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!)
20000V goes by the name Ni-man Den-atsu now in its new location for contractual reasons, but true believers know what it’s really called.
The final date of the tour was a show I had organised myself with the help of Tsuchi from synth-punk lunatics Jebiotto. As the final show, and as the official Tokyo release party, this was one I needed both to go off with a bang and bring in a properly big crowd. The shows leading up to it had all been good one way or another, most of them had been fantastic, and some of them — in particular the secret show at Koenji Ten, the Friday night in Fukuoka and the wonderful little show in Takamatsu — had been truly, truly sublime experiences. I was nervous.
Doing the opening night on a Wednesday in Tokyo and doing the only other Tokyo show as a secret gig had been in part an attempt to ensure that the greater part of N’toko’s audience was funnelled into this one show, and the decision to space out the two openly promoted shows at opposite ends of the tour was an attempt to avoid Slovenian rap fatigue in audiences and make sure as many people from the first date came back for the final one.
In terms of the bands, I had hoped to get a reasonably well-known name on the bill, but that’s a dangerous area. Once you start trying to book “name” acts, you’re paying the bands in addition to the venue — yes, I’m one of those shitty promoters who doesn’t always pay bands — which often means given the limited size of the venues and the limited reach of underground music anyway, you’re forced to increase the price for the people who do come rather than radically increase the audience. At best it’s a balancing act, where you have to book the right bands together with the “name” act because “name” acts rarely do anything to promote shows themselves, which means the way they bring benefit is more through acting as a booster to the other bands playing. Put simply, any audience Melt banana will bring themselves will likely be cancelled out by the cost of paying Melt Banana to play, but more Jebiotto fans will come if Melt Banana are on the bill. This can work, but it also means that you’re paying one band simply for being themselves, while you’re not able to pay other bands who are actually the ones whose fans are making the event such a success. I’ve been willing to do this in the past, but only for the right band, and this time round, I just couldn’t find the right band, so instead I went with people I liked and trusted, crossed my fingers and hoped.
The balance of artists was just about perfect for what I was trying to do though. Jebiotto were down from the start, and their brand of manic, synth-based punk/new wave was ideal, feeding into N’toko’s industrial side while at the same time anchoring the event in venue 20000V’s underground punk ethos. Tsuchi from Jebiotto brought in Dubideb, a techno-industrial noise duo featuring Ataraw Mochizuki from Groundcover. (also the manager of 20000V) and drummer Yana from Numbs, who also plays support drums with Jebiotto on occasion. It was the first time I’d seen them, but they blew the room apart from the get-go and were probably N’toko’s favourite band of the entire tour.Mukokyuu Kakokyuu Shinkokyuu digest (intro by YMO)
Takashi Nakayama, punk rock god.
Next was Mukokyuu Kakokyuu Shinkokyuu, a postpunk/new wave orchestra in a definitively Japanese mould, taking cues from the Plastics and P-Model. The band’s leader Takashi Nakayama had worked with me before through his previous bands Skyfisher and Labsick Man-machine Remix, but Mukokyuu Kakokyuu Shinkokyuu was him at his best, all hyperactive pop melodies delivered with fierce, postpunk intensity, with added balloon animals.
Tommi Tokyo from group A.
group A were one of the first bands I booked for the show, and they were nervous before going on. They have a tendency to strip half naked and paint themselves white onstage but both members had needed to rush to the venue from other engagements and in the process had forgotten some of their stage gear. They went on in pants and t-shirts like primary school kids who’d forgotten their gym kit, and put in the most furious, raw performance I’ve ever seen them do, vocalist Tommi Tokyo channelling Genesis P Orridge at his most intense. When a band relies on a constructed stage image, that image can often become armour behind which the band hides, and I think that’s what happens a bit with group A. Here, clothed, they felt more stripped bare than they ever had naked.Jebiotto: AxNxC
Tsuchi from Jebiotto: Pop Zeus
Jebiotto might have had a hard time following such a powerful set, but they always have something in reserve and threw themselves into their set with reckless abandon, getting things whipped into a frenzy that peaked during N’toko’s headlining set. Where he could easily have done an encore in Takamatsu but shied away from indulging himself, here he let it all out and sent the room wild in a way that compared with the tiny, cramped experience of Koenji Ten on the 16th but which he carried off this time with a much bigger crowd. Throughout the tour, he and I had been binging on standup videos by the British comedian Stewart Lee, and through his work, deconstructing the art of performance to the point that by the end of the tour, N’toko was eager to start incorporating Lee’s lessons into his own shows. You could see that a little in this show, where he started his set by pre-narrating what he was going to do with his set, trivialising and diminishing the tricks he was going to play before hitting you with them every bit as effectively as if they had been delivered to you blind. At the end of the set, he started a song using an unfamiliar beat before sighing and saying, “Oh, you all know what song this is going to be,” flicking a switch and letting it turn into his theme song of sorts N’toko ne Obstaja. There are a lot of themes in common between Lee’s comedy and N’toko’s most recent Mind Business album, in that both artists play this slightly confused-seeming satire of themselves, seeking to reject and place themselves above commercialism and mocking themselves for having this attitude, and in both their work, there’s a sort of carefully constructed desperation of someone frantically pursuing relevance but not quite being able to make it work.N’toko: Minor Celebrity
So it was a bigger success than I could ever have hoped for and despite all the amazing shows that had preceded it, it was the highlight of the tour and one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. There’s an enormous pleasure in setting up an event and then sort of hitting “play” and seeing it roll along on its own wheels, like seeing a child walk for the first time or watching a meticulously constructed arrangement of dominoes tumble in sequence. It left me exhausted though, not wanting to do another event for the forseeable future. It was so good, I just wanted to stop there.
It also meant time had come for counting out the costs and income of the tour. After taking into account all transport and hotel costs, deducting some of my wife’s and my costs in Kyushu that came under “family holiday” expenses, we had come out of the tour with a small profit. This is obviously absolutely nothing in commercial terms: my 50% share of that profit is what I might drink in one evening while on the road, and N’toko’s share accounted for perhaps 10% of his plane ticket, but there was something psychologically satisfying about having gone through eleven gigs in the Japanese live house system and taken out more than you put in, even if that figure can only be gleaned from calculations that operate within severely constrained parameters.
Modest, qualified success.
