Tip! Kitchen. Label is proud to present Agate, the latest album by Japanese artist Meitei, marking a deepening of the world he first shaped through his Kofū trilogy released between 2020 - 2023. Named after the mineral agate, a stone formed through slow accumulation, pressure, and time, the album reflects Meitei’s patient approach to sound. Agate brings together extended and newly rearranged works from across the Kofū cycle alongside new compositions and passages, refining material developed through years of performance and sustained practice.

Across these works, Meitei expands the musical vocabulary first introduced in Kofū, a sound he once described as “lost Japanese mood.” While Kofū drew from fragments of folklore, theatre, ghost stories, and forgotten urban memory, it was never an act of historical reconstruction. Rather, it reflected a  sensibility of the past observed from the present. With Agate, this worldview is clarified as Shinpu, a process of discovery in which historical awareness becomes a foundation for contemporary creation rather than a constraint. During five years of Kofū tours across Japan, Europe, and Asia, Meitei performed this material in a wide range of spaces, from underground live houses and listening rooms to culturally  significant sites. These environments influenced pacing, dynamics, and structure, shaping how the material evolved over time. Agate is therefore not only a studio album, but the result of material refined through repeated performance.

Meitei’s approach to sound mirrors the nature of agate itself. Grains become texture. Texture becomes
narrative. Voices drift through decaying layers of sound, while ancient instruments are used in non-traditional ways, forming distinctive percussive rhythms and melodies that appear and vanish without fixed resolution. The album’s visual materials were developed under Meitei’s direction through physical art-making processes. The cover artwork originates from a letterpress work by Kamisoe, a Karakami atelier in Nishijin, Kyoto, created on Kyo-karakami paper and reproduced for the album edition. The title calligraphy was created by Bio Xie, invited by Meitei after encountering in Taiwan a lingering atmosphere of “Shitsunihon,” reflected in Xie’s distinctive use of Chinese characters. The accompanying liner photo-
graphs were created by Hiroshi Okamoto, who also directed the visuals for Sen'nyū. Drawing from winter
seas, solitary cliffs, and breaking waves, the imagery reflects Meitei’s years in Hiroshima and his ongoing
confrontation with solitude and sound.