Ureterocele

For my first text-only interview, I connected with Ureterocele, a solo bass wizard and a truly delightful Bluesky poster. He just released his second album Tube With Contrast Medium and I wanted to learn more. We talked about playing in bands vs playing solo, connecting with fans, and drawing inspiration from all sources in life.

Pool Plants: When did you first start playing bass and what is your history of playing bass solo and in groups?

Ureterocele: I started playing bass when I was twelve years old. When I was fifteen, I played at a live venue with the first band I ever formed in my life. Until around the age of twenty-two, I kept playing music in bands, changing forms along the way, but always as part of a group. After that, my bass career was on hold for a long time. I only started playing again in 2024, when I began Ureterocele.

P: What type of music did you play in those first bands?

U: I consistently played alternative rock. In the early days, I was in a three-piece band that was kind of like a mix of NOFX, Rage Against The Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Korn. We did both recordings and live shows with that band. The band I played in up until just before COVID was also alternative, but in that group I played guitar. In both bands I was also doing vocals. However, since I started Ureterocele, I have not really talked about those past bands.

P: Who are your favorite bass players and who had the biggest influence on your style of playing bass?

U: My favorite bass players and the people who influenced my bass style are basically the same, and there are many of them. To name just a few: Les Claypool, Jaco Pastorius, Victor Wooten, Flea and Billy Sheehan. I have never been completely devoted to one particular person, but I have been influenced by every bassist I have listened to.

cont...

P: What styles of music most influence your own music making?

U: The artists who have had the biggest impact on what I am doing now are Nurse With Wound and The Pop Group. Listening to The 150 Murderous Passions by Nurse With Wound and Whitehouse, and the cassette tape of Y by The Pop Group changed my sense of what music can be. Also, after I discovered Vaporwave, I started to think less in terms of “genre” and more in terms of “aesthetics”. Worlds such as Mallsoft, Liminal Space and Weirdcore have also had a big influence on my current sound.

P: I’m surprised at the vaporwave connection! When did you first discover vaporwave and how do the sounds and aesthetics inspire you?

U: I first discovered vaporwave in 2022, when I listened to Eccojams Vol. 1 released by Oneohtrix Point Never under the name Chuck Person. After that I found Floral Shoppe by Vektroid under the name Macintosh Plus. I became fascinated by the contrast between the catchy collage-style artwork and the dystopian sound. Because Japanese language and Japanese culture are often used as motifs, it felt very familiar to me. I also love the core theme of nostalgia for cultures that were mass-produced and then forgotten within consumer capitalism. I am deeply inspired by that kind of musical theme, and I feel that it is reflected in Ureterocele as well. Beyond that, I think I am also inspired by the way many different elements are packed into a single track to create a sense of chaos. That attitude is something I feel close to.

P: How do you draw inspiration for your music from the events of your everyday life?

U: Most of my inspiration comes while I am walking. However I do not think of inspiration as something I can actively go out and “get”. For me it feels more like a seed that slowly germinates inside the life I am already living. The sounds I hear around me, the joy and sadness I experience, even my daily habits all become seeds of inspiration. But I cannot force these seeds to grow. I cannot water them and I cannot rush them. They appear again later, often at the moment when I have already forgotten that I planted them. I believe that every event in my life has the potential to become part of my art in the end. When I hold that belief, I can treat almost everything that happens to me as something meaningful and valuable. That way of thinking has helped me look at my life in a much more positive way.

P: What was the mindset that led to recording your first album? How did you know when you were ready to share your music with a larger audience?

U: When I decided to record my first album, the strongest feeling I had was that I wanted to do things exactly the way I wanted to do them. One of the reasons I started Ureterocele was that I had come to believe that making music completely on my own fits me better than creating in a group. I played in several bands and I learned a lot from those experiences, but looking back I realize that I felt some resistance to the process of collecting different opinions and searching for a compromise. It is a very important process for a band, but for me personally it did not feel like the most honest way to create.

The moment I felt ready to share my music with a larger audience was connected to my experience on Bluesky. Through many interactions with followers there, I felt that I was learning a great deal and receiving a lot of courage. At some point I felt a very strong conviction that “it is okay to express myself here”. That feeling of being allowed to exist as I am finally pushed me to release the first album.

P: How did you discover or develop your own individual music voice? Did it come at all from previous experiences with bands? Or later solo experimentation with the bass?

U: My musical voice has definitely been nurtured through the accumulation of all my past musical experiences. With Ureterocele I went back and gathered all the things that had felt a bit off to me before, and I tried to remove those elements. For example, I realised that I prefer short tracks to long ones, and that having many short tracks flow together to form an album suits my nature better. So I decided to remove the “standard” idea of a four or five minute song length.

