There is something almost absurd about how much we’re expected to accomplish simply to qualify as functioning human beings.
Build a successful career.
Maintain meaningful friendships.
Stay informed about everything happening in the world.
Have an opinion about it.
Contribute something useful.
Keep your family close.
Take care of your mental health.
And, naturally, document enough of the experience online to demonstrate that you’re doing all of it correctly.
Somewhere between the constant notifications, professional ambitions, personal obligations and carefully curated social identities, life begins to resemble an increasingly complicated juggling act.
Aili & Orson have a name for that feeling.
“Achi Kochi.”
Roughly translated from Japanese, it means “all over the place.”
And the Belgian-Japanese electro-pop duo have turned that sensation into one of the most revealing songs of their career.
Released through Eskimo Recordings, “Achi Kochi” combines relentless motorik rhythms, hypnotic Moog bass, dreamy synthesizers and the kinetic drumming of Lander Gyselinck into a track that sounds almost impossibly energetic.
Underneath its momentum, however, sits something considerably less celebratory.
Exhaustion.
Melancholy.
And the suspicion that modern life has become a competition nobody remembers agreeing to enter.
“It feels like we’re constantly running from one place to another, and somehow it’s still not enough,” the duo explains.
The contradiction is intentional.
The music keeps accelerating.
The people inside it are struggling to keep up.
Everyone Looks Like They’re Handling It. Nobody Really Is.
Aili Maruyama and Orson Wouters aren’t describing a particular personal crisis when they talk about the inspiration behind “Achi Kochi.”
They’re describing an atmosphere.
The constant expectation that everyone should be competent, available, informed, productive and socially present at all times.
“There’s a lot of pressure on all of us: to have a spotless career, be a perfect friend, keep track of everything that’s happening in the world and contribute to it, be present on social media.”
The list could continue indefinitely.
The problem isn’t simply that we have too many responsibilities.
It’s that we increasingly feel obligated to perform the appearance of managing them effortlessly.
“As crazy as modern life can get, we always try to keep our heads held high. We try to keep smiling and want to show that we are still in control.”
And why?
“Mostly because we get the impression that everyone else is doing the same.”
It’s a vicious little feedback loop.
Everyone looks composed because everyone believes everyone else is composed.
Nobody wants to admit they’re overwhelmed because the surrounding world appears to be handling everything perfectly.
The result is a collective performance of competence concealing a shared sense of exhaustion.
“Achi Kochi” turns that performance into rhythm.
Nostalgia for a World That Wasn’t Always Online
There’s another emotional current running through the song.
Nostalgia.
Not necessarily for a particular place or person, but for a different relationship with time.
Aili & Orson belong to a generation that remembers life before social media became inseparable from everyday experience.
They remember a period when being connected didn’t necessarily mean being permanently reachable.
When not knowing something wasn’t immediately interpreted as falling behind.
When moments could happen without the implicit expectation that they might eventually become content.
“We are one of the last generations who consciously knew life before and after social media,” they explain.
“We sometimes think back to that era and wonder: wasn’t it better that way?”
It’s a question without a particularly simple answer.
Digital culture has made extraordinary things possible, including the international connections that have helped Aili & Orson bring Japanese-language electronic music to audiences across Europe, Japan and beyond.
But the same technologies have also transformed the speed and intensity of everyday existence.
“Social media made us hyper-conscious about everything and pushed the tempo to a whole new level.”
That observation becomes especially interesting when placed next to the actual tempo of “Achi Kochi.”
The song runs at 150 BPM.
The fastest track the duo have ever made.
“At 150 BPM, this is secretly a hardstyle song at heart, haha.”
There’s something wonderfully self-aware about translating the acceleration of contemporary life into music that quite literally refuses to slow down.
Sometimes the Dancefloor Is Where Anxiety Goes
Dance music has always had an interesting relationship with difficult emotions.
Euphoria and melancholy are hardly strangers.
Some of the most emotionally devastating songs are also the ones people dance to most enthusiastically.
Aili & Orson understand that contradiction instinctively.
