nowisee -- Trompe L'Oeil（トロンプルイユ）

 

From Visual Arts Cork.com

To get on with this article, I had to have a couple of questions answered. One is "What is nowisee?" and the other is "What the heck is Trompe L'Oeil?"

Well, let's start with the latter query. Trompe l'oeil which in French literally means "deceive the eye" is "...an art technique that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects exist in three dimensions", according to Wikipedia. So, basically it can be something like a painting that really comes out and grabs you. And the one example that I have shown above is Spanish painter Pere Borrell del Caso's "Escaping Criticism" from 1874.

As for the first question, the answer could be found on J-Wiki. For one thing, nowisee isn't pronounced like "no-wise-ee". It's pronounced "noise" and it seems to be a multimedia project centering around a band whose members have rather cryptic names: vocalist Strange Octave, guitarists Minimum Root and Add Fat, pianist Turtle 7th, bassist Chotto Unison and artwork person Zankoku tone（残酷 tone...Cruel Tone）. Wow! It's like wiseguy names for mathematicians! 

Starting up in August 2015, their concept is that the group has wanted to compete with the resonant power of music without the shackles of appearances and achievements. Sounds good enough to me. Around their music, all of nowisee have been involved with video, short stories and comics.

For a period of two years right from that starting point of August 2015, nowisee had released music through digital download monthly exactly on the 18th with accompanying music videos coming out on the previous 8th. Their output during those two years were placed onto their first two albums on CD. Although things had gotten sporadic from July 2017, the group began once more to put out regular monthly songs and videos, both on the 8th starting from June 2021.

The November 2021 contribution by nowisee is "Trompe L'Oeil" whose video reminds me of something similar by the Pet Shop Boys over a decade ago and whose music takes me back to the 1980s with those synthesizers. In a way, the arrangement also reminds me of what the 2010s aidoru group Especia was doing. Plus the video seems to be taking me through Doctor Strange's multiverse via beats. It's a whole lot less harrowing, and Strange Octave seems to be singing of the wonders of the titular art technique and how mind-expanding it could be.