Still, that was for a three week tour with one solo musician and a tour manager. I occasionally get mails from bands wanting to tour or sell their music in Japan, and I used to politely explain to them that I wasn’t a big enough operation to help them. Now I just ignore them, and this is why. Take that modest, qualified success, make it a band of three people and that figure immediately becomes an enormous loss — all that we achieved on tour in March evaporates upon contact with anything resembling an actual band.
That doesn’t detract from the wonderful feeling of achievement that came from pulling it off though, and in particular from the incredible people who made it happen. Tomo from Style Band Tokyo, DJ Rally, Kouhei from Come To My Party/Servals, Joe from VVDBLK, Eric and Julien from Lo-shi/Tententen, Ryota from Kumamoto Navaro, Harajiri from Fukuoka Utero, Iguz from Futtachi, Yoshida from Rag-G, Masumi from Miu Mau/Coet Cocoeh, Tsuchi from Jebiotto and Mochizuki and Ishida from 20000V. To that list, we could add Ayako and many others who I don’t even know, who designed flyers and helped promote the shows, plus more than a hundred musicians, some of whom had their own staff and drivers, nearly all of whom worked unpaid or for minimal fees to do something simply because it was artistically valuable. I salute them all.
The final date on the road in this tour was Takamatsu. To be honest, I didn’t even really know where Takamatsu was when I booked it other than that it was in “Shikoku somewhere”. At the beginning of March I had helped organise a Tokyo release party for the Fukuoka new wave indie supergroup Miu Mau, and during the post-gig drinking session I had suggested, probably rather aggressively, that it would be lovely if the group’s leader Masami (a.k.a. Coet Cocoeh), now a resident of Takamatsu, could organise a show for N’toko there towards the end of the month. I promptly forgot about it, only to receive an email from her a week or so later saying we could do a show at a very cool little bar called iL.
DJ Masami
Now since N’toko had a rail pass, this was no big deal, since he could just hop on the Shinkansen to Okayama and take a relatively short train from there across the water to Takamatsu, but it meant more planes and other expenses for me. The first thing I did was plunge into attempts to get a show in Osaka again to see if we could make a couple of nights in the region out of it. I’d had a gig in Osaka tentatively planned, before the organiser suggested doing it in Kyoto instead and then announced that actually she couldn’t do it at all, so I’d taken that as a message from the heavens that it wasn’t to be. Still, if we were going to be in the area, I figured it might be worth looking around again, so I spoke to Club Noon, where some of my friends had done shows in the past. They seemed amenable to doing something, but it was pretty clear they expected me to shoulder the burden of promotion, and without someone well connected with the local scene there on the ground I decided against it. Better to do nothing than to do something poorly organised and promoted.
Kotetsu: manic
And the show Masami put on in Takamatsu once again reinforced the benefits of someone who understands your music and ethos, and knows both the local scene and what they themselves are doing. iL was a tiny place just off the side of Takamatsu’s vast, kilometres-long roofed shopping arcade, but it was immaculately organised and put together. The venue had brought in a powerful sound system to ensure N’toko’s music played out without a hitch, Masami very kindly ran home at one point to get her own keyboard stand when things looked like they might get a bit complicated, and the DJs she booked were massive fun. Masami’s own stuff tilted towards postpunk like the Slits and New Age Steppers, while Oka took a smoother, more sophisticated tack and Kotetsu careered between a manic selection of Japanese new wave, latin, pop and curios that I couldn’t place if I tried. For my own set, I played the same basic stuff I usually play at Fashion Crisis, but since I was playing in front of a completely unfamiliar crowd edged it more towards the poppier, more uptempo stuff in an attempt to keep people’s attention.
The interesting thing about playing here was the way that people really seemed to be listening. Usually when I play, there are a handful of people coming up to me saying, “Hey, what’s this?” and a lot of people just having conversations with each other and not really paying attention, so soundtracking those conversations and dropping in enough weird or interesting stuff to keep anyone else interested is more or less what I think my job is. In Takamatsu, nearly everyone seemed to be sat, listening intently — not dancing or asking me questions, just sat there with their ears tuned into everything I was doing — which made it a bit of a weird experience, although not by any means a bad one.
N’toko played his usual 30-minute touring set, and could really have played double that time given the reaction the crowd gave him. The sound was superb and in the tiny, narrow room with the crowd surrounding him on three sides, it gave the performance a dynamic feel that isn’t really there when you’re on a stage, facing the audience behind a barrier, either physical or metaphorical. N’toko is a performer who laps up attention and I think he finds it psychologically impossible to ignore part of the audience, so playing to a 180-degree spread of people like this, he was constantly aware that wherever he was playing to, there was someone behind him and this made him mobile at all times.
Ritsurin-koen
So the party ended up being one of the highlights of the tour in its own right, and since we were only there for one night, I’d booked a late flight back in order to do some sightseeing. Takamatsu was the only place on the tour where we really did any sightseeing, and it was fascinating. The shopping arcade is a thing of wonder, a vast roofed enclosure apparently 2.7km long that took us nearly to the famous Ritsurin-koen, a glorious garden that was so absurdly, fastidiously beautiful that we both kept bursting out laughing at it.
Takamatsu castle grounds
Takamatsu is this:
At the other end of the shopping arcade was the castle ruins and the seafront, where we chilled for a few hours, and even the station concourse was lovely. In fact even the airport was lovely, with the souvenir stall in the departure lounge serving locally brewed ale on tap. I realise that this is becoming more like a travelogue than a rock’n’roll tour diary, but seriously, Takamatsu is really, really nice city. Anyway, the gig at Takamatsu joined a growing list of other amazing shows that set the bar absurdly high for the final night of the tour, back in Koenji tomorrow, and as the day went on, the fear continued to rise that my own cherished event that I had tried so hard to make the highlight of the tour would fall short of the mark.
The final date in Kyushu was at Rag-G in Saga. I’d been here once before, when Zibanchinka supported Bo Ningen in 2011, and both the town and the venue are interesting places.
One of many decidedly odd buildings left over from another age and largely colonised by the local sex industry.
When travelling in Kyushu, the step-changes in economic growth and reconstruction of the various cities can make each stop seem a bit like travelling ten years further back in time. While Fukuoka looks more or less like the present day (and the Momochi area is outright futuristic), Kumamoto feels more like the 1990s, with a familiar enough atmosphere, but lacking some of the glitter and glitz of the 2000s. Kagoshima is like a faded 1980s theme park, with the bright, brash, plastic bubble-era storefronts and building artifices bleached and dashed by two decades of volcanic dust. Saga then brings us back to the ’70s. On a Sunday afternoon, the town is deserted. You can walk from the station to the venue fifteen minutes away almost without seeing a single person, just passing hostess bars and brothels shuttered for the daylight hours, the whole town bathed in a sort of orange light giving it a sense of a permanent sunset. Signs advertising Coca Cola and other well-known brands showed no sign of having been changed or moved since they were first placed there decades ago, which makes a striking contrast to Tokyo where such retro ephemera is diligently collected and arranged to create a perfectly curated designer’s-mind facsimile of the past. N’toko turned to me at one point and said something to the effect that it was like India after being hit by a neutron bomb.
