But the first time nOrikO tapped into romance à la française was her version of Jane Birkin’s “Quoi,” which appears near the end of Melting Moment. The bilingual cover song, which also draws English lyrics from the jazz standard “All of Me,” is driven by an omnipresent piano riff, downtempo breakbeats, string and guitar melodies, and a vocal delivery so breathy it could have made Birkin blush. nOrikO’s voice is a bell on the high notes, capturing the doe-eyed softness and shameless romanticism that keeps yé-yé divas like Catherine Ribeiro and Françoise Hardy eternally on lovers’ mixtapes.
For all its ethereal fancy, nOrikO’s romance is grounded in a real search for meaning. On the following year’s full-length for Columbia, Love Me (named in part for the Polnareff tune), she spends a whole song attempting to define the feeling: “Love is light/Love is hope/Love is real/Love is hopeless/Love is lose/Love is hate.” At times her yearning is platonic, too: The second half of Melting Moment opens with “Those Were the Days,” a song popularized as Welsh singer Mary Hopkin’s 1968 debut single. Over a beat reminiscent of UK garage, a jolly bar song becomes filled with melancholy nostalgia. nOrikO’s voice rumbles deep and tired, stirring low as she contemplates days when she and her friends “would fight and never lose.” In her assessment, the rapture and dissolution of love and friendship is also an apocalypse.
Melting Moment appeared just after the golden age of Western-inspired genres in Japan such as city pop and shibuya-kei, but despite taking inspiration from England and France, the EP’s snapshot of a wandering soul seeking absolution in big-city nightclubs was never a mainstream success. “In Japan, it was popular among young people who like edgy music, but it didn’t resonate with the general public who listened to J-pop,” nOrikO told Resident Advisor in 2024. After Melting Moment, she released a few more albums as POiSON GiRL FRiEND before taking an extended break from the project. She went on to live in France, occasionally DJing or performing live, collaborating on music under the names Dark Eyed Kid and Kiss-O-Matic, and documenting her life on her blog.
In recent years, Melting Moment’s borderless viewpoint and open-minded approach to genre has attracted a global audience that recognizes it as a quietly revolutionary piece of music, and its creator as an unsung electronic pioneer. In 2021, “Nobody,” a song from POiSON GiRL FRiEND’s 1993 release, Shyness, was included on the well-received compilation Heisei no oto: Japanese Left-Field Pop From the CD Age (1989-1996), sparking renewed interest. In 2023, Melting Moment received a vinyl reissue, and nOrikO’s distinctive, feather-light voice featured on “So Many Ways” by Kiss Facility, Mayah Alkhateri and Sega Bodega’s shoegaze duo. As POiSON GiRL FRiEND found new audiences, a world tour took nOrikO to China and the U.S. In 2025, she’s set to tour Europe, starting with a sold-out show in Paris.
On Melting Moment’s closing title track, nOrikO sings in English, French, and Japanese, her voice piercing as she makes peace with a relationship that’s evaporated into words left unsaid. The record ends with a violin solo and elegant piano, a moment as restorative as the sunlight and breeze on your face as you exit the party, body depleted from dancing out a broken heart. Perhaps what continues to draw new generations to this underground gem is its sense of fragile hope. Over ambient textures and breakbeats on “The Future Is Now,” nOrikO contemplates a crumbling world and grabs our shoulders to give them a shake: “Why don’t we try/To save our planet for our children?” (Another simple, key exclamation: “Don’t be negative!”) Melting Moment is a small utopia, radiating human warmth to resist the modern world’s ever-encroaching isolation. It’s an invitation to step into the present.
