Best of 2017 – More great sounds (2) – Call And Response Records year in review

Among the top releases of 2017, I always avoid writing about anything on my own Call And Response label for obvious reasons. For equally obvious reasons, the music Call And Response puts out is also always among my favourite new music of the year (otherwise why would I go to the trouble of putting it out?) so I’m giving the label a page of its own to run through what was a very busy year in new releases:

Lo-shi – Ninjin

Lo-shi are an instrumental post-rock/electronic duo and Ninjin was the first of two albums they released in 2017 (the second was an equally excellent self-released CD/download called Moro-Q). Lo-shi’s music is characterised by eerie soundscapes and beats that range from skittering electronica to insistent, almost krautrock rhythms, while the melodies and tones combine washes of synth with theremin, Jew’s harp and Durutti Column-esque guitar.
(Buy the CD here)

Looprider – Umi

The second post-rock album Call And Response released in 2017 was this single 25-minute-long rock monster of a track by Looprider. Following on from the hardcore and noise-influenced Ascension and their pop/metal/shoegaze debut My Electric Fantasy, an instrumental prog rock epic may have seemed like another hard swerve in another direction, but it’s really a refinement of the same combination of sweet and heavy that the band have been exploring from the start.
(Buy the CD here)

P-iPLE – Do Do Do A Silly Travel By Bicycle Bicycle

This clumsily titled mini-album is a short-sharp-shock of scuzzy hardcore and no wave delivered with a playful and nonsensical sense of humour. The guitar sounds are tortured and glorious, the rhythms are breakneck, and vocalist Madca Kitabeppu (also of synth-punk trio Jebiotto) is a natural born rock star.
(Buy the CD here)

V/A – Throw Away Your CDs Go Out To A Show

I don’t include Call And Response releases in my year-end rundowns, partly because no one would trust the lists if I did, and partly because I find it hard to assess music I’m this personally invested in against music I simply enjoy as a fan. This compilation, however, would definitely have been No.1 if I’d been including everything. It’s everything I love — skronky art-punk and noise-rock that channels the ragged creativity of the postpunk era while rarely resorting to direct pastiche. It also includes fantastic songs by most of my favourite bands in Japan, like Panicsmile, Melt-Banana, Hyacca, otori and more, so I’m not going to be ashamed in any way of saying that this is a fucking awesome album.
(Buy the CD here)

Sharkk – Be That Way

Sharkk is another way of saying Sean McGee, drummer from Looprider and Tropical Death. It’s also a convenient shorthand round these parts for a kind of sweetly sentimental, emo-tinged indie rock with gnarly, 90s alt-rock guitars. One of the few unashamedly melodic bands on the label at the moment, McGee deploys his tunesmithery in the service of a faintly self-effacing, rather ambivalent nostalgia for teen angst.
(Buy the cassette here)

Tropical Death – Modern Maze

Like Sharkk, there’s a sense of harking back to ‘90s indie rock in Tropical Death, although they take a more angular approach to their arrangements and a far more cynical approach to their lyrics. From the melodic title track to the post-hardcore rhythm workout Tribal, Tropical Death load their songs with hooks and little moments of invention that ensure every track takes you somewhere unexpected.
(Buy the cassette here)

Looprider – Ascension (cassette re-release)

Originally released as a limited edition CD in 2016, Ascension is Looprider’s take on hardcore and noise, a twenty-minute nuclear explosion of a record that starts and ends in squalls of pure noise but on the way takes you on a whirlwind tour of scratchy hardcore and the scuzzier fringes of Looprider’s more familiar metal-adjacent territory.
(Buy the cassette here)

illMilliliter – New Standard

The debut album by a Tokyo post-hardcore band featuring ex-members of Tacobonds and Imamon, dealing in frenetic, twisted guitars and tight, focussed, aggressive rhythms. illMilliliter are clearly influenced by bands like Shellac (Bob Weston worked on the album as mastering engineer), Slint and Fugazi, as well as Japanese acts like Panicsmile and possibly Number Girl/Zazen Boys, but there’s also an appreciation for sparseness and the spaces between sounds, which lifts New Standard above most Japanese punk and post-hardcore and makes them something worth playing special attention to.
(Buy the CD here)

Top 20 releases of 2016: Intro

As any readers this site has somehow managed to retain may have spotted, updates have dried up over the past couple of years. The main reasons for that have been down to my finishing writing, editing and promoting my book, Quit Your Band! – Musical Notes from the Japanese Underground (released late 2016 from Awai Books) and my decision to spend half a year travelling around Japan by bicycle, documenting the local music scenes in each of Japan’s 47 prefectures (partially written up on my Burn Your Hometown blog).