Saga Rag-G
Saga is also crisscrossed by hundreds of tiny streams, giving it the impression of a run-down toytown Venice, and it’s on the corner of one of these streams that Rag-G sits, opposite a really quite beautiful temple, with an open space and seats laid out in front of it. Sitting outside was really so nice that it felt like an enormous hassle even to go inside and listen to the music, the only thing ruining the atmosphere being the grindingly repetitive blues music chittering away out of a portable CD player by the venue’s entrance (one that Omi from Futtachi swiftly replaced with some avant-garde guitar improv CD he had with him).
There was a panda wandering around outside for some reason.
Keeping a live venue open in a small town like Saga is a different challenge to running a venue in a competitive environment like Tokyo. In big cities, rent is a big constraining factor in the size of a venue, and basically means that a small venue will always only have small bands. In Saga (population about a quarter of a million), there are only a couple of live venues to serve the whole city, so they have to be able to accommodate anything, from tiny underground shows to washed-up old stars, and encompassing a variety of genres. Rent on the other hand is not constrained so much, which means that Rag-G is a phenomenally large venue by the standards of most larger cities. The smaller size of the city, however, means that it’s difficult to support underground or experimental music in such a space without doing, as they did at this show, an all-day event with about ten bands playing.Johnny Ohkura Daijin: Yasu Megumi no Theme
It’s a fascinating lineup though, with N’toko and Futtachi both present and correct again, the latter performing in their minimalist psychedelic duo incarnation, and an interesting mix of local and nearby bands joining them. Headlining was Johnny Ohkura Daijin from the band Suichuu Sore wa Kurushii, who’s a Koenji local that I’ve known for a long time and who was by coincidence playing the same night. He’s one of those singers “you have to be Japanese” to really get, rattling through a series of folk-punk tunes with funny lyrics and just generally tilting along the tightrope between music and variety performance. It’s the kind of thing I always find much easier to take in a small room.
Saga is close enough to Fukuoka that it’s pretty easy to visit and several Fukuoka mates came. DJ TKC and Iguz from Futtachi were partying in the street well into the evening.
I can’t pretend to even remember many of the bands who played that night, but Yaoyoloz were superb, and Hakuchi are one of my favourite bands right now. One interesting fact I picked up recently is that the word “hakuchi” (meaning “idiot”) is on the list of words banned by Japanese TV, so when the band’s drummer Ann, who is an omnivorous, oddball teenage musical genius in her own right, recently appeared on local TV, they weren’t allowed to say the name of her band. Given that Hakuchi is also the Japanese title of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (from where the band took their name), it makes you wonder what literary discussions on Japanese TV are like, with one Russian friend of mine suggesting, “Today we will be discussing Fyodor Dostoevsky, author of Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and <BEEP!>” (I prefer to imagine the censorship effect as a comedy sound like a swanee whistle or a cuckoo clock).
Kanami from Nakigao Twintail: too cool for school.
Also attending the show were four members of another great Saga band, the quite amazing Nakigao Twintail, who split up last year. The drummer, bassist and two guitarists were present, so after Hakuchi, they commandeered their equipment and played a couple of songs themselves. Now given what an impact they had on me when I saw them in Fukuoka in 2013, this was a special moment for me, since I thought that one occasion would end up being the first and last chance I’d ever have to see them live. Given its impromptu nature and their limited gear and setup, their brief set was less the furious garage-punk explosion of their full band sets and more a chaotic, dadaist disassemblage of rock’n’roll. I’m not sure what sort of musical endeavours any of them will end up engaging in in the future, and it could be horrible, but there’s still enouch childish nonsense in what they do that it’s fun.Hakuchi: Suttoko Dokkoi
Iguz from Futtachi finds a psychedelic flower shop.
N’toko had to work his way through some sound difficulties, perhaps as a result of being the only electronic act on the bill, but after some furious mucking about with the wires and some cajoling from me in my asshole manager hat, things got pumped up to the necessary volume and enough of the cool people there stuck around to watch him. Futtachi had no such technical issues and perhaps even more than in Fukuoka their minimalist, industrial-psych was hypnotic and utterly compelling. Shiro-Boshi were a pretty good indie rock band from Fukuoka, while The Amber Tortoise had the best bandname of the evening.
It was also exhausting, and by the time the post-gig food and drink started winding down, N’toko and I were both dead on our feet. A few days rest beckoned before one last gig on the road, way out in Takamatsu, a place neither of us had ever been to or had any image of, and which I’d accidentally booked while drunk a few weeks previously. It was in the hands of good people though, so what could go wrong?
So Fukuoka was marvellous as it always is, and the next stage of the tour was Kagoshima. This wasn’t the most logical choice of destination, the city being as it is at the opposite end of the island and with another gig up in Saga, not that far from Fukuoka on Sunday. However, the schedule of the venue in Saga and the event they had planned for that day dictated that Saturday was the only day we could easily do Kagoshima, which meant an expensive train ride for us and four painfully long car journeys for Futtachi.
It was also by this point at the part of a tour where you start to be able to smell your shoes walking about town and just generally feel a bit mouldy and unpleasant, something which no amount of deodorant seemed to be able to dispel. Even the death of my jeans and their swift replacement with a fresh pair from Uniqlo did little to alleviate my discomfort. This after only three or four days on the road. How bands tour the United States in a van for weeks on end, I will never know. Yuck. Anyway, my wife had joined us in Fukuoka for the show last night and she was coming with us to Kagoshima, so we splashed out and took the Shinkansen.
Scene Queen: Futtachi’s Iguz Souseki at the non-more-punk Kagoshima Word Up!
The venue in Kagoshima was a punk bar called Word Up! with a heavily insulated and soundproofed back room rather like a miniature version of a British pub venue, and I was surprised to see playing in the background a DVD of Tokyo punk bands featuring the quite wonderful Elekids, whose vocalist Canan I know personally and now plays with the equally brilliant Compact Club. The owner of Word Up! is a hardcore musician himself and has connections throughout the country. These people who not only play music but also organise and create infrastructure are crucial to keeping music and creativity alive in smaller or more remote towns.
