One of the best albums to grace my ears
P-MODEL are a band I have listened to for a long while now. Thanks to my pre-existing obsession with picopico music and my constant need to listen to new things, I was hungry for new music, so when I first met my best friend, she immediately pointed me in this direction. P-MODEL are the largest direct influence for so many bands in the scene.
I was excited to see whatever amazing force had inspired so many cool Visual Kei musicians. This was immediately and extremely damaging, of course, at no fault of her own. My excitement got the better of me, and even worse, I had found a whole new world abound with new and consistently good (or at least interesting!) music.
I listened to a lot of albums. It took me an embarrassingly long time, though, to land on ENOLA. I regret this as, quite frankly, it was a record that changed my life. On your first listen, it's impossible not to think: How can human beings produce such phenomenal sounds? It's hard for me to pick a favourite P-MODEL album—things vary from day to day—but ENOLA might just be it.
Enol-huh?
ENOLA is the eleventh studio album released by P-MODEL. Production began in 1996 and the album was released on 29 November 1997.
What's interesting about this album, to me, is that it's born from a sense of Internet optimism you would never find in the modern day. Half the point of the project was to encourage people to buy their own computers and find their own place on the World Wide Web.
The idea of being connected to everybody, being part of an Internet community, was enticing and even beautiful. Nowadays, people want to escape from such a thing.
The fact that you're here reading this means that you long for that sort of early-Internet community, no? I think that, in the "personal website" sphere, everyone wishes for a more pure form of connection. This is exactly what ENOLA was born to express.
The production
Twenty-five years before the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to work remotely and online, P-MODEL were already figuring it out! With something so promising as the Internet becoming available, I don't at all blame them.
This album, unlike all the ones P-MODEL made before it, was designed from the very beginning to have the composition workload shared equally between all the members. Collaboration is the goal!
They traded audio files—all recorded in their home studios—over the Internet, requesting changes online. Compared to doing everything in a studio together, it's quite different.
When the album was basically complete, they all went to Thailand to trade recordings in person and finalise the album. Many compositions were inspired by South East Asia at large, and their frontman Susumu Hirasawa loves Thailand, so it was the logical endpoint for the album's production.
Love for ENOLA
Covers.
the first is the original, the second is the 2011 re-release.
Tracklist.
- Enola
- Hidden Protocol
- Bogy
- Rocket Shoot II
- ENN
- Satellite Alone
- Layer-Green
- Spiritus
- Ashura Clock
- Black in White
- A Strange Fruit
Listen.
You can actually listen to ENOLA on YouTube.