The other thing that’s kept me occupied has been my Call And Response Records label, which has been getting more and more active over the past couple of years. Last year we put out four new albums/EPs:

Looprider’s Ascension was a hardcore- and noise-influenced collection of raw, fast sonic violence.

Nagasaki art-punk trio Mechaniphone’s Uholic was a collection of quirky, pop-inflected tunes that come at you from a variety of rhythmical angles.

Tropical Death’s Thunder Island EP was a Cassette Store Day special, combining a Japanese underground background with ’90s post-hardcore/alt-rock influences.

Finally, Nakigao Twintail’s Ichijiku was an eclectic explosion of pop, surreal humour and teen angst.

With Looprider’s third album, the post-rock/progressive Umi, and instrumental electronic/psychedelic duo Lo-shi’s new Ninjin already out in 2017 and at least four more new releases in the works, the label is picking up the pace still further this year.

Nevertheless, with the end of my Strange Boutique column in The Japan Times this March, I have had more time for writing, and I’ve spent the last couple of months belatedly introspecting over the best and most interesting Japanese music of 2016. Whether anyone apart from me still cares about the Japanese underground music of a year that ended nearly six months ago is up for debate, but I’m doing it anyway.

The usual caveats apply. These releases have been selected from EPs, mini-albums and fill albums. I include compilations, but not singles, which I loosely classify as a disc with two or fewer tracks. There are experimental and psychedelic releases that may only include a single track of immense length, so obviously I make exceptions for those. I exclude anything Call And Response released, since I’m too close to it to be able to assess it critically in the same way I would something I didn’t have a hand in the production of (although obviously all four of our releases if last year would be right up there if I were ranking the music purely on what I love). The order of the ranking is by no means scientific subject to all sorts of competing considerations. Some are simply interesting ideas or good representations of something I think deserves to be represented, others are albums that I found myself engaging with on a creative or intellectual level, others are simply fun collections of songs.

There are lots of albums I enjoyed or appreciated that I didn’t include here but which on another day I might have, and there are still more I didn’t get a chance to listen to but which may well be worthy of inclusion. However, this is the list I came up with, so this is what I stuck to when writing it up. I’ll post the 20 reviews individually in a flurry of updates over the next few days.

Call And Response online store — new stock update

2015 has been a busy year for this blog’s sister label Call And Response Records, with new releases from the label itself as well as a couple of excellent new releases from bands and labels we like in the distribution section.

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CALL AND RESPONSE DISTRIBUTION

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Otori: I Wanna Be Your Noise (CD)

This blog’s album of the year for 2014, Otori’s tightly-wired, laser-guided debut was a long time in coming, and turned out to be well worth the wait. These eight controlled explosions take earsplitting no wave ferocity and bottle it, deploying the fury with deadly precision and focus. (Gyuune Cassette, 1620yen)

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You Got A Radio: Carnival (CD)

A follow-up to You Got A Radio’s 2010 self-titled debut, Carnival draws on similar postpunk and new wave influences to its predecessor, but synthesises them into a darker, more portentous sound that shares elements of similarity with Joy Division and Magazine. The songwriting revels in this darker palette, with melody and discord playing off each other to dynamic effect. (Drriill Records, 2160yen)

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CALL AND RESPONSE LABEL

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Sharkk: Sharkk (Cassette)

This five-song EP is the solo project of Sean McGee, who in addition to his own music plays drums with a number of bands in the wider Call And Response circle. Sharkk draws together a variety of alt-rock and punk influences with a clear, pop songwriting sensibility. (Call And Response, 500yen)

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Hakuchi: Chindon Ding Dong! ~ Minokurui March ~ (CD)

Saga-based spazzcore junk-punk trio Hakuchi’s debut album takes frenetic, lo-fi postpunk and crashes it headlong into a parade of children’s songs and 1970s Japanese pop, with this album the bloody, chaotic result. (Call And Response, 1300yen)

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Lo-shi: Baku (12-inch vinyl)

Lo-shi are a Tokyo-based French instrumental duo, whose unsettling soundscapes combine electronic beats, samples and effects with ringing, reverb-heavy guitar. This album it themed around the nightmare-eating creature of Japanese legend, in a cathartic journey into a dark dream world. (Call And Response, 2000yen)

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Looprider: My Electric Fantasy (CD)

Combining heavy metal, J-pop and shoegaze influences in one album, Looprider’s debut is a bold, brash statement of the band’s refusal to be tied down to specific genres and scenes, but it’s also a carefully crafted pop album that for all its eclecticism is never less than plain and direct in its accessibility. (Call And Response, 1500yen)

Call And Response Distribution: New arrivals from Half Sports and You Got A Radio

There are some new arrivals in the Call And Response online store now. As with the first batch of CDs I got in stock, they are all loosely in a postpunk/new wave sort of zone, but each offers something a bit different and again, all of them are bands I personally rate and am happy to recommend.

