Ethereal rock duo Asobi Seksu may be busy traveling on a world tour, but lead singer Yuki Chikudate's cat, Tony, could care less.
"He's really a jerk, especially now that I'm gone so much," said Chikudate, who lives in Brooklyn. "He gets really, really upset with me and he's not nice when I come home, but I don't blame him. You know, he didn't choose this life."
Asobi Seksu means "playful sex" in Japanese, even though Chikudate, who is Japanese-American, isn't sure if it's actually a Japanese phrase. She and guitarist James Hanna have often been pigeonholed as modern shoegazers, a style with dreamy guitar walls and reverb popular in the '90s. But with their sweeping and ambient new CD, "Hush," released last month, Chikudate said she and Hanna have tried to move away from that sound.
"We got tired of just making walls and walls of guitar on every song," she said. "Mostly that was James . . . so I think he got tired of his own noise."
Chikudate has had a fair share of strange encounters on the road, including an older woman who bulldozed into her dressing room in Chicago ("She kept yelling 'I'm 51 and from Cleveland!' ") and a show at an indoor trinket swap, located in a former appliance store, in Bakersfield, Calif. "It was just the oddest thing ever," Chikudate said, describing how the makeshift stage overlooked turtles in the window of a pet store next door.
But the hardest part of tour life for Chikudate is recalling where she is in the morning. "I'll wake up and I'll expect another hotel room, or like I'll go down to the lobby and [think], 'Wait, which tour manager am I going to see again? Are we in Europe?' " she said. "My brain will just kind of freak out."
Asobi Seksu plays the Middle East Downstairs March 30 at 8 p.m. with Tyvek and Wallcreeper. Tickets are $12 at 617-931-2000 or www.ticketmaster.com.
