Don't Ask Alaska B to Translate Sailor Moon

A screenshot from Yamantaka // Sonic Titan's upcoming video game.

Alaska B—a Half-Chinese Half-British musician, performer, illustrator, designer—grew up in Montreal. Like basically every other person who grew up in the late 80s and 90s, she watched the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; Dragon Ball Z, and wasted a bazillion hours playing 007 Golden Eye on Nintendo 64. But besides the passive joys of electronic entertainment, growing up in Canada in a mixed-race city caused a lot of a tension for Alaska B. She says she felt paradoxically pressured to act more Asian while being told from others that she wasn’t Asian enough.

It’s through her music and performance art collective, Yamantaka // Sonic Titan, where Alaska and fellow founder Ruby K Attwood have experimented with cultural assimilation and tapping into imagery from the cultural backgrounds of the group members.

Although they’ve only released one LP, the album was given much praise for its experimental, punk metal sound, and was included on the Polaris 2012 Short List. Most recently, fans of the group witnessed their art in the form of 33, a 33-minute long rock opera performed in Toronto and Montreal this past fall. (Check out the full video here.) Each performance is as unique and artistic as the rest: hand-made costumes, white painted faces, anime-inspired 2.5 dimension cardboard cut-out sets—all created by members of the collective. Now, the group is working on a new album as well as a video game they're hoping to get enough crowdfunding for called Your Task // Shoot Things, for iOS and Android.

I called up Alaska B to talk about the game, her complicated relationship with anime, and how she isn’t actually Japanese.

VICE: On top of the album you’re working on a video game. What’s it about?
Alaska B: It’s kind of a side project. It’s basically a side scrolling game, kind of retro, classic Super NES, run-and-gun type of game. It’s the kind of game where the character just consistently goes and it’s a matter of dodging and shooting enemies as you run. The entire game is scored, from beginning to end. So the entire gameplay is written to music. It’s all YT//ST music. It’s a mixture of new songs and rearranged versions of previously released ones.

Cool. Where does your anime fascination come from?
Me and Ruby came from mixed-race Asian backgrounds so we were raised in this 80s ninja movement. In the midst of all the massive comic book commerce we found weird relations to other people where we were growing up in Canada. People would assume that I could translate Sailor Moon for them. I’m actually not Japanese at all, I’m part Chinese. It was these kinds of assumptions we were raised with where we were called Astro Boy or something to make fun of us when we were kids.

As much as we do enjoy anime and we watch anime and we grew up around it—and I was hugely into the cheesiest TV shows like Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon when I was a kid—we’re not trying to actively participate in some kind of otaku [someone who’s obsessed with anime/manga] culture, but rather these representations are undivorceable from the way we see ourselves. It’s become an obsession. What started as an artistic statement became a kind of style.

This newfound style, it’s really authentic in itself the way you’ve created it. What sparked that?
Ruby and I met at Concordia University, where you couldn’t get a break when people perceived you as being between worlds. We dealt with some weird shitty racism about the work we did. We had to demonstrate some kind of Asian-ness to “be Asian,” but we’re never “Asian enough” to do it. People put walls around culture. You don’t grow up with a concept of a barrier between cultures. You just take what’s on television or experience what your parents do and you build your identity around that. It’s only later when other people come in contact with you that it gets ugly.

We were dealing with a lot of that in conceptual art courses where it’s all about what you think, what you’re showing, where you’re taking things from—your influences. And the whole thing was absurd in that way. It used to be black people feel music, white people think music—that whole racist kind of way of thinking about music going back to the 50s through 80s. It hasn’t really changed much today. In many ways it’s like, look at how Asians practice music, they don’t play it [laughs].

It was those little subtle things that make us go, we’re not really one or the other and we’re being painted with broad strokes, so we may as well paint our own broad strokes.

How would you describe your broad strokes?
Being mixed, I’m not a part of any specific culture. So how do I navigate a world like that? In the work we do, we blatantly culturally appropriate and use imagery everywhere. But, we have to find an ethical line as to what we take. We’re more interested in misconceived representation. So, representations of anime don’t represent Japanese culture at all because they’re just cartoons. Just like the adventures of Bucky O’Hare don’t identify all white people from the 90s.

Do you feel like you know what you’re talking about when it comes to race and culture?
I did do some studies in political theory, but I’m more interested in our personal experiences as artists and our exposure to culture and influences. I mean, a lot of our prog influences come from the fact that I grew up around Emerson, Lake & Palmer records, and in the same way that I grew up around anime, being from an Asian household. There’s definitely going to be some crossover. We’re all experts of our own artistic expression.

Watch the trailer for Your Task // Shoot Things [here.](http://: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=playerembedded&v=d2jVrsALstE)_

Follow Ken on Twitter: @kjrwall

For more on Yamantaka // Sonic Titan and rock operas, check out these:

Yamantaka // Sonic Titan are a freaky fusion of the future

The making of a modern rock opera

Tommy is way more disturbing than you remember