Pop violin star Kishi Bashi talks documentary, AI and new album 'Kantos'

After spending years working on a documentary about Japanese-Americans incarcerated during World War II, Kishi Bashi joked that he needed something lighter to help with “cleansing my brain of sadness.”

With the completion of the album “Omoiyari” in 2019 and the Emmy-nominated documentary “Omoiyari: A Song Film By Kishi Bashi” in 2022, the pop violin star turned his attention to a new record, “Kantos,” which he described as a “party album.”

“I spent the last five years working on ‘Omoiyari’ and my documentary,” Bashi said Monday in a phone call from California. “So the subject matter was pretty serious and inflective, it’s about history and identity and stuff like that. And I think all the while I was still making fun, kind of upbeat music.

“So I think until we released the album, until we released the movie, I didn’t feel comfortable putting it out. So I think this is a kind of a breath of fresh air for me to kind of do something different.”

Bashi will be performing songs from “Kantos” as well as hits from his back catalog in what he said would be a “super high energy” show on Oct. 15 at Thunderbird Music Hall in Lawrenceville. He’ll be joined on stage by his longtime friend Tall Tall Trees on banjo plus Sweet Loretta, an English funk group that will serve as his backing band and the night’s opening act.

“Kantos” drew inspiration from the science fiction novel series “Hyperion Cantos,” the writings of philosopher Immanuel Kant and a trip to the ruins on the island of Crete.

“Some of the subject matter is about artificial intelligence and celebrating our humanity and valuing human creativity and ingenuity because it’s all we’ve got,” he said, “and being in the present … and not looking too far into the future and remembering to focus on us now and our own problems and our own connections today.”

In a shift from the symphonic folk of his last album, Bashi leaned into the rock side, like the theatrical, rock opera vibes of “Icarus IV.”

“It’s definitely full of riffs, and it’s super epic sounding,” he said. “I kind of wanted it like that, and I think it’s mainly because I got an electric guitar over covid that I really liked, and I was playing a lot. And this band Sweet Loretta — they’re on the album too — they just had that rock ‘n’ roll sound dialed in, so I kind of had access to it. I just had fun with it.”

Bashi also delved deeper into artificial intelligence, his vision as a filmmaker and what he learned while making his documentary:

I was wondering what your thoughts on AI and music were because you definitely use some technology, but there’s a huge difference between using a tool versus having a tool create for you, right?

AI is going to change our lives for sure, and it may already have, but it’s the kind of thing where as long as art is concerned, I think people still are really inspired by what humans can do because it kind of reminds us of our own potential, what we are capable of, so I think art still has value to to us.

When you look at the vision for your songs, do you feel like it extends beyond just the music into videos and stuff like that?

Yeah, I’m a filmmaker now, so I was the co-director of “Omoiyari.” It’s Emmy-nominated now, so it’s kind of like I see myself more — my music is obviously my strongest foot forward — but I do connect visually, and if I have a strong enough vision for any music, I’ll try and create it or visualize it with music videos or future documentaries.

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What did you learn about yourself while you made the documentary?

A lot of stuff. (laughs) I gained more confidence as a Japanese-American artist. I started to see a responsibility that artists have to kind of uplift humanity, you know? I mean, that sounds grandiose, but in a small way, in our own way, our job is to be celebratory of the human condition. That’s one of my takeaways.

Do you see parallels between the subject matter of your documentary to basically what’s happening in America today?

“Omoiyari,” the film, is really about uplifting immigration. It’s about immigration and xenophobia, the dangers of other-izing and kind of like it’s deeply embedded in racist history around World War II, and how it parallels what’s happening today. I talk about that all the time on my social media and like at my shows too, so it’s part of who I am. I believe that this country is made robust and strong really because of … our immigration, because we were always like filled with fresh, eager people that worked really hard, worked their asses off, and I think that’s why we’re so wealthy, in my opinion.

In the trailer for the documentary, you ask what does it mean to be American? Did you come up with an answer for that?

That’s a good question. No, I think it’s a question that we always keep asking, because I think America is always changing. So I think the most important thing is to ask that question to yourself. And I think some things like that may never ever be able to answered. But I think it will help you find out more about yourself.