Kagoshima has always had a pretty strong local punk and hardcore scene though, and what Iguz from Futtachi is trying to do is a little more difficult than that. She seems to be trying to create from the ground up a more open-minded, musically cosmopilitan scene that could perhaps be comparable to the alternative scenes that exist in places like Fukuoka or parts of Tokyo. I thoroughly support her in this endeavour, which is one of the reasons I was so keen to take the tour so far out of its way to do a show in Kagoshima in the first place. There are interesting and creative musicians there, but not many, so concentrating the signal the way she is trying to do is crucial. The willingness of the punk scene to open up its unfrastructure to such events is great, although in a town of that size (Kagoshima has a population of over 600,000, but as live music scenes go in Japan, that’s small) it’s probably just as much an economic necessity — scenes like that need to coexist in the same live spaces to survive. In any case, it would be interesting if this sharing of ground could also lead to some cross-pollenation rather like the kind of scene you get at my home venue of 20000V/Ni-man Den-atsu in Koenji, where the border between the punk and alternative scenes is quite porous.
The first band were Dew, who were another of those progressive/post-rock type bands of which we’d encountered a few on this tour. There’s so much of this stuff in Tokyo that it doesn’t really register, but once you step out of the seething metropolis, this music really means and represents something quite different and I find myself listening to it in a slightly different way. I’ve been to Kagoshima several times for events and bands like Dew really stand out in the context of the Kagoshima music scene. In this way, it’s important to realise that applying the same rules and standards that you would in Tokyo is meaningless here. Dew offer something special. The lack of much of a scene around them making similar music, however, might also have the effect of limiting what they do by forcing them to play to the limited attention spans of audiences not tuned in to their style. There were moments in their set where they hit an almost spacerock groove and should really have driven that home ruthlessly, droning over it for six more minutes, but they simply stopped before they could reach a really transcendent moment. They were good, but I kept wishing for more.Dew: Deus Ex Machina
Taison is another local rapper. As I said previously, really all rappers should be local rappers, and Taison is the real deal. Where KenVolcano in Kumamoto was very much a party rapper, Taison is a poet. He was playing with a live backing band, which perhaps suggests he’s an artist who likes to improvise, but in many ways he would have been served better by a more minimal musical backdrop. He has played with electronic and turntablist backing musicians as well, and I’m pretty sure he could hold up as a compelling performer with just his voice alone. He was well matched with N’toko, with whom he shares a cynical, socially-conscious worldview, and his lyrics frequently dealt with local Kagoshima society. As I said before, I thoroughly endorse this sort of thing.Taison: On The Road
Futtachi were playing in their full four-member incarnation, meaning the music was completely different from last night. They hadn’t been able to soundcheck so their sound was scuzzy and fucked up, but then their music is scuzzy and fucked up to begin with, so all it did was bring out their inner garage rockers. This was more familiar ground for me, having seen them perhaps three times in this form, but it was a welcome reminder of what a brutal powerhouse of a band they can be.Futtachi: Siam
N’toko was well-served by the tiny, black room, and credit again has to go to Iguz for putting together a diverse lineup that nonetheless led the audience neatly towards N’toko’s performace at the fulcrum of the night. Taison came onstage with him at the end and initiated a bout of tag-team freestyling, which is something that really shouldn’t work when neither rapper can understand what the other rappers are saying, but somehow the good vibes carried it. It’s also worth noting that Taison had clearly done his research and was ready to greet N’toko with a few choice phrases in Slovenian. Given that no one in Japan knows where Slovenia is and I’ve seen N’toko described variously as being from Slovakia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Uzbekistan, this little bit of geographical and linguistic research was commendable.
With the tour now chugging along very nicely, finances just covering necessary expenses, and constant heavy drinking obliterating all of those benefits, we were looking forward to an epic show in Saga. More on that to come.
After the Thursday night DJ party, we were ready to kick off the weekend with a live show at the same venue. This was perhaps the show I’d been most looking forward to on the tour, partly for the reasons I outlined in the previous entry in this tour diary (Fukuoka is always an enormous amount of fun, and it’s great to hang out with friends there) and partly because of the bands.
As I’ve said before, I always keep in contact with Harajiri from Utero over the lineup, and make suggestions where there’s something I think is relevant, but at the same time, I will nearly always defer to his judgment when it comes to booking. He knows my events and my artists well enough by now to be able to choose bands who fit the sound and the vibe I’m looking for, and he’s also eager to constantly introduce new people into the mix, which ensures that through my roughly twice-annual events there, I’m able to keep a step ahead of most other people in Tokyo when it comes to cool music from Kyushu.
There was another reason why Friday was a big one for me as well, because it was the day that my friends Futtachi from Kagoshima would be hooking up with us for part of the tour. Futtachi is the new band that Iguz Souseki formed after the implosion of Zibanchinka, and their first recording was a song they did for Call And Response’s Dancing After 1AM compilation. They’d also contributed a track to my recent Black Sabbath Valentine’s covers project, and Iguz and I had been working on plans to put out their first full album through Call And Response. Futtachi are a psychedelic band, but grounded in garage-punk roots which gives them an earthiness and directness that lots of other psychedelic bands lack. They operate on quite complex principles though, with the band existing in four different incarnations depending on which members are present, all of which play quite different music.
The recordings they had done for me had been of the group’s four member incarnation, Futtachi’s most common touring incarnation is a duo of Iguz and guitarist Omi, and Fukuoka was the first chance I’d had to see them. Based around a slow, minimal, throbbing rhythm loop, Iguz wails hypnotically over spectral guitars and droning keyboards. It’s psychedelic but it teeters on the brink of industrial, insistently coaxing you into a hallucinatory, nodding trance. It’s an amazing sensation when you see a new band do something that just plows you away, but it’s something else when someone you’ve known and admired for years does something totally unexpected and completely brilliant. You’re knocked sideways not just by the surprise, but also by the fact thay you’re able to be surprised. Futtachi were astounding.
The first band up, however, were Escape From New York, a sort of progressive/post-rock band of a sort that you get a lot of, especially in Tokyo, but nonetheless a very good example of the form. They don’t have much in the way of recordings but you can get a bit of an idea from this rough-edged demo from Soundcloud.
