2021 Japan music roundup: EXPERIMENTAL

In this section, I’m looking at music in the general sphere of experimental and improvised music, covering a couple of different takes on free jazz, some minimal ambient and drone work, some raw sampling and found sounds junk, and other more or less adjacent approaches. As usual, if there’s no Bandcamp link available, you might be able to find it on the evil streaming sites, but I’m not going to link to them. Alternatively, it may only be available in physical form from the label or artists themselves.

estude by Takane Nakajima – diurnal delirium
This was a CD I picked up at the square on the north side of Koenji Station last summer, when the state of emergency meant that most bars and izakayas were closed and everyone was gathering in the square at night to drink and party. There were always people playing music there, but this quiet mix of ambient, electronic and acoustic sounds stood out just for how little it seemed to be trying to stand out in that space. Listening to the CD, I waver between finding some of its acoustic guitars and ambient washes of synth cheesy and finding them devastatingly effective. It works best in the tracks catechumen pt 1 and pt 2, as part of a collage of field recordings and samples, which fall together in a dreamlike journey through the night, not unlike The KLF’s Chill Out in that the very naïve obviousness of parts of it feels integral to its charm.

Kiyasu Orchestra – Discipline for Domination
Formed “under the influence of 60s free jazz”, Discipline for Domination bursts out of the traps with everything playing at once, as fast as humanly possible. In the sense that it ever lets up over the course of the 30 or so minutes of this album, it mostly does so in shifting waves of intensity of the boiling cauldron of skittering discord rather than any ebb in the frenetic pace, a cacophony of notes rising and subsiding according to the logic of ambient music.

Junji Ono a.k.a Noiseconcrete – sabotage#1
As part of the atmospheric, experimental pop duo Noiseconcrete x 3chi5, Junji Ono made a couple of appearances in the Dark/Industrial section of this roundup, and as a solo act, he made a ferocious and speedy response to the onset of the pandemic in 2020. With this 50-minute live mix, he channels his blasts of textured noise and industrial clang through breakbeats, but it’s characterised by a recognisable conversation between intensity and ambient as it works its way towards a close based around a beat that further blurs the boundaries with his other work by forming the core of the song Worth Living Hunter that Ono released later in the year in his work together with 3chi5.

OkadaTakeshita – Clattery Ooze
This project is a collaboration between Ryo Okada, best known as the guitarist with experimental rock band Extruders, and Yuma Takeshita, who specialises in improvised music using instruments he’s created or modified himself. Clattery Ooze is one of those titles that works tidily as a review of the album in its own right, and the sounds here flow slow and viscous, given jagged textures by percussive electronic distortions that swirl between the speakers. At times Clattery Ooze sounds like music made from editing together only the mistakes and sonic artefacts that get thrown up by the wiring in the studio, but there’s both method in how those sounds are deployed, beauty in how the textures and drones colour the canvas on which they play, and a detectable delight in how the two musicians play with the possibilities of both their equipment and the studio.

Phew – New Decade
Yet another fantastic new Phew album is starting to become a cliché when it comes to end-of-year reviews of Japanese music, but then there’s not really anyone else making such consistently great music at such a reliable pace as she has been over the past few years. Anyone who’s been following her releases since 2017’s Light Sleep and Voice Hardcore (including 2018’s intriguing Island with Ana Da Silva) will find it easy to fit New Decade into the texture and rhythm of the journey Phew has been on lately, with its disconnected voice fragments layered drones, its ghostly rhythms and electronics, and there’s something in the voice those elements add up to that makes her work such a fitting soundtrack to the uneasy low level panic of modern life, where creeping, invisible fears seem to constantly surround us, gnawing at the fragile comfort of our lives. Whatever the crisis of the week, Phew knows how we feel.