Also, because the tracks are programmed, I wanted to somehow create a sense of live performance inside them. To do that, I decided that the bass would always be completely improvised and impossible to reproduce in the same way again. In other words, I removed the idea of playing fixed phrases in the same way every time. You could say that this comes from my later solo experimentation, but I believe it also grew out of my past band experiences and my own history of composing.

P: What was the recording process like for the first album and did that change for the new album?

U: The process itself is not very unusual. I create demos in my DAW, then I move on to mixing and mastering. I write demos for all the tracks first, then I start mixing them in the order of the ones I feel most attached to. Because my tracks are quite short, on a good day I could probably make five or six demos in one day. However, I have set a personal rule that I only complete one demo per day. A demo is “complete” when I listen to it and genuinely feel, “I love this! This is great!” I try not to stop before I reach that feeling. Usually, it takes me three to six months to finish all the demos at that pace. After that I wait until I feel ready and motivated to start mixing.

For the new album the process itself did not really change, but emotionally it was more difficult. Even though I had the rule of one song per day, I struggled to reach that genuine feeling of “I love this demo” during the new album’s writing phase. I think I was unconsciously comparing everything to the first album. At some point I realized that this was like comparing my own kids to each other. Once I became aware of that, I was finally able to say again, “I love this! This is great!” and move forward with a lighter heart.

P: Do you record everything at home? What is your recording set-up like for your bass?

U: I record everything at home. I use Logic Pro X with a Steinberg UR44 audio interface, and all the sounds other than bass and guitar are programmed as MIDI inside the DAW. Before releasing the first album there was a kind of “behind-the-scenes theme” of seeing how much I could make an album without spending money (haha), and I carried that approach over into the second album as well. As for other equipment, I use a Sony MDR-7506 and the Bluetooth-compatible model of the Audio-Technica ATH-M50x. However, when I am mixing, I only listen through monitor speakers. I use a pair of relatively inexpensive MACKIE CR3 speakers, with sponge stuffed into the ports.

P: You have used your posts on Bluesky to build an audience and inspire people. When did you realize you also had this gift for philosophizing on life and music?

U: Thank you so much for saying that! :) From my point of view, it is precisely because I receive inspiration from followers that I can say what I say now. This goes back to the time before I graduated from university and became a working adult. At that time, I was just living in a way that felt like wasting my days, with no particular goals for the future and not even the idea of looking for a job. Around then, I came across an article about work in Japan. It was about the attributes of Japanese workers, and it said that more than eighty percent of working adults in Japan, including both regular and non-regular employees, are company employees – what we in Japan usually call “salarymen”.

At that time, I did not want to make money by having music as my main job, but I did want to keep making music for my whole life as my life’s work. However, I felt that whatever I might create, and even if I were to become some kind of entrepreneur in the future, I would not be able to do anything if I did not understand the experiences and emotions that more than eighty percent of people in society are going through. So I chose to work as a company employee and earn a salary. A few years after that, I quit being a company employee and became self-employed, but even now I feel that my time as a company employee was very important. There were irrational things, many times when I wanted to run away, and many things I still regret even now. But in the middle of all that, I was able to find small moments of happiness, to feel the kindness of other people, and to become aware of what I am good at and bad at.

When I talk about my feelings or my thoughts now, they are based on those experiences. It might be that this has become some kind of gift for someone. If that is the case, then it makes me feel as if my past has been rewarded a little.

P: What is next for Ureterocele? What are your musical goals?

U: Even before the new album was finished, I had two musical goals. The first was to move a little closer to analog rather than staying only in digital. The second was to have people get to know my activities more deeply. Regarding the first goal, it simply means selling physical music. My albums are short in total length, so I needed to make at least two works and put them together in one package. So once the new album was finished, I was thinking of making a cassette or a record that combined it with the first album.

In fact, I even received a government-backed loan as working capital for this activity, but then Japan Post, which I was planning to use as my main shipping method, stopped shipping to the United States. Many of the people who support my music live in the U.S., so the plan is on hold for now. There are other shipping methods, but the postage would be expensive and that would put a big burden on the people who buy it, so I am not considering those options. Also, I do not know how many people are interested in my music on physical formats. From the perspective of inventory risk, I am now thinking it might be better to start a project on something like Kickstarter first.

But if I do that and change the sales platform on the assumption of shipping overseas from Japan, I will also need to properly research how to handle taxes like VAT and sales tax. I do everything by myself, so progress is slow, but I plan to keep moving things forward little by little. It would make me very happy if I could find a label or someone to collaborate with on that side of things. As for the second goal, this is about sharing the values I usually express only on Bluesky in other places as well. Recently I started a Patreon and wrote one blog post there. In it, I wrote about how I came to start Ureterocele, and I would like to keep creating content in that kind of format so that people can get to know my story and my values more deeply. I am very honored that there are followers who say they like my writing and what I write about, and my biggest motivation is to give those people even more to enjoy.