch offIt isn't the same but it is enough(It isn't the same but it is enough)'
Lyrics: Genius
Bain's layered (and vaguely androgynous) vocals effectively heightens the melancholy without doubling down on melodrama, hinting on the romantic sweetness that might have been with the help of a dreamy and hazy melody. Her real life inspiration - the unexpected death of a childhood friend - lends the track a deeper poignancy that the average breakup song: "It’s about someone I was really close with when I was younger. But a couple of years ago they died. A bit after that I saw them in this dream and it was quite a weird situation, because I’d never experienced something like that before" (NME).
