How Anime ‘Samurai Champloo’ Helped Absofacto Create His Chart-Topping Single “Dissolve”

The sonic world of alt-pop artist Jonathan Visger, also known as Absofacto, is as imaginative as it is carefully tailored.

His genre-defying explorations in songs like "Lemon Drop" and "Python" bend hints of alternative, electronic and bedroom pop for lofty and layered compositions that seem as calculated as pieces of big-budget cinema. It helps, of course, that Visger’s creative process is heavily focused on visual aesthetics as a sense of guidance. Let alone handling production and vocals for all of his music, the artist has even stepped in to co-direct the music video for his hit song "Dissolve."

"… At some point in the process I’ll think of something that I love that’s a visual piece of art… there’s something in the connection between music and the right beautiful visuals that can really help show you if you’re on the right track," he tells the Recording Academy. His experimental sound is so immersive that upon listening, it’s as if you can see each song unfold.

With some of the Atlantic Records signee's earliest songs making headway throughout underground internet communities, Absofacto most prominently broke through last year when "Dissolve," originally released in 2015 and re-released in 2017 on his Thousand Peaces EP, began climbing the Billboard Alternative chart. Thanks to a spurt of virality on TikTok, the song completed its climb to the number one slot in January, marking the fourth-longest positioning climb in the chart’s 30-year history, according to Billboard. "Dissolve" originally hit radio in 2018.

Ahead of any new releases or his major-label debut, Visger says that he is focused on establishing a consistent creative rhythm first. "For right now, I’m planning to keep dropping singles and really getting a rhythm going where people understand that there’s always something new coming from me, and really working to establish that it’s probably going to surprise you every time."

The Recording Academy caught up with Absofacto to discuss his musical connection to visual aesthetic, the challenging rewards of collaboration, the impact of TikTok on his career and the focus of intention behind his forthcoming music.

This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.

Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your background in music? How and when did you first start making music?

My name is Jonathan Visger, I’m an artist called Absofacto. I make alternative, left-leaning pop music. I got started really by just falling in love with music in high school. I picked it up and started playing in indie-rock bands, toured around doing a really indie-rock thing for a long time and later on I just fell in love with production and writing, the more electronic side of it. The music I make now is kind of a blend of all of those musical experiences before.

You mentioned transitioning from doing a lot more indie-rock and instrumentation with those bands to moving toward more solo efforts. What made you want to shift gears that way and what was the transition like?

It somewhat came out of the realization that the thing that I love most about music is the creation of it, the conception and the design and the writing more so than necessarily performing it. Really the shift to being more of a solo musician was more of a studio-based process. I wanted to focus on that more and for me, I like to go down such deep rabbit holes with the music before I’m happy that it inherently becomes kind of a partially solo pursuit. Although I do collaborate a lot as well, and I’ve learned how to incorporate that over time.

People are probably most familiar with your song "Dissolve," which made its way to the top of Billboard's Alternative Chart and has also made big waves on TikTok. How did that song come about and what was the inspiration for it?

That’s a really interesting story because that song, I actually made about four years ago. I was an independent artist at the time and my normal modus operandi was to have a song that I was working on and work on it every day. I was never in a rush. All in all, that song I spent two months on, kind of picking it up and putting it down and looking at it from different angles before I was happy. But, it had an interesting inception because I started out with a very very obscure sample of a Motown song. A song that was not a hit from the Motown era, and I started building on that. I was really inspired at the time by a lot of lo-fi hip-hop producers like Nujabes, this Japanese lo-fi producer, and I was kind of feeling that link between music and anime and some of the vibe of "Dissolve" was inspired by that. I literally wrote "Dissolve" while watching the intro theme song of Samurai Champloo on loop.

After making that song and having it out for a while, was it weird for it to suddenly resurface and gain traction on TikTok? When did you realize that people were really gravitating towards this song?

That song had lived in culty-underground circles for the entire time that it’s been out. It was in anime music videos a lot, it’s in pseudo-animations and even on Musical.ly it was on there a little bit before TikTok. But, then when the TikTok thing happened and kind of caught the world off guard at how explosive the growth was, I really had no idea what it was. Someone just DM'd me and told me that my song was viral on TikTok. I had zero idea what that meant. Once I got that message, within a week I just saw that the streams on that song were going crazy and it just popped off. It felt like all of last year I was both kind of riding that wave and wrapping my head around how to make the most of it at the same time.