You can access the shop here.

The three new CDs are (click the photos to go to each CD’s page in the Call And Response Store):

You Got A Radio

New wave/postpunk band You Got A Radio’s self-titled 2010 debut album. You Got A Radio are mainstays of the Japanese postpunk/new wave scene and through their Tokyo Noise events have done a lot to support other bands in a similar vein. This album is pretty much the definitive recorded document of their sound, and it’s fun, spiky and energetic, striking a balance between art-punk and offbeat pop.

Slice Of Our City

Half Sports’ debut Slice Of Our City was one of this site’s best albums of 2012 and it still with all the benefits of hindsight resonates with the same unbridled energy and outright tuneful joy. Released through You Got A Radio’s Drriill label, it’s also another example of the way one band’s support of their peers can produce creative dividends.

Mild Elevation

Mild Elevation is Half Sports’ 2014 follow-up to Slice Of Our City, and it retains the same confidence with a catchy melody and an anthemic chorus, but this time sees the band incorporating slightly more psychedelic pop elements.

Getting hold of indie CDs from Japan — Call And Response Distribution

In the course of writing this blog, I occasionally get messages asking where people can get hold of the music I review, and while Bandcamp has been a wonderful thing in facilitating distribution of indie music all over the world and giving listeners the opportunity to pay bands and labels the bare minimum they actually deserve for their work, there is still a lot of music where the answer is simply, “Japan. If you’re lucky.”

In the past there have been attempts by indie music entrepreneurs to set up online distribution systems for Japanese music in the form of music download stores, but from conversations I’ve had with they’ve tended to run into problems firstly with the fan community, as new releases instantly get shared over fan forums with sales dropping to zero within just a few days, and secondly with record labels, as especially major labels but also many indies, can be exceptionally fussy and controlling over their product, to the point where it becomes more of a hassle than it’s worth to work with them.

A third problem, at least from my subjective position, is that these stores have tried too hard to give fans what they want. From a business perspective of course this makes obvious sense, but honestly, fans of Japanese music as a collective group have pretty horrible taste. I’m utterly opposed to any music business model that involves following what the audience wants (as a non-coincidental adjunct to that, I’m also deeply suspicious of any music business model that makes money). People have got way to used to the notion that “the customer is always right” and are well on the way to embracing the Japanese notion that “the customer is God”. This is questionable at the best of times because it devalues the workers’ experience and rights, and it’s especially inappropriate in the world of the arts.

Now I love so much music in the Japanese indie and underground scenes, and I want people to hear it, so since I already have an online storefront for selling my own label’s CDs, it was easy enough to expand the store to include a Distribution section where I can make available some of the music I write about on this site. I shan’t be selling downloads — that’s up to bands to decide and set up for themselves — and I shan’t be dealing with any record labels that give me even the faintest hint of hassle. All music I make available will be from local Japanese artists and labels I’ve personally selected and recommend, so make sure to adjust your taste filters accordingly.

You can access the shop here.

There are currently four CDs available.

Buddy Girl and Mechanic

First up is Buddy Girl and Mechanic’s sexy, psychedelic, kraut-blues debut, which I raved about last year and was one of my top releases of 2013. Not much I can add to what I’ve already written about this other than that it’s great and that they’re an utterly singular and compelling band, unique in the Japanese indie music scene.

Topsy Turvy

Also available is Topsy Turvy, Buddy Girl and Mechanic’s second mini album from this summer (which I wrote about here). A more intricate and claustrophobic record than the band’s eponymous debut, it expands the range of sounds they play with while retaining the interplay between organic and mechanical elements that is their signature sound.

Drunkendesignatedhitter

The third CD is Fukuoka-based instrumental post-rock band Macmanaman’s ferocious live album Drunkendesignatedhitter, with the live recording environment really capturing the band’s virtues in their best light. I interviewed them earlier in the year around the release of this album, and as we near the end of the year it’s still holding its own as one of the most impressive underground releases of the year.

Subete wa Template

Lastly, we have new wave art-popsters Compact Club’s Subete wa Template EP (review here). Drawing on influences like the Plastics, Devo  and especially P-Model, but with a skronky, postpunk edge, they’re one of my favourite new bands, this is their debut release, but there’s hopefully going to be great new stuff coming from them.

