Eskimo presents some club-ready remixes, re-edits and reworks. For their take on Fashion, French electro/techno stars Maelstrom & Louisahhh have opted to completely rework the track and take it in a much darker direction. With its overdriven bass, corroded industrial beats and Louisahhh’s own interpretation of the vocals, this version of Fashion is one tailor-made for strobe-lit Berlin warehouses rather than the catwalks of Paris or Tokyo.
With our take on Aili’s Fashion, we wanted to honor the original version while also criticizing today’s unquenchable thirst for fast fashion and its reliance on sweatshops, fueled by today’s heightened expectations on social media.” – LOUISAHHH
In the original version of ‘Fashion’ we sing about the whereabouts of wearing and being aware of how you look. The fashion world is a very fascinating phenomenon, and Japanese people in particular can sometimes be a little obsessed by how they look and what they wear. They even have different verbs for ‘to wear’, each according to what you wear and on which part of the body you put your clothes on. – AILI MARUYAMA (Aili)
Aili is a Belgium-Japanese electro-pop duo comprising Aili Maruyama and Orson Wouters. After a chance meeting at a party in 2019 and time spent bonding over music and synths, they discovered an instant connection. Their different personalities and approaches to making music inspired each other to explore new ideas and sounds.
Starting each studio session without preset ideas, Aili and Orson embraced a more spontaneous and playful way of writing songs. They bounced sounds, samples, and even jokes off each other, allowing the music to develop in unexpected ways until Aili felt the words begin to emerge. To her surprise, this led her to sing more in Japanese—or rather, in the unique version of Japanese she developed with her father to stay connected after leaving Japan at the age of seven.
The first result of their partnership was the 2021 EP Dansu on Eskimo Recordings, the label with which Orson had previously worked under the name Transistorcake. Dansu’s mix of underground electronic sounds and sparkling pop was an instant hit, with its title track spending eight consecutive weeks at the top of Radio 1’s VOX list, leading to the band’s nomination for that year’s Studio Brussel’s De Nieuwe Lichting (New Generation) award.
Since that debut, the duo has cemented their position as one of Belgium’s most exciting new bands, with new singles praised by the likes of Rolling Stone, a wonderfully strange video featuring the band draped in food, and regular features on tastemaker radio stations like KEXP and KCRW in the U.S. and Radio Nova in France. Having found a way to transfer the energy generated in the studio to the live stage, they have also performed ecstatic live shows throughout Europe and appeared as themselves playing live on the hit Belgian TV drama Roomies.
In 2022, the band was invited to Japan, where, in between Orson adding to his synth collection and Aili reconnecting with her birthplace, they played the Inspire Tokyo Festival. Championed by Tokyo’s J-Wave radio station, the band went on to perform their own sold-out solo show in the capital, where a strong following was already waiting for them. They partnered with Nariaki Obukuro and Yaffle’s creative company, TOKA, to release a special Japanese edition of the DansuEP.
Returning to Belgium with new ideas, samples, and yes, new synths, Aili spent the next six months working on their hotly anticipated debut album, Nandakke? Released in early 2024 on Eskimo Recordings, Nandakke? more than fulfills the band’s early promise. Covering everything from the idiosyncratic Japanese relationship to fashion to Aili’s father’s takoyaki recipe, its ten tracks veer from surreal electro-pop to joyful electronica, house music, and beyond, resulting in a record as unique as Aili themselves.
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