Where their debut album, Nandakke?, embraced a colorful, playful world of electro-pop experimentation, “Achi Kochi” introduces a more introspective emotional vocabulary.
The energy hasn’t disappeared.
Neither has the humor.
But the music is beginning to acknowledge the world outside the party.
“We didn’t quite feel like making another happy, goof-around record,” they say.
“Nandakke? was a lot of fun, but now it’s time for something different.”
That shift isn’t simply a matter of becoming older or more serious.
It’s about feeling unable to ignore the surrounding world.
“There’s so much going on in the world right now that we couldn’t ignore it; we had to try and incorporate that into our music.”
The forthcoming second album will explore that impulse further, including the duo’s feelings about society and the state of the planet.
But they’re not interested in abandoning the pleasure of making dance music.
Instead, they’re allowing more complicated emotions into it.
Perhaps the dancefloor doesn’t have to be an escape from reality.
Perhaps it can be somewhere to confront reality without having to stand still.
Japanese Isn’t a Gimmick. It’s Part of the Rhythm.
One of the defining characteristics of Aili & Orson’s music is the relationship between Japanese vocals and European electronic production.
The duo, who formed after meeting in 2019, have developed a sound that draws on Belgian club culture while incorporating Maruyama’s Japanese language and cultural background.
On “Achi Kochi,” they take that relationship further by singing entirely in Japanese.
But the decision wasn’t primarily a calculated attempt to reach a particular audience.
It was musical.
“Japanese is a very rhythmic language, and for this motorik, rhythmic production, it fit perfectly.”
The words themselves became part of the composition’s propulsion.
“‘Achi Kochi’—those two words just sound perfect in the song, right?”
It’s a reminder that language carries musical meaning even before listeners understand its literal content.
Syllables have rhythm.
Consonants have impact.
Vowels create movement.
A phrase can become memorable through the way it occupies a beat, even for someone who doesn’t know what it means.
And yet the duo aren’t suggesting that lyrical meaning is irrelevant.
Quite the opposite.
Three Years of Duolingo and Half the Lyrics
There’s a particularly charming detail about how Aili & Orson collaborate.
Wouters doesn’t automatically understand every Japanese lyric Maruyama writes.
But he’s working on it.
“I have a three-year Duolingo streak going as we speak, which helps me understand almost half of the lyrics!”
The other half requires conversation.
Once Maruyama’s lyrics have found their place in a track, she explains their exact meaning so the duo can make sure the production and the words are emotionally aligned.
“I love to know what the lyrics are all about so that we aren’t working in two different universes.”
There’s also an important distinction the duo want to make clear.
Both Maruyama and Wouters are producers.
Their sound isn’t simply the result of one person supplying vocals while the other constructs the music around them.
They develop the arrangements and production together.
The linguistic differences become part of that collaboration rather than a division of responsibilities.
And the resulting music demonstrates something particularly interesting about cross-cultural artistic work.
Understanding doesn’t always need to begin with translation.
Sometimes it begins with sound, movement and intuition.
Then the words deepen what the music has already communicated.
Making Music in Japanese Changed Aili’s Relationship With Japan
For Maruyama, the project’s development has also created a more personal transformation.
As Aili & Orson gained recognition and began connecting with audiences in Japan, she found herself thinking more deliberately about her heritage.
Questions from listeners and people around her encouraged her to examine aspects of her identity that might previously have existed more intuitively.
“It put me in a position where I had to think a lot about my Japanese roots.”
That process has brought her closer to her family, the language and the culture.
“I try to go to Japan every year to visit my family and to learn more about the culture.”
It’s an interesting reversal of the familiar narrative in which artists draw upon their heritage to construct a creative identity.
Here, the creative project has helped Maruyama develop a deeper relationship with that heritage.
The music didn’t simply emerge from cultural exploration.
It also encouraged more of it.
And as the duo’s audience has expanded internationally, Japanese has become a point of connection rather than an obstacle.
They’ve witnessed audiences responding to the music without necessarily understanding the lyrics.