This store is never going to be anything other than a narrow, tightly curated fragment of everything that’s out there, filtered through my own particular taste, but it will grow gradually as I add more stuff. Some new stock arrived today and I shall be writing it up and updating the store over then next week or so, and I’ll ensure I post any new arrivals here as they come in.

Ten Years of Live Music in Tokyo: Autopsy

A short afterword on my ten year anniversary event this Saturday gone, and a big thank you to everyone who took part.

My band Voided By Geysers (west Tokyo’s finest Guided By Voices tribute band) took the stage at 3:15 with Carl playing Tobin Sprout for a version of Ticket to Hide, with Ryotaro donning Mitch Mitchell’s cloak in gradually building up a squall of feedback and noise as the song locked into its closing mantra of “It might get louder”. By the time we’d kicked into A Salty Salute, there were already people with their fingers in their ears, and the sound just got bigger as the night went on. Miu Mau’s refined, sophisticated pop boomed out of the PA, while Usagi Spiral A’s brutal kraut-noise panzer assault was one of the most heart-stoppingly joyous things I’ve heard in a long time. By the time Hyacca closed the show, the sound had reached a level of earsplitting intensity. 20000V/Ni-man Den-atsu has a reputation as pretty much the loudest venue in Tokyo, but I’ve never seen it like this before – it means the engineers were excited.

Tropical Death Metal were fantastic on their stoner-prog-punk-metal debut, while Mir’s krautrock-sampling icy noise pop was expertly chilled. Macmanaman played a frenzied whirlwind of a set, Futtachi played out half an hour of eerily compelling psychedelic improvisation, Nakigao Twintail said their farewells in characteristically off-kilter and unhinged fashion, and Jebiotto proved themselves matchless in their capacity to make rooms bounce. The attendance was terrific and 20000V’s staff were brilliant as always. Next year, I’ll be trying to move on and get the next ten years rolling in a way that looks to the future.

Some blurry, lo-res camera phone pictures from the night (you want hi-res, you should have been there on the night!)

Ten Years of Live Music in Tokyo addendum: Planning an event and timetable

In my posts over the past ten days I’ve gone through all ten of the bands performing tomorrow (September 27th) at my party to celebrate ten years of doing events in Japan. However, booking the bands isn’t the whole picture. In between bands, there are a few DJs spinning tunes, which can sometimes be a thankless job in events like this where the sound of bands setting up and eking out what they can of a soundcheck can overwhelm most of what the DJs are playing, but it’s nevertheless an important job, helping to keep the mood of the event going and where possible linking one act to the next. DJing this time is James Hadfield, with whom I’ve been running the monthly party Fashion Crisis for more than five years now. Also commanding the decks will be eclectic DJ team 3TE1, a.k.a. Haru and Kaname (the name is a pun on K-pop group 2NE1 and is pronounced “thirty-one”), who will be joined by Kyushu-based friend Emix, who has herself DJed at a couple of my events in Fukuoka.

The other big consideration is the timetable. This is by far my least favourite part of any event, but here’s a bit of insight into how the process works. First up there’s the noise limitations of the venue, which means live music needs to be done by 10pm, and related to that, there’s the fact that no event ever stays on schedule, so there needs to be at least 30 minutes of slack built into it. Very few bands are ever really happy playing first, and the earlier the event starts, the more people there are who you’re going to disappoint. One of the big reasons I’ve had in forming my own band is to have someone to put on first, thus sparing the sad eyes and pointed expressions of, “Oh, that’s a bit early…” from bands. Thus, Voided By Geysers are opening the event, playing a short set right at the start. Since Tropical Death Metal are just starting out and finding their feet, and nearly all their members are also in VBG, they’re on next to minimise changeover of equipment. After that, I’ve tried to balance the louder and more low-key bands so the sound doesn’t become too repetitive, and I’ve tried to space out the Kyushu acts as much as possible. Considering the audience is another thing, and having a rough idea of how big a crowd each band will bring I’ve tried to space out the bands with the biggest followings too, to give the other bands the best chance of catching new listeners. Then there are individual issues. Jebiotto and Futtachi have new CDs out, and this event is at least in part a release party for them both, so I shifted them more towards the end of the bill; Hyacca are notoriously difficult to follow, being both devastatingly intense live and these days really quite popular, and singer Hiromi Kajiwara needs time to switch characters from her more refined role in Miu Mau, so they still play last; and then Nakigao Twintail will be completely new to most people, plus they’re playing their final show, so I tried to give them the best chance of playing to a packed room.