Riki Hidaka + Jim O’Rourke + Eiko Ishibashi – 置大石
Over the past few years, Riki Hidaka has been cutting an interesting and enigmatic path through the Japanese music landscape, from fragmented lo-fi prog-folk through ambient guitar improvisations into this piece of rural-psychedelic alien-organic machinery, made in collaboration with renowned scientists of new sounds Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke. Divided into two tracks, one for each side of the LP, the first half of the album is as intangible as its obscure title (Tsutomu Noda of Japanese music magazine Ele-king hazards a guess at “Okiooishi” as the characters’ reading in his review), coming in fluid compressions and expansions of ambient drones, while the second side introduces more recognisable instruments, which peel away from the stream, working tranquil, uneasy, discordant and harmonious shapes on its surface, before sinking gradually back into its semi-transparent flow once more.

Sayozoku – Sayozoku Tanjo
Sayozoku aren’t so much a band as they are a playground: a collection of instruments and costumes that get picked up, played with, discarded, layered over each other sometimes in conversation with each other, but often dancing on their own, delighting in their own sounds. It isn’t until the fifth track, Hoshi, that Sayozoku give you something like a song, in the form of a raw, naïve folk song that gradually shares space with the by this point familiar howling flutes and other noises. This album is really all about the noises, the spaces between them, and the sense of play and childlike exploration.

Slope Up Session Club – Session / Club
Emerging out of a series of session events in Shibuya, Slope Up Session Club isn’t a band but rather a space where musicians get together. At the heart of it is Kim, vocalist/trumpeter/bassist/guitarist/loopmaster of jazz/prog/hip-hop duo Uhnellys, but he’s just part of a subtly shifting cast of musicians from the intersection zones between Tokyo’s indie, J-rock and jazz worlds. In 2019, they started releasing recorded documents of their project on Bandcamp with the album Slope, and they’ve been gradually spelling out their name with subsequent releases during the pandemic, culminating in January 2021’s Session and then Club following swiftly on its heels in May of the same year (no word as to whether they’ll start spelling out any new phrases now they’re done with this one). Musically, we’re in free jazz improv territory, and over the years, the cast of already supremely skilled individual musicians seem to have got more and more used to each other, laying down and exploring grooves, making space for each other, and able to create not only raucous jams but subtle and spacious pieces of beauty like the sublime Wola (from Session) with its affecting interplay between sax and violin. Of these most recent two releases, Session is the longer and covers a little broader territory, even detouring into classical territory on Flower, while Club leans a little more on rave-ups but both showcase a collection of musicians who interact wonderfully onstage.

yokoscum – Ibitsuna Shikaku
In the barrage of samples and found sounds that opens this mini-album, it hints at the harsh edges of ramshackle, naïve noise, but an equally important part of what Yokoscum does is in wrapping that clatter of found sounds into rhythmic loops over which eerie mantras or melancholy melodies play out. Over the course of its roughly 20 minute runtime, the clatter of broken machinery and those mournful spiritual cries dance in an awkward, frequently interrupted, and often fractious courtship. It makes for uncomfortable listening, but despite the many obstacles it throws in your path, it has a knack for drawing a sense of rhythm out of the chaos.

YPY – Fremde Füße
As the alias under which Koshiro Hino of Osaka minimal percussion group Goat operates solo, YPY is a name that’s been on a lot of people’s radar these past few years. This EP emerged out of what he describes as “weird version remixes for Yoshio Ootani’s album” (Jazz Modernism, also out in 2021 from Black Smoker Records). Its origins aside, Hino’s subtle ear for spartan but intricately interacting rhythms is on impressive display in here.

Top 30 Releases of 2020: No. 20-16

20. Coet Cocoeh – Anthology
Coet Cocoeh (the Coet usually seems to be silent) is the name under which Masami Takashima of avant-pop trio Miu Mau released her solo work prior to 2016’s Fake Night, and while she put out a string of luxuriously smooth singles under her own name over the course of 2020, this collection of her earlier lo-fi work was a particularly striking release. Most of the releases these tracks are drawn from are only available on difficult-to-find CDs or CD-Rs, so this collection, while by no means complete, is a gorgeous collection of sweetly transparent hypnagogic pop.