Sometimes listeners even attempt to sing along phonetically.
The results, apparently, can be hilarious.
But the enthusiasm matters more than the accuracy.
The emotional connection arrives anyway.
The Human Drummer Inside the Machine
“Achi Kochi” also demonstrates the duo’s continuing fascination with combining the precision of electronic production with the unpredictability of live musicianship.
The track features drums from Lander Gyselinck, whose background in jazz and electronic music made him an especially natural collaborator.
“He is both very skilled and super creative on his instrument; it was incredibly inspiring to spend time with him in the studio.”
The combination of live and electronic elements isn’t new territory for Aili & Orson.
They’ve worked with acoustic instruments since the beginning.
But Gyselinck brought a particularly sophisticated understanding of how those two worlds interact.
“He has a background as a jazz drummer but is also deeply immersed in electronic music, so he understands the dialogue between the two like no other.”
That dialogue becomes essential to the song.
The rhythm feels relentless, almost mechanical.
But within that propulsion exists the physicality of a human musician.
A body responding to the beat.
An instrument being played rather than simply programmed.
The combination mirrors the track’s larger emotional contradiction.
Human vulnerability moving inside an increasingly accelerated system.
A Second Album That Refuses to Repeat the First
Aili & Orson have already established a distinctive place within European electronic music.
Their 2021 EP Dansu introduced their playful collision of Japanese vocals and Belgian club influences, while Nandakke? expanded that approach into a full-length statement.
International radio support, performances across Europe and Japan, and touring alongside L’Impératrice helped bring their music to audiences well beyond the Belgian scene.
But success creates its own creative problem.
Once people recognize your sound, they begin expecting you to reproduce it.
And once you’ve made a record defined by playful, colorful energy, there can be an implicit pressure to keep being the people who made that record.
Aili & Orson aren’t interested in simply delivering Nandakke? again.
“We just wanted to explore a different part of ourselves on our upcoming album.”
That doesn’t mean abandoning their identity.
The rhythmic playfulness remains.
The inventive production remains.
The interplay between Japanese language and electronic music remains.
But the emotional context is changing.
There’s more uncertainty.
More melancholy.
More willingness to question the society around them.
And perhaps more awareness that a dance track can communicate something serious without sacrificing its ability to make people move.
There Are More Doors to Come
“Achi Kochi” is an unusually appropriate introduction to this next chapter.
A song about being pulled in too many directions becomes the starting point for a record about expanding the duo’s emotional possibilities.
The beat accelerates.
The lyrics circle.
The synthesizers soften the edges.
And underneath everything sits the realization that nobody can really keep up with everything all the time.
Perhaps that’s why the song feels so recognizable.
It’s not offering a solution to modern overwhelm.
It doesn’t tell us to delete our social media accounts, abandon our careers or retreat into some imaginary pre-digital paradise.
It simply captures the absurdity of the experience.
The pressure to succeed.
The fear of missing out.
The nostalgia for a slower world.
The exhausting performance of being fine.
And then it gives those feelings somewhere to move.
As for what the rest of their second album will reveal, Aili & Orson aren’t offering a complete explanation just yet.
“‘Achi Kochi’ is the first doorway, but there are many more doors to come… =)”
For now, the world is still spinning.
The tempo is still accelerating.
And Aili & Orson have found a way to make the chaos danceable.
In Conversation With Aili & Orson
“Achi Kochi” roughly translates to “all over the place.” What was happening in your lives when that feeling of constantly juggling responsibilities became something you wanted to capture in a song?
There was no single particular event that caused us to write this song; it’s more about the feeling that we all have to keep track of so many things these days. There’s a lot of pressure on all of us: to have a spotless career, be a perfect friend, keep track of everything that’s happening in the world and contribute to it, be present on social media…
In short: make no mistakes and don’t miss a thing. It feels like we’re constantly running from one place to another, and somehow it’s still not enough.
There’s an interesting contradiction in the track: it sounds energetic and danceable while carrying a sense of exhaustion and melancholy underneath. How important was that tension to the song?