The big challenge for me as an organiser is to mitigate any disappointment the earlier bands might feel by making sure I personally get as many people along right from the start. It’s a good bill, and there’s been fantastic support from some of the participants, so I’m uncharacteristically optimistic in this instance. Anyway, here’s the timetable:

3:00 Open
3:20-3:35 Voided By Geysers
3:45-4:05 Tropical Death Metal
4:20-4:45 Miu Mau
5:00-5:25 Usagi Spiral A
5:40-6:05 Mir
6:20-6:45 Macmanaman
7:00-7:25 Futtachi
7:40-8:05 Nakigao Twintail
8:20-8:45 Jebiotto
9:00-9:30 Hyacca

Ten Years of Live Music in Tokyo Part 10: Nakigao Twintail

For the tenth band in this roundup, I’m going to talk about Nakigao Twintail again. I only discovered them last year, and they’ve already split up twice by my count (soon to be three times if we’re to believe them in asserting that this next show is to be their last), but in a way all the chaos and uncertainty around their existence is a reflection of their essential appeal.

When Ryotaro and I started work on a Japanese indie zine last year, it was Nakigao Twintail’s lyric, “Yamete yaru! Konna band yamete yaru!” (from about 11:00 in the video below) that inspired us to name the zine Quit Your Band! and that trashy, anarchic negativity sounded utterly thrilling to us amid Tokyo’s pose and poise. One commenter under my initial raving exposition of their virtues dismissively referred to them as a “second rate local punk band,” but then exploring the musical value in much depth feels like missing the point with something as explosive, wilfully ephemeral and pointedly unformed.Nakigao Twintail live at Fukuoka Graf, 2013

When I first wrote about them, it was in the context of idol music, and Nakigao Twintail embody the wild, hyperreal, theatrical presence of idol music at its best but at the same time the live band format allows them to be genuinely spontaneous in a way that the rehearsed and choreographed world of idol music can only attempt to simulate: Their career isn’t tied down to a management contract, their music isn’t tied down to a backing track, and their performance isn’t tied down to a pre-rehearsed choreography. This isn’t just to make a banal point that rock music is better than pop — for a start, I seriously doubt the band members really understand the difference between the two — it’s that this particular rock band are better pop than pop: their music is disposable, their performance is a rush of raw, if often bizarrely-directed enthusiasm (check out vocalist Kanami exuberantly yelling out the name of mass murdering Tokyo underground gas attack cult leader Shoko Asahara about 12:30 in), and the whole package wraps you up in the moment and at the end spits you out, breathless.

Nakigao Twintail say farewell (again) with their own version of the 9/27 anniversary event flyer (designed by guitarist Konatsu Yamaguchi). You can see the full event details on the Call And Response Records blog here.

Ten Years of Live Music in Tokyo Part 9: Hyacca

I’ve written extensively about Hyacca before, including posts here, here, here and here, so I’ll keep this relatively short except to say that they’re one of the best bands in Japan, an incredible live act, and always a treat to have on the bill at one of my shows. They embody all of the qualities I look for in an artist, mixing something accessible with an anarchic sense of unpredictability and a refreshing disregard for doing things the “right” way, be that adhering to pop conventions or adopting the posture of vacuous, Rockin’ On Japan-style, festival-ready designer indie.Hyacca: Uneko

Vocalist Hiromi Kajiwara will also be taking part in the September 27th anniversary event as part of Miu Mau, and the contrast between her role as Miu Mau’s refined avant-pop guitarist and Hyacca’s agent whirlwind of unmoored chaos is part of what appeals to me about having both bands on the same bill.Hyacca: Hanazono

Hyacca will be headlining my anniversary event on September the 27th, and there are very few bands I’d risk putting on after them.

Ten Years of Live Music in Tokyo Part 8: Jebiotto

Along with Futtachi, the other album I helped release this past summer was Jebiotto’s synth-punk party monster Love Song Duet. This album was in some ways the mirror image of the Futtachi album. Rather than something avant-garde that gradually reels you in with its hidden accessibility, Jebiotto’s music comes on accessible and then sets to work sabotaging itself. It’s pop music played by people who don’t know how to make pop music.

Jebiotto are one of the most fun bands on the Tokyo live circuit and a group I’ve been friends with for a long time before this release. I first encountered vocalist Madoka (Madca) back in the early days of my event and label through this marvellous punk band she was in called Inkakugoten (“Clitoris Palace”, which remains one of my favourite band names ever) and then I discovered Jebiotto a few years later through the live venue 20000V, which in its old location near Koenji Station became my favourite venue, and which in its new Higashi Koenji location is playing host to the anniversary event that Jebiotto and the other bands I’m writing about in this series are all performing at. Matt Schley’s short documentary about the band is a 100% accurate depiction of the group’s personalities and the band’s ethos.