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19. Various Artists – We Need Some DISCIPLINE Here.
This compilation blurs and screams through several genres, but is unified by its curators’ dedication to manic, elegantly scruffy darkness, all of which adds up to a mood that’s harsh, chaotic, sometimes experimental, sometimes brutally on the nose. Taking its name from a Throbbing Gristle reference, it channels metal, grindcore, noise, drone, EBM, no wave and scuzzed-out electronic influences into the raw (although at the same time assiduously style-conscious) disaffected hedonism of an abandoned factory rave in a 1980s B-movie dystopia.

More about this release here.

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18. NOISECONCRETE x 3CHI5 – Chiisana Moment
This Nagoya/Aichi duo comprising noise/hardcore sonic terrorist Noiseconcrete and witchy vocalist 3chi5 (also of the excellent Ghilom) established themselves on their first two albums with an atmospheric sound that mixed industrial beats with the spectral vibes of trip-hop. 2020 seems to have seen the sound branch off in different directions, firstly with a ferocious COVID-themed Noiseconcrete solo album, followed by a very interesting Bandcamp release of some of the duo’s more experimental side. This album, released in December in collaboration with the new OOV label, takes the band’s beat-led sonic sorcery down a route that sees their earlier echoes of the Bristol sound flower into a sort of sparse drum’n’bass combined the shimmering synth tones reminiscent of European 1980s minimal wave (hints of Bene Gesserit on the track Bokura Kurage perhaps). A 15-minute live extract closes the album out, but rather than simply appearing as a bonus to flesh out the album length, also serves to link the album back to the duo’s earlier material and flesh out the spaces between the skipping beats, minimal wave synths and sequencers, and lingering industrial throb.

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17. Riki Hidaka + Tatsuhisa Yamamoto – decalcomania
Until now rarely the name above the title in the Tokyo experimental music scene, Tatsuhisa Yamamoto chose the locked-down environment of 2020 as his time to take the limelight, releasing eleven or so albums (or album-length releases at least) this year under his own name. With that in mind, it feels a little like missing the bigger story to focus on this collaborative release with guitarist Riki Hidaka here. Nevertheless, the two artists are well matched on Decalcomania, with Hidaka’s sometimes harsh guitar tones subdued in Yamamoto’s mix, brought out to provide raw texture to the submersing synthesiser waves.

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16. Gezan – Klue
I’ve always had mixed feelings about Gezan. Starting out bringing a fun, raucous sort of Kansai Zero Sedai sort of theatrical junk with occasional nudity, they gradually became one of the great hopes of Japanese underground music, achieving borderline mainstream popularity with some decidedly pop-leaning efforts, while continuing to use their newfound influence to promote the underground scene around them in a way that so few other bands manage. I was settling into seeing them as something like an underground Asian Kung Fu Generation — audience-friendly but middle-of-the-road (and often frankly inane) pop-rock tunes combined with a genuinely admirable attitude towards the independent music scene — but Klue surprised me by turning out to be a genuinely exciting record on pretty much any level you look at it.

The deep turn into dub and psychedelia brings a richer, multilayered sound from which some truly explosive moments emerge, as well as being (a couple of grating exceptions aside) a far more comfortable background territory for Mahito The People’s anarcho-chipmunk vocals. It’s also a sound that suits on a quite fundamental level the mood and atmosphere of the album’s main muse: the city of Tokyo. And despite their origins in Osaka, it’s the band’s current home of the capital that really feeds this album, running through the veins of its grinding, pulsing rhythms and layers of noise and effects. It’s the primary lyrical focus as well, pulling political concerns from the world scale all the way down to everyday existence in the shadow of the machinery of the status quo, which also by the same nature represents a focus and crucible for the possibility of revolutionary change. Klue is an ambitious and timely album, as well as a striking expression of musical maturity from one of Japan’s most important current bands.