The Perfect Me were another very good, young Fukuoka band. A difficult band to describe, they’re essentially an avant-pop band, with elements of postpunk, a little something of Animal Collective to them, and a bouncy, almost Madchester party vibe. If that isn’t very helpful, it could be that after a month, my memory is a little foggy, but I remember being mightily impressed. Their recordings are a bit more low-key and lean more towards the postpunk elements of what they do, with Joy Division, Fad Gadget and Wire jumping to mind, but it really has to be stressed how much fun they are live.
AmrFas is the current preferred spelling of Amorphous (the illogical English spelling was probably causing problems for their Japanese fans), a dance-pop duo who had played with N’toko on his previous Fukuoka tour. They’re one of those bands you suspect would be dreadfully fashionable and end up playing exclusively in cafes and boutiques with other bands who sound exactly like them if they lived in Tokyo, but being in Fukuoka they’re often forced to play together with punk, post-rock and other assorted noisy fuckups, which I’m going to suggest here is definitively a Good Thing. The multiple layers of sound they employ gives their music a richer, more textured feel than the Tokyo boutique bands they sometimes resemble, which is perhaps partly the result of being forced to stand alongside other bands on their music alone and not just the quality of their wardrobe and rolodex. They also helped balance out the lineup to place N’toko closer to the centre ground in a lineup that inclueded at the other end the furious funk-punk of Accidents In Too Large Field.
N’toko’s set was probably the best show I’ve seen him do in Fukuoka. In the past, he’s struggled with the sound system a bit, but the venue seems to be getting used to him now and he was able to hit as hard as any punk or post-rock band. With the almost industrial throb of Futtachi and the richly layered electronic pop of AmrFas already burned into the audience’s minds alongside the more conventiopnally guitar-structured bands, he was positioned in just the way I had hoped he would be on this tour, and being his third visit to the city, there were a growing number of people there who knew him. It gave that warm feeling of making progress again.
Accidents in Too Large Field are local legends and they blow the roof off pretty much any show they play. They’re one of those bands who whenever I meet them, they always seem to be looking at me sidelong with this mocking twinkle in their eyes, as if everything I do and say is hilarious and deeply uncool, so I’m always torn between the conflicting urges to hug them like brothers or punch them hard in the face. There’s something of that in their music too, mixing these joyously funky dance beats with music full of discord and aggression. They drove the audience into a crowdsurfing frenzy, as you might expect from a crowd many of whom had been charging around piggyback at the same venue the previous night over not much at all really.Accidents In Too Large Field: Nonfiction Rakka
I was DJing again, this time alongside TKC from macmanaman, one of my favourite DJs and an old friend from back when he was with the wonderful Ruruxu/sinn. With none of the technical problems of the previous night, it welt off pretty well, and playing between bands allowed me to come off whatever the previous band had been doing and then work my way towards the kind of thing I knew the next band would be playing.
One of the best nights of the tour so far, I was worried it had set the bar impossibly high for subsequent shows, but neither of us were complaining. By this point, we were more or less breaking even on hotel and travel expenses, although the next few dates would see us exploring more challenging ground in towns without the musical heritage and scene magnetism of places we’d played so far. But then what kind of progress would it be if we were just going over the same ground again and again?
Fukuoka is by far my favourite place in Japan outside of my adopted home in the Tokyo suburb of Koenji. It’s not so much for the town itself, although it’s a lively city, a little more spacious and les hurried than Tokyo, with an buzzing central shopping district in Tenjin, a nice fashion district in Daimyo, a scary nightlife district in the Oyafuko-dori area, a beautiful park in the castle ruins and nearby Ohori Koen, a neat little shopping street district in Nishijin, and a fascinating and weird reclaimed seafront development in Momochi. Other towns have similar things, but Fukuoka does all these things a little bit nicer than most. The main reason I love Fukuoka is just that I know a lot of people in the music scene there, there are lots of great bands, and the people in them are generally really friendly and easygoing. Whenever I go there, it’s always a source of great regret that I can’t stay longer, and it’s always the highlight of any Kyushu tour for me.
Last year when I was talking with Seiji Harajiri from the live venue Utero about plans for my next tour, he suggested I come down a day early and we do a free DJ party on the Thursday night before the main gig. I have no doubt this was largely because of the difficulty in getting audiences out on weekday nights, but since N’toko usually stays in Japan for longer and spreads out his live shows, interspersing them with DJ gigs, often at my Fashion Crisis event in Koenji, it felt like a nice interlude in the tour for me as well.
I mentioned in the last post about how while Kumamoto has always been good to me, I’ve also always felt a bit of distance. One way I experience that most strongly is when I’ve played there as a DJ. The reactions to songs just doesn’t quite match the reactions those same songs usually get in Tokyo, so it’s difficult to judge the right thing to be playing. At most of the events in Tokyo I take part in, if people don’t know a song I’m playing, they come up to me and ask. In fact, that’s how you know you’ve got the balance right: if no one’s asking you what you’re playing, it means your set was too obvious. It sounds snobbish, and it can be sometimes, but as a rule, it just means people are curious, eager to find out about new stuff, and confident enough in their own knowledge and taste that they don’t feel self-conscious admitting when they don’t know. In Kumamoto, no one ever asks. Maybe it’s a cultural thing and they’re shy to interrupt, maybe it’s a self-conscious thing about seeming ignorant in front of a visiting DJ, or maybe they’re just not interested, I don’t know, but I’ve never felt quite right. The only time I’ve ever got a noticeable reaction from a crowd there was when I played the (excellent) song Fire by K-Pop quartet 2NE1 after Bo Ningen’s set.
Party time
Fukuoka on the other hand has always been a pleasure to DJ at, especially Utero. The crowd there reminds me so much of the little scene we have around us in Koenji in their behaviour, listening and drinking habits. They’re not just curious when they don’t know something, but they’re enthusiastic when they do know something, which makes it a really fun atmosphere to play in. Usually I’m just playing between bands, so having a proper set together with N’toko and local Fukuoka friends was just a great opportunity to draw out our stay in this great city.
As with many of the most fun events of the tour, I talked it through with the local organiser first, and based on my experience with Fashion Crisis gave him some suggestions about what kind of schedule would work best. Since the room would probably only fill up gradually, giving each DJ an hour split into two 30-minute sets seemed like the best option. Sometimes if you have a DJ playing dance music, it’s better to give them a single, longer set, but certainly when most of the DJs are playing indie and punk music to audiences who are primarily live music audiences, it’s best to treat the sets the same way as live sets and aim for a similar attention span. I also gave him a list of the Fukuoka DJs I personally liked and he talked over his own recommendations.
