CAR-86 – Praha Depart: DOT.

CD, Call And Response, 2011

This is part of a series of posts talking about music I’ve released through my own Call And Response label. I explain in a bit more detail here.

Praha Depart were a band I first heard back in the early days. I think I first saw them at a studio gig organised by Drive to the Forest in a Japanese Car (who had appeared on Call And Response’s first 1-2-3-Go! compilation). At that time they were a simple drums, guitar and vocal trio, with no bass but a very cool, scratchy postpunk sound that had elements of The Slits and Maximum Joy to it and a singer who did this wonderful, mad gypsy dancing. I kept seeing them at shows on and off over the years and became more and more of a fan. At one stage the singer, Mai, took up bass and stopped her dancing, then they experimented with bringing in bassists (including one memorable spell with Takehito Kono of Mahiruno (now of Lagitagida), and then finally settling once more on Mai as bass/vocalist.

I’d been trying to book them more and more as time went by and they’d been rapidly rising in my estimation as (along with Tacobonds) one of the best bands in Tokyo. Their sound filled out, their music became less punk and more expansive, epic, psychedelic and contemporary. Their sound filled the small halls of the Tokyo underground circuit and seemed to be bursting at the seams, straining for bigger spaces. Zibanchinka loved them and N’toko thought they were marvellous — I think it’s very important to pay attention to the opinions of other Call And Response artists; not everyone’s going to like everything, but it helps massively if they get along — so I did my best to help them where I could.Praha Depart: Dreamer / Swan (Slovenian studio session part 1)

Praha Depart were a rare item in the Call And Response roster though, since they were a band who’d already been around for a while and were reasonably well known in the Tokyo underground scene. The Dot. EP was originally recorded as a free giveaway for a “one-man live” they did at at the beginning of 2011 (a “one-man live” just means a gig with no other bands performing and is a really big deal for Japanese bands for no good reason), then over the summer, Praha Depart and N’toko started talking about touring Europe together and decided having something new to sell on the tour would be a good idea. With that in mind, I suggested pressing up the EP properly and putting it out to coincide with Europe.

N’toko felt the recording as it stood wasn’t ready to be released, so we contacted Slovenian producer Igor Vuk (a.k.a. BeatMyth) to punch up the recording and give it a bit more energy and power. He had to cheat a bit with the remixing but I’d say he did a pretty bang up job of it. Iguz from Zibanchinka lent her graphic design talents to the album jacket for free, and due to time constrictions, we had it pressed in Slovenia so that the CDs would be waiting for Praha Depart when they arrived rather than risk having them delivered to Japan too late.

Now Praha Depart had made a decision to focus on overseas touring, and this was a big commitment from the band. They had to find jobs that would allow them to take large amounts of time off, which usually means low pay and makes it far more difficult to participate in the money-sucking enterprise of playing in Japan. It killed Praha Depart’s prospects for touring in Japan even though by working theirs and my connections, they could probably have made a Japan tour pay for itself. Instead though, they devoted their energies to Europe and America, and got what looked like some solid progress out of it in some areas. The progress was piecemeal though, and you can argue that they gave up too soon, but given how much they had already sacrificed, I don’t want to be the person to say how much time one should devote to such a quixotic goal. In any case, something happened and they started to sharply curtail their activities.Praha Depart: Sanzeila / Stone (Slovenian studio session part 2)

As far as the album was concerned, there were some serious problems, with most of the units arriving with me damaged, necessitating the removal and replacement of discs into new cases. Given the number of unsold CDs I had from the early days of the label, I wasn’t short of spare cases, but it was still time-consuming. Fortunately the discs themselves were beautifully done, with full colour labels and no problems with the audio quality. I still don’t know the cause (if it was the press themselves or the postage) but it has made me very suspicious of using overseas companies.

The limits of my own powers to help bands with overseas booking were also very clearly revealed by Praha Depart’s touring experience. I’d booked some UK gigs for Uhnellys and Deracine round the time of 1-2-3-Go! which had been a humbling and frankly dispiriting experience, and even with a few slightly more reliable connections under my belt, the sheer scale of a continental tour enterprise would have crushed me were I attempting to do it myself. I didn’t make a specific decision, but I think around this time, I drew a sort of mental red line around Japan and resolved to limit my ambitions to areas where I had face-to-face working relationships with people. I didn’t turn away from the rest of the world and I still help bands and overseas organisers who are interested in making connections or contact with bands where I can, but I became reactive rather than proactive. In that sense, I suppose I became part of that “Galapagos syndrome” that I myself have occasionally criticised Japanese music and pop culture of wallowing in. Anyway, bite me.

Anyway, back to Dot. There are only four tracks on it, but it’s as long as a lot of the mini-albums I’ve released. The ten-minute title track is one of the most powerful and exhausting pieces of music I’ve ever put out. The repetitive dot-dot-dot morse chime of the guitar is a deceptively minimalist opening given the contortions of twisted rock energy it explodes into, but it’s always there, an insistent, propulsive backbeat that the song keeps returning to, while Mai’s voice rips itself to shreds. As an opening track, it’s ambitious. Portrait Man is probably my favourite track though, and actually my favourite of any of the songs they’ve done. It’s the track that I think combines all the elements I associate with the group most powerfully: the off-kilter gypsy-punk, the Japanese festival drums, and the harsh, abrasive guitar squalls. Lesson is a bit more restrained but no worse for that (and it’s not saying much anyway with a band as expressive as Praha Depart could be), while the deliberate, plodding doom of Faust Class demonstrates why Praha Depart are one of the few bands whose slow emotional songs I can honestly claim to like.Praha Depart: Rhumba / Dot. (Slovenian studio session)

As I said, the band seem to have curtailed their activities a lot lately. Drummer Junpei Yamamoto also plays with Loolowningen & The Far East Idiots (along with Lagitagida, Sajjanu and Lailailai Team one of the several successor bands to Mahiruno) and as they have become more successful and busy, it has perhaps put limits on what he can do with his other bands. Also Mai and guitarist Tsukasa have formed the rather fine Yokan System, playing synthpop with elements of 80s kayoukyoku mixed with a sort of The Knife/Grimes-style offbeat pop sense. To watch Yokan System play shows alongside cutesy “girls group” acts at cavernous but three-quarters-empty venues is to watch the workings of a very different side to the music scene from the cramped clubs that Praha Depart’s immense sound seemed to be straining against. It feels weird and wrong to me, but then I’ve wilfully and arrogantly set myself up in opposition to the established promotion and booking model that the music scene tends to use. My notion of “right” and more objective measures of “effective” are often at odds. In any case, Praha Depart still exist, and this is by no means a story of failure. Like Zibanchinka though, there’s a nagging sense of what could have been.

DOT. is available now from Call And Response’s online shop.