Noiseconcrete – New world chapter 19 EP

Aichi prefecture’s Noiseconcrete has appeared on this site a few times as one half of the duo Noiseconcrete x 3chi5, setting his abrasive inclinations at the nexus of noise, hardcore and industrial off against vocalist 3chi5’s otherworldly vocal wanderings. On this EP we find him unfettered by the soft/harsh dynamic of his other project and diving straight into the pandemic chaos of 2020 with explosive vigour. There have been a few tracks emerging from the Japanese underground that touch on the COVID-19 crisis, especially as more artists adapt to life making music under the radically changed circumstances the scene and its infrastructure finds itself in, but none tackle it as relentlessly and head-on as this EP, which weaves samples of news reports and political statements blandly announcing the creeping disintegration of normal life with short, intense bursts of apocalyptic machine hardcore and tortured electronic noise. The only track that pushes past 90 seconds or so is 3-mitsu, devoted to Japan’s “three Cs” catchphrase of avoiding closed spaces, crowded spaces and close contact — three rules that essentially shut down the entire punk and hardcore scene, which makes it perhaps telling that it’s the only track that really diverges from a hardcore sonic dynamic, instead building through a menacing crescendo of drone as a cacophony of overlapping voices builds in the background. Released at the beginning of May at the peak of Japan’s initial state of emergency, this EP is an eerie and atmospheric reflection of the creeping panic of the pandemic’s early days, infused with its own dry and occasionally goofy sense of situationist wit.

Top 20 Releases of 2016: No.1 – NOISECONCRETEx3CHI5 – Sandglass/Suna-Ji-Kei

CD, sssm, 2016

Despite being one of Japan’s largest cities, despite lying neatly right in the centre between Japan’s two biggest metropolitan areas, Nagoya feels like a strangely isolated city. Perhaps it’s the curse of those freeways and Shinkasen lines, which make it a bit of a flyover city for bands playing the Tokyo and Osaka/Kyoto areas that makes Nagoya such a cultural island. Bands who are hot names in every major city between Tokyo and Fukuoka mean nothing in Nagoya, while peripheral acts from elsewhere can sometimes command huge audiences. It is a city of over two million, with a gravity well encompassing nearby cities such as Gifu, Toyota and Yokkaichi, but it behaves like a small town, with a few key spots and scene figures seeming to exert a huge influence over the musical conversation the city has. And the reverse is true too: a band can grow up fully formed in Nagoya without even the most powerful indie music antennae in the rest of the country picking up even the faintest signal. When I visited Nagoya last year, I dropped by a couple of these key spots — File-Under Records and Bar Ripple — and both places were buzzing with the same recommendation: Noiseconcrete x 3chi5’s debut album Suna-Ji-Kei (or Sandglass as the band themselves call it in English).

On first glance, this duo fits into the growing format of noise guy + girl vocalist that seems to be have been gaining ground over the past couple of years as the fashion kids get hip to noise. We’ve visited this general territory before with Jun Togawa and Hijokaidan’s Togawa Kaidan project (No.10 on this list) and there are occasional similarities in how Noiseconcrete x 3chi5 play with the borders between voice and noise. On Don’t Hate Me!, 3chi5’s vocals are contorted and raw, entwined with the harsh slashes of noise, while on the closing Dake her breathy utterances alternate with vocalisations that blur the line between human and machine. Also like Togawa Kaidan there are moments of vocal-less pure noise that interrupt the proceedings, with the two-part Behemoth no Yume.

Nevertheless, while Togawa Kaidan (and many of the pop/noise crossover records that have sprung up playing off the subcultural appeal of idol music) is interested in the tension between pop and noise, Suna-Ji-Kei tends to treat melody and noise as two dimensions of the same thing that are fundamentally at home with each other. When the noise elements of Ernst no Gensou scream into the frame like angry rockets, and the vocals tilt towards them with an edge of distortion, but elsewhere 3chi5’s delivery rings out clear, delivering her abstract poetry through bluesy improvisations that oscillate portentously around a couple of core notes against a backdrop of sparse industrial