I didn’t know some of the people he put on, but the variety was about right to keep the night interesting and to prevent it falling into a rut of too many people mining similar record bags. I was particularly stoked that he was able to get Hajime Yoshida from Panicsmile to DJ. I saw him DJ a few times when he lived in Tokyo and he was always an interesting selector who I’d tried to get at Fashion Crisis before, so now that he was back living in Fukuoka, I was eager to get him involved. to-ya is the drummer from the excellent z/nz who I’ve had play at my events in Tokyo before, while Harajiri himself played under his nom de disque 100hip.
To be honest, my first set didn’t go brilliantly. I was still getting to grips with the soundcard and DJ software on my laptop (no way I was lugging a pile of CDs and/or records around Kyushu with me for five days) and I was having problems with popping that disrupted things at one stage. Yoshida was playing a mix of vinyl and CDs and had problems with the balance at first as well, although the way he divided his two nostalgic sets between old underground music, including (quite movingly actually) a great track by his friends Bloodthirsty Butchers (whose leader Hideki Yoshimura died unexpectedly last year) and a retro J-Pop set. It was handy for me too that he divided things along those lines, because it left me free to play the stuff by Wire, The Feelies and Stereolab that I might otherwise have worried he was planning on playing.
Sleep time
One thing Utero did that no bar in Koenji would ever be stupid enough to try was set up an all-you-can-drink offer, giving people six hours worth of unlimited booze for ¥2000. Even on a Thursday night, the result was lively, with people alternately riding around on each other’s shoulders and collapsing elegantly on the bar. Given the way DJ events in Tokyo are often so closely demarcated by genre or scene, it was great to play at something that fit so closely with the combination of nerdy musical depth and anything-goes genrecide that I’ve tried so hard to cultivate in my own parties. After the solid organisational competency of Kumamoto the previous night, it was also a welcome blitz of unstructured mayhem before the big event at the same venue on Friday.
As I’ve mentioned before, Kyushu has generally been good to me over the years. I’ve released albums by Hyacca (from Fukuoka) and Zibanchinka (from Kagoshima), I’ve featured the likes of Accidents in Too Large Field (Fukuoka), cynicalsmileisyourfavorite (Kumamoto), Kobayashi Dorori (Kumamoto) and macmanaman (Fukuoka) on compilation releases, I’ve included work by Nakigao Twintail (Saga) in my zine, and I’ve brought a list of bands as long as your arm from Kyushu to Tokyo to play shows. Thanks to that connection, Kyushu has been pretty welcoming to me whenever I’ve tried to do things there, but at the same time, because tours generally last three days over a weekend, I’ve tended to get stuck doing the same two or three towns and the same two or three venues. This time round, I wanted to hold onto those connections but also try to go a bit further.
The first problem with that is that most of Kyushu is what people in Tokyo call “countryside”, i.e. cities with populations of less than a million, and small town venues just don’t really command much of a crowd on weekdays. In fact many venues just don’t even open during the week. Even in Fukuoka, the undisputed regional capital, weekdays are hard going. I remember when Seiji Harajiri, the bass player of Hyacca and the manager of the Fukuoka venue Utero, was in Tokyo last year, he was looking at the schedule of a venue and marvelling at how stayed open and putting on shows every day. Most Tokyo venues manage it by charging bands between ¥20,000 and ¥50,000 to perform, which the bands promptly fail to recoup, often playing to crowds of perhaps a dozen or fewer people. Venues elsewhere in Japan generally don’t have this system, instead focussing on big weekend shows to cover the bulk of their operating costs.
So booking five days in Kyushu meant finding somewhere we could do a show on a Wednesday what wouldn’t be a disaster. Fukuoka and Kumamoto are the only cities that really have music scenes big enough to support something even remotely like the kind of leftfield, alternative-ish tour I was doing, and I was already determined that Fukuoka was going to be a weekend show. I had more friends there and a weekend gig offered a greater multiplier than a show in Kumamoto could. So I booked Wednesday the 19th for a show in Kumamoto and crossed my fingers that it wouldn’t be too depressing.
“It’s behind you!” – N’toko looks for branded goods of the nation’s favourite local city mascot
Kumamoto is a city of perhaps three quarters of a million people, making it the third biggest city in Kyushu after Fukuoka and Kitakyushu. Despite this, it has a much more lively music scene than Kitakyushu due to the effects of urban mass relative to distance. Kitakyusyhu is right next to the larger cultural centre of Fukuoka, which tends to absorb all of its alternative culture in much the same way Tokyo does to Yokohama. Kumamoto is just far enough away from Fukuoka as to be outside its gravity well, but close enough that bands from the two cities can easily play together. The result is that Kumamoto is able to support a couple of decent venues, one very good record shop, and some of the region’s finest bands.
That said, I’ve never felt at home there in the way I have in Fukuoka or Kagoshima, where I have much closer personal connections with bands. I always get the self-conscious anxiety of being perceived as an arrogant big city asshole, the sense that my musical ethos is just a bit too niche for what audiences there are prepared to put out for, and that the cool local bands deal with bigger fish than me anyway (the Kumamoto scene, largely through the excellent Doit Science, seems very close with the more respectable side of the Tokyo alternative scene, but there’s a bit of a disjunct with the slightly more maniacal Koenji subscene that I’m sort of part of). It’s an awkward mix of inferiority and superiority complexes, heightened by the fact that both are grounded in some truth.
New Hawaii
The result of that is that while Navaro in Kumamoto is quite simply the nicest venue in the whole island and one of the nicest venues in Japan, I’ve always felt a bit disconnected from the events I’ve been involved in in Kumamoto. I’ve always felt like a guest, indulged by the local establishment but not invited to play a serious part in shaping the proceedings. It’s a subtle thing, but one that has a definite (and not by any means negative) influence on the way the events are set up and go off. Basically, Navaro are an alternative-minded venue that hosts a wide range of events, have a deep knowledge of their own town’s local scene, and are the best people in town at putting together a collection of bands to get the most out of a show on a given day. Unlike in previous on-the-road shows on this tour, however, they’re not my mates: this show was about business. This was the only gig on the tour where I asked for money guaranteed in advance, and as a result, I didn’t interfere with how they arranged the event.
