Behind the scenes with Perfume, Japan?s most futuristic pop group

“For example, showing messages from Twitter as part of the 3D images on stage — it makes the fans able to experience our show through technology.” A-chan adds “It’s not like technology defines Perfume, but since technology exists, Perfume wants to make the most of it.”They certainly do that — Perfume’s live shows are like nothing you’ve seen before. I met with Manabe for about an hour at his Tokyo studio, and much of the interview involved him showing me various mind-blowing work in progress on his MacBook Pro. Rhizomatiks has so many projects going on at the same time that Manabe has to keep track of how the technology is shared between them with a flow chart that looks like Tokyo’s subway map from 300 years in the future.Rhizomatiks works closely with Mikiko Mizuno, Perfume’s choreographer and director of the dance troupe Elevenplay. “First we do some very experimental projects with Elevenplay, then if the technology works well we use it with Perfume,” Manabe says. “We actually haven’t seen ourselves with the production yet, so we can’t really tell at this point,” Nocchi says when I ask the group if they have a particular favorite song from the Future Pop tour. I first saw Perfume at Osaka’s Summer Sonic festival in 2011, and as you’d expect it was a very different experience — there’s only so much you can do in daylight with limited changeover times.“Festivals are sometimes for people who are just getting to know Perfume and seeing us for the first time, and it’s just ourselves on stage — it’s a challenge,” says Kashiyuka. “But he said at the beginning when he started producing Perfume, people said that our music is ‘future pop.’ At the time he didn’t think it was exactly futuristic — there was so much more to work on.