Considering that at that point you were four years evolved, was that something that helped to inform what you’re making and what your new creative output looks like?

It was weird at first because when something is moving that quickly it’s hard to know what to make of it. You know, I felt like I was kind of chasing it a little bit last year but now I think I really see what it means. My takeaway from all of it was [that it was ] ultimately a song where I just made exactly what I wanted to and what I loved and thought was genuinely good. I didn’t make it to be successful or go viral, I didn’t do any of that. My takeaway is just to keep doing that and whatever it is to make the music that I’m most inspired to make and what I love. It proved to me that if I release something I love and it doesn’t pop off day one, that doesn’t mean that three years down the line it can’t go crazy or even if it never does go crazy, it’s still something that I’m proud of. That’s become my major takeaway is just focus on the music and make great music and you’ll win in the long run.

Is there any connection between the elements of how music is incorporated into anime and the way that you approach making music? Have producers like Nujabes and different anime franchises been a primary source of inspiration?

It really goes beyond anime for sure. It’s more aesthetic visuals, in general, are really inspiring to me. And ever since that song, and somewhat before it, every song that I’m working on now at some point in the process I’ll think of something that I love that’s a visual piece of art. I pull it up and try to keep it present while I’m working on the music because there’s something in the connection between music and the right beautiful visuals that can really help show you if you’re on the right track. For my latest song “Lemon Drop”, it wasn’t anime but it was a certain scene from Twin Peaks that I felt like embodied what I viewed for the song. I probably watched it on loop 50,000 times while I was working on the song and every time I would make a change to the song I could ask myself, “Does this bring me closer to the vibe that I’m trying to achieve?”

Can you talk a little bit about newly released songs like "Python" and "Rewind"? What was your focus with these songs and others that you might be working on?

With the new music it’s a very very simple goal to me. With every single song, I try to set a really high aesthetic bar for myself and push towards something that I think is special and encapsulates any sort of difficult to describe magic. With "Python" it’s sort of this trippy, psychedelic sexy song that essentially embodies sex through a metaphor of snakes twisting together. The line is "I wanna hold you tight, tangled up around each other," but then the song is called "Python." Everything sort of feels snakey. I wanted to make the production feel like a snake rising. It’s all very metaphorical like that.

With "Rewind," the whole thing was supposed to encapsulate the feeling of a long night out in the city where you run into somebody that you used to be with, and then end up having an odyssey all night together. I pictured New York. That feeling of wondering if you could go back to something that you used to have.

Are you working with anyone right now? What has your experience been like collaborating in that capacity of production, instrumentation and songwriting? Do you have any dream collaborations?

I really love it. It’s funny because it’s certainly challenging in a way because to some extent you have to meet everybody in the middle. I have to turn off the part of myself that’s an absolute control freak, which I can do and I enjoy that. It’s really great because it’s an opportunity to exercise a part of yourself that appreciates all different kinds of music and making all different kinds of music, but that may not necessarily fit your own projects as well.

My thing right now is that I think there’s such an amazing wave of young newer artists that are happening and that I think are more exciting than anything that has come out in a long time. For me it really is these artists that are more early in their process. I’m really feeling this artist Chiiild and I love what Benee is doing. That’s the stuff that’s got me really excited right now, genre bending artists like that.

Do you feel that the movement of "genre-bending" in combination with the push from TikTok has changed your career trajectory?

It certainly has changed my trajectory in the sense that it brought a lot of attention to what I was doing. Certainly, at a time when I didn’t have that much attention I would say. Ultimately, what I learned is that it certainly changed my trajectory but it didn’t become the center of the trajectory either. With the TikTok stuff, nobody can force it to happen. It’s sort of these random stormy seas of virality in music and the thing that I see again and again is that the songs that blow up are really immediate, and the ones that stick around are really great. I really do believe that. And classics come back. I think with TikTok, everyone just has to take it as it comes to some extent and don’t take it personally if it doesn’t happen. It doesn’t mean your music isn’t good, it just didn’t happen. It might happen tomorrow, or the next day. All it did was take people’s tastes and create new opportunities for people to blow up. For me, it changed the trajectory but ultimately, it comes down to me just continuing to make the best music that I can.

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How Anime ‘Samurai Champloo’ Helped Absofacto Create His Chart-Topping Single “Dissolve”

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