Of the bands, the first ones on stage were pretty good. They were called New Hawaii and seemed to be a side project of some other local bands, at least I recognised the singer from Doit Science on drums, and they reminded me of a lot of the kinds of bands you get in Tokyo playing faintly jazz-influenced, slightly progressive rock, but with a melodic, understated poppy edge at places like Shinjuku Motion. The next band seemed to be called Kanmuri Groove, although I may be misreading their kanji quite badly (冠GROOVE if anyone wants to correct me) and whatever the merits of their music, which I honestly still can’t work out, they did manage to bring a crowd, which local rapper KenVolcano did a great job of getting into the vibe and setting up for N’toko.
KenVolcano
As I’ve mentioned before, I was wary of booking N’toko with other rappers because that’s not really the scene he fits, especially not in Japan, but he did play with a few on this tour. We always used the term “local rapper” as a bit of an ironic term on the tour to refer to the one guy in a lot of smaller towns who organisers can call on to warm up the crowd when a touring rapper is visiting but rather than letting it be a derogitary term (of course in Slovenia, N’toko himself is a “local rapper”), it’s actually one of the most interesting things about touring. The very localness is what gives the music its character and unique voice — punk has this a bit as well, but the problem with punk is that the localism often transmutes into ethnopunk, which is the worst thing in the world, while with rap, the localism more often often seems to retain a sense of contemporaneity along with its grounding in a specific environment. All rappers should be local rappers. In KenVolcano’s case, he was a party rapper, making a lot of use of samples in a way that reminded me a bit of the stuff oddball Fukuoka rapper Moth used to do back in the day (before he went acoustic disappeared from the scene). He also did a terrific job of making N’toko welcome as a touring guest playing last in front of an audience, none of whom had seen him before.
Weekday gigs in Japan are nearly always battles, especially when you’re playing away from your home crowd, and with neither Call And Response Records nor N’toko really having a reliable core of friends or fans in Kumamoto, we had to rely on the knowledge and booking nous of Navaro’s staff. They did as good a job as could be expected under the circumstances, bringing out a small but comfortable sized crowd and booking acts that on the whole complemented rather than jarred what N’toko did. At the same time, it felt afterwards like the tour was in a bit of a holding pattern. At gigs, I’m usually quite active around the room, talking to people and suchlike, but at this show, I felt like much more of an outsider, even among the two or three people who actually did know me. I was able to exchange pleasantries with the guy from Doit Science/New Hawaii, and I had a chat with one guy at the merchandise table who bought a few CDs and introduced me to his (pretty good) post-grunge/punk-metal band Syllabus. The result was that we left the gig feeling that things had gone pretty nicely but also strangely subdued. The momentum that the Nagoya and secret Koenji show had built up had been arrested slightly, but despite the rain that always seems to follow me to Kumamoto not quite dampened.
The day after Nagoya, we were back in Tokyo for a secret gig. The event was Tententen, a show I organise together with my friends Eric and Julian, a.k.a. Gotal and Ralouf from the band Lo-shi on the third Sunday of every month at a tiny little music bar in my home neighbourhood of Koenji called Art Bar Ten. I do two monthly parties in Koenji, the other being the DJ party Fashion Crisis at the nearby Koenji One. Since Ten has a proper drum kit, we focus more on live acts, but we also incorporate video, art and DJs into the show, while at One it’s more about chilling out and listening to the DJs, although we do sometimes have live electronic or semi-acoustic performances. One and Ten are not connected in any way other than being down the street from each other; the naming is just coincidence.
Koenji Kitty
Anyway, there are a couple of advantages to having these regular events going on. One is that it anchors my activities in the Koenji neighbourhood, which helps establish an identity for what I do. The Internet does great propaganda about breaking down boundaries, and to an extent it does do something along those lines, but region and locality are still very important, even within Tokyo itself. Just look at the way anime over the past 10-15 years has increasingly focussed on real locations, almost fetishising the sheer locality of the place. Koenji itself has played stage to a few anime series, the tedious looking (I haven’t watched it) Accel World and notably parts of the bizarre Penguindrum. Hello Kitty has a special mascot for practically everywhere in Japan (Koenji again has its own version, dressed in Awa Dance costume) and everywhere has its own “special” ramen and manju or biscuit souvenir. Locality still carries weight, and local music scenes have a lot of appeal, perhaps more so the more the Internet appears to make them irrelevant.
The other advantage of these monthly events is that they gradually build their own audience. Fashion Crisis has been going for five years now, and while Tententen only started last September, it carries over a lot of the same audience. It helps foster a core audience for Call And Response events and provides a slightly looser environment for me to try new or different things that wouldn’t fit easily into any of my bigger and more strictly genre-focussed events.
With the N’toko tour I didn’t want to skip Tententen, but at the same time I didn’t want to be promoting another N’toko gig in Koenji just a couple of weeks before his big Tokyo release party at the nearby 20000V/Ni-man Den-atsu on the final day of the tour. Ten costs me nothing to do, but do something at a proper live venue and you have to guarantee about ¥100,000 in takings, so I didn’t want people looking at the tour schedule and thinking, “Let’s see, the release party is on the 29th, but oh, I can see N’toko for a quarter of the price two weeks earlier. I’ll just go to that instead!”
So N’toko was a secret guest at Tententen, although a lot of our regular crowd (the people who tend to show up to my events anyway) already knew he’d be there either because I’d told them or just through the simple art of deduction. We needed an event that would work on its own regardless though, so Eric suggested Communication Breakdown, a sample-based instrumental hip hop unit formed by two of the guys from avant-garde rock band Bathbeer and indie-dance band Nacano. I was wary of booking another hip hop act with N’toko, but their sound was reassuringly old-skool and since they were from an indie background, it helped smooth the transition to the next act, Gloomy. Gloomy is basically Aya Yanase, an indiepop singer with a synthesiser in the mould of someone like Grimes. She is sometimes joined on drum pads by Kohei Kamoto of indie bands DYGL and Ykiki Beat, leading to some charming stage interactions that remind me of nothing so much as a couple in a car arguing over a map but trying to keep their voices down unless they disturb the kids. Aya has also worked with N’toko before, albeit remotely, providing guest vocals to mine and his band Trinitron’s Valentine’s Day cover of Paranoid by Black Sabbath.
Anyway, the room was packed more tightly than any Tententen so far, which is to say there were about 35-40 people over the course of the night in a room that can really hold comfortably about 25 max. If there’d been a fire, people would have died, but the only fire was in the hearts of the musicians and audience. We were all burned, but it was a nice burning, like eating a spicy curry, or drinking strong liquor. Gloomy would have finished the show perfectly in their own right, but N’toko put in one of his best shows of the tour, and the Tententen crowd proved themselves one of the best audiences he could have asked for.
