POiSON GiRL FRiEND

Rio, London, and a name borrowed from Momus

Poison Girl Friend is one person: Noriko Sekiguchi, a Japanese singer, songwriter, producer and DJ whose upbringing kept moving. Born in Japan, she spent three years in Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s while her father worked in banking, and was schooled in French — an accident of biography that explains why half her catalogue is sung in a language that has nothing to do with either country. She spent time in the UK in the 1980s and early 1990s, and it was London's club scene, and the British and American house records circulating in it, that gave her a form to work in.

She came back to Tokyo and started DJing. In 1990 she put together a group called The Poison Girl Friends; by 1991 it had contracted to a solo project and lost its plural. The name was lifted from The Poison Boyfriend, an album by Momus, who later became a collaborator — as did Simon Fisher Turner. Those two associations are largely why she is filed under Shibuya-kei, a label that fits her social circle better than it fits the music, which is slower, colder and more indebted to ambient house than to the sunny record-collector pop the tag usually implies.

Four years, and then nothing

The run of records that made her reputation is remarkably short. A self-titled EP arrived on Psycho Planet in 1991. Melting Moment followed in 1992 on Victor's Endorphin imprint, pairing an ambient house pulse with string writing and a voice mixed so close it barely rises above speech. The single Hardly Ever Smile (Without You) came the same year on Nippon Columbia, which then released the album Shyness in 1993, the Mr. Polyglot single and its remix EP, and Love Me in 1994.

Love Me was the end of it. Self-produced, it closed with a reading of Michel Polnareff's Love Me, Please Love Me — a French chanson delivered at the tempo of a trip-hop record, which is as neat a summary of her method as anything she has written. It was a CD-only release, and for the next thirty-one years it stayed that way.

The work did not stop entirely; it changed name. As Dark Eyed Kid she released Angelic House: Ambient Love Collection on Spiral in 1993, and as Kiss-O-Matic she made Circularhythm in 1996 and both Sambanista! and St. Angélique in 1997. Then came roughly two decades of public silence.

The return nobody was waiting for

She reappeared in 2014 with rondoElectro on her own Psycho Planet label, followed by the single Paradise in 2017 and the album Das Gift in 2018, both on Nekon Records. These landed into an indifferent market. The catalogue that had made her name was out of print, expensive on the second-hand CD circuit, and effectively invisible outside Japan.

What changed was distribution rather than taste. From 2021 the major labels holding her back catalogue began putting it on streaming services, and the records found the audience that a 1992 Victor pressing never could — listeners arriving through trip hop, ambient and the ongoing excavation of 1990s Japanese CDs rather than through anything that happened at the time. A compilation, Collection, appeared on 7th Heaven in 2022; Nippon Columbia issued exQuisxx in 2023.

Vinyl, radio, and a 2026 that keeps producing

The reissue programme is the most concrete evidence of the turn. Love Me was pressed on vinyl for the first time on 21 March 2025 by Nipponophone / J-Digs, catalogue COJA-9543, on black vinyl with an obi and two tracks in edited form. Shyness and the 1991 Poison Girl Friends EP have followed on vinyl across 2025 and 2026, and the campaign has been carried by Western specialists including Light in the Attic and In Sheep's Clothing.

Since October 2023 she has held a residency as a host DJ on NTS Radio, having first appeared on the station's In Focus strand on 9 September 2022 in a broadcast from Tokyo. New music has resumed at a steady rate on Psycho Planet: the single The October Country in 2024, the single Un espoir pour… earlier in 2026, and the Reprises EP — eight tracks, thirty-two minutes — released on 25 August 2026. She has also turned up as a guest on records by Candy Collection in 2021, Kiss Facility and Sigh Society in 2023 and Gaul Plus in 2025.

Asked in October 2025 whether she was proud of any of it, her answer was "always or never", followed by a flat observation that "there's very few people in Japan who like me" and a refusal to be treated as a heritage act: "I don't want to live in the past... I want to have some miracles."

The touring career arrives thirty years late

Poison Girl Friend barely toured in the 1990s. In 2024 she played a first US run across eight cities. In 2025 she worked the West Coast, and 2026 has been her busiest year by a wide margin: Northcote Theatre in Melbourne on 1 March, Lee's Palace in Toronto on 17 May, then a North American tour that opened at The Foundry inside The Fillmore Philadelphia on 9 September.

That run has since taken in the Howard Theatre in Washington on 10 September, the Crystal Ballroom at Somerville Theatre on 11 September, Webster Hall in New York on 13 September, King of Clubs in Columbus on 15 September and The Roxy at Mahall's in Lakewood, Ohio on 16 September, reaching House of Blues Chicago on 17 September. Ahead of it are The Rave/Eagles Club in Milwaukee on 19 September, the Green Room in Minneapolis on 20 September, the Gothic Theatre in Englewood, Colorado on 22 September, Metro Music Hall in Salt Lake City on 24 September, Shrine Social Club in Boise on 25 September and The Crocodile in Seattle on 28 September, where RIP Swirl shares the bill. The Vermont Hollywood in Los Angeles follows on 3 October, tickets from $40 through DICE, and Foro Indie Rocks! in Mexico City on 7 October.

What the sets actually contain

The shows are not a reissue victory lap in the usual sense, because the material is drawn evenly from both halves of the career. Setlist records from the current North American tour average sixteen songs, opening with FACT 2 and running through When You Call My Name, comme rêve sans trêve, MONCHE, Slave to the Computer, DOOMED LOVE, MORE I SEE, The October Country, Dreamer's Ball and Hardly Ever Smile before a two-song encore of QUOI and Can't Help Falling in Love.

Covers do a lot of the work. Light My Fire and Julee Cruise's Falling sit inside the main set; the Elvis Presley reading closes the night. At Webster Hall on 13 September the set also included Poptones, Those Were the Days, always, If You Wish, Love Me, Please Love Me and the new single Un espoir pour…. Set lengths vary considerably by billing — some listed slots run to only about forty-five minutes — so the sixteen-song shape describes the fullest headline nights rather than every date.