That tension is what the song is all about. As crazy as modern life can get, we always try to keep our heads held high. We try to keep smiling and want to show that we are still in control, mostly because we get the impression that everyone else is doing the same.
The melancholic part is something people from our generation will understand very well, we believe. We are one of the last generations who consciously knew life before and after social media. We sometimes think back to that era and wonder: wasn’t it better that way?
Social media made us hyper-conscious about everything and pushed the tempo to a whole new level.
The repetitive Japanese vocals and motorik rhythms almost recreate the sensation of having too many thoughts and obligations running simultaneously. Did the concept influence the production from the beginning, or did you discover its meaning as the track developed?
The concept was there very early on. If we remember correctly, it was already there shortly after we decided on the tempo of the song.
It’s also the fastest song we’ve ever made, by the way—at 150 BPM, this is secretly a hardstyle song at heart, haha.
“Achi Kochi” is sung entirely in Japanese rather than using the bilingual approach you’ve explored previously. What made Japanese feel like the only appropriate language for this particular song?
Japanese is a very rhythmic language, and for this motorik, rhythmic production, it fit perfectly. “Achi Kochi”—those two words just sound perfect in the song, right?
Aili, has your relationship with your Japanese heritage changed as the project has grown and you’ve had the opportunity to bring your music directly to audiences in Japan?
For sure, I feel like I’m more in touch with the language and my heritage. As the project grew, I got a lot of questions from the people around me about the project and the meaning behind it.
It put me in a position where I had to think a lot about my Japanese roots. It made me more conscious of Japan and my family, and I’m very grateful for that.
I try to go to Japan every year to visit my family and to learn more about the culture.
Orson, when you’re producing around Aili’s Japanese lyrics, does not necessarily understanding every word immediately change the way you respond to her voice—as texture, rhythm or melody?
A very important nuance is that we are both producers, and we always work on our arrangements and production together.
But still, at a certain point, I love to know what the lyrics are all about so that we aren’t working in two different universes. I have a three-year Duolingo streak going as we speak, which helps me understand almost half of the lyrics!
But Aili usually guides me through the exact meaning once the lyrics have secured their spot in the track.
Your debut Nandakke? was characterized by a colorful, playful energy, while “Achi Kochi” suggests something more introspective. What has changed in the two of you personally or creatively since making that first album?
We just wanted to explore a different part of ourselves on our upcoming album. We didn’t quite feel like making another happy, goof-around record. Nandakke? was a lot of fun, but now it’s time for something different.
There’s so much going on in the world right now that we couldn’t ignore it; we had to try and incorporate that into our music.
That doesn’t mean we have become entirely serious, but on our new record, we dare to speak our minds about society and discuss how we feel about what is happening to our planet.
You describe music as something capable of dissolving language barriers. After touring internationally, have you witnessed moments where audiences who don’t speak Japanese seem to understand exactly what a song is communicating anyway?
We don’t have hard proof of that, but the fact that people are triggered to come to our concerts and seem to understand our energy is very encouraging to us. It proves that music goes beyond language.
People trying to sing along phonetically in Japanese have caused a few hilarious situations, though!
The song brings together disco drums, dreamy synths and a hypnotic Moog bass line, with Lander Gyselinck contributing drums. How do you balance the spontaneity of live musicianship with the precision and repetition at the heart of electronic music?
We’ve always found the combination of live instruments and electronics to be an interesting match—though we aren’t the inventors of this concept, of course!
We used live drums and other acoustic instruments from the beginning, but being able to record with a musician like Lander was on another level.
He is both very skilled and super creative on his instrument; it was incredibly inspiring to spend time with him in the studio. He has a background as a jazz drummer but is also deeply immersed in electronic music, so he understands the dialogue between the two like no other.
If “Achi Kochi” is our first doorway into the second Aili & Orson album, what does it reveal about the emotional and sonic world you’re building—and what might surprise listeners who think they already understand what Aili & Orson is?
“Achi Kochi” is the first doorway, but there are many more doors to come… =)