It was an interesting comparison with Bar Ripple in Nagoya the previous night, with both shows in similar small bars with no stage, both shows bringing in a mix of Japanese and foreigners in the audience, and both shows having a decidedly non-“scene” vibe without compromising the essentially nerdy musical atmosphere. You could have transplanted ONOBLK and Rock Hakaba from Nagoya to Koenji and done the same show and it would have felt very similar even with totally different audiences.
By this point in the tour, it was starting to feel like the motors were beginning to run. Most of the shows had been in unusual places and were far from typical gigs in proper live venues with the exception of the first night at Shibuya Home, which had been on a weekday night, but there was plenty of that to come. The next few dates would all be very far from home so we had many hours of planes and trains to look forward to. The next block of gigs, which would form the core of the tour would be in Kyushu, where Call And Response at least has fairly credible past form, so there was a lot to look forward to. I’d never done so many dates there all at once though, so we were trying a few new things too. In Hollywood terms, this was the end of Act 1.
Nagoya was the first night really and truly on the road. N’toko had been able to get a Japan Railways travel pass so he could use most of the Shinkansen lines freely for a period of two weeks, which would see him through the worst of the travel, but as a resident of Japan, I was disqualified from such cost-saving niceties, which meant I had to bus it. Now for my North American and continental European friends I realise that a six hour road journey is just what you do to go and buy pretzels, but it’s a long journey for a Brit. It’s also the cheapest way to get to Nagoya, so that’s what I did. Other cost-saving measures included both of us cramming into the same hotel room, quite against the hotel’s rules. Usually you can sneak in and out easily, but this hotel was more vigilant than most. We managed it, but not without some suspicious glances. Net cafés are another option, but for two people, the difference in cost was negligable so the hotel won out — anyway, suffice to say that cost nearly always trumps comfort.
Bar Ripple
Nagoya is still kind of new territory for me. I did a show there in early 2013 with one of my favourite local bands, Pop-Office, I went there in my capacity as Zibanchinka’s label manager in 2012, and in 2011 N’toko played a quiet Wednesday night there at which I wasn’t present. The 2013 show had a bit of the atmosphere of a holiday booze cruise from all the visiting musicians from Tokyo and Fukuoka, which was huge fun but I didn’t come out of it feeling I’d made any real inroads into what was happening locally. N’toko’s previous show had been a pretty low-key event but he came away from it with some of the recordings that formed the basis of the track Nagoya off his new Mind Business album.
There are good reasons why Nagoya should be a good home away from home for Call And Response Records though. Local indie record shop File Under Records has been very good to Call And Response over the past few years, selling more CDs for me than every Tower Records in the country combined. It’s closer to Tokyo, so there is more two-way musical traffic between the two cities than any of the other places I deal with, and Nagoya-based music journalist Toyokazu Mori of the web site Cookie Scene is the only person in the Japanese language music press who’s ever paid even the blindest bit of attention to what Call And Response does.
My local hookup this time was my friend Joe, a.k.a. Japanese noise musician VVDBLK (pronounced “vivid black”), who organises shows under his A Ghostly Ghost Productions moniker. He and I talked quite a bit before the show to make sure we were on the same page about how the event should be, what sort of acts, good places, etc. I cannot emphasise enough how important this is: as the Yokohama gig showed, if everyone’s on the same page, things go off OK regardless of how many people show up. If there are people left thinking, “Why am I here? What’s this even about?” you’ve lost. I sent Joe the link to N’toko’s album and talked a bit about the other places he was playing and the kinds of bands he was playing with. As I had throughout the promotion of Mind Business, I emphasised the industrial and EBM aspects of N’toko’s music, which aren’t necessarily the most obvious ones, but I’ve found through trial and error that with their combination of electronic and underground sensibility they’re the ones that are most likely to get organisers thinking about him and conceptualising his position in the right way. Cookie Scene’s review of the album was massively helpful in this regard because it had instantly latched onto the parallels with 80s industrial music and used that as a framework for its analysis of the record (I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, Cookie Scene write the best, most detailed and most intelligent music reviews in Japan, and not just because they’re nice to me!)Rock Hakaba
It turned out that one of the musicians N’toko had worked with on his previous visit to Nagoya played in a noise duo with Joe called ONOBLK, so that sealed the deal that this was a show that we could make work. He brought in one more band, Rock Hakaba, some DJs from the local underground event Boredom (not to be confused with the live event Tokyo Boredom), and then Joe and I completed the DJ lineup.
ONOBLK
We settled on Bar Ripple for the venue. It’s a small venue, but one of the coolest places in Japan, so I was thrilled (the bar name has been immortalised in Knew Noise Records’ excellent Ripple compilation album of Nagoya bands). It’s not ideally equipped for loud electronic music though, which led to some quite intense messing around with the equipment beforehand in order to give N’toko’s sound the requisite boost. There was going to be no low-key intimacy tonight: he needed to be loud. The owner of Ripple had none of the squeamishness many bar owners have about letting things get noisy, so he, Joe and N’toko managed to re-organise the sound, putting much of it, including the vocals, through Ripple’s vintage amps, creating a raw, scuzzed-up punk sound.
As I say, it was necessary. ONOBLK put in a loud and by the end utterly thrilling noise-improv set, while Rock Hakaba did thirty minutes of really quite exceptional psychedelic skronk in what felt at the time like a sort of Rocket From the Tombs vein. In the end, whatever difficulties it put N’toko through (his lyrics were indecipherable amid the fuzz and skree of his set), it had the visceral power it needed to follow what had gone before.ONOBLK: full live set at Bar Ripple on March 15th
My first DJ set was hampered by problems with my own equipment, with an external sound card that I was using for the first time, and by the second set, I was too easily distracted by two or three separate conversations I was having at the same time as playing. Basically, if I was hoping to impress people with my DJ skillz, I failed. On the other hand, the fact that I was involved in so many conversations throughout the night meant that I’d succeeded at least a little in forging connections with the scene there. It was also a genuinely thrilling and exciting night. The owner of Ripple, who I gather is a legendary figure in his own right, was fiercely into the stuff that was going on, and several people I knew, either in person or online, were there. The musicians I spoke to were very cool people, and all-in-all lots of credit to Joe for getting everyone together. It was fun, the music was great, and more than that, it felt like progress.
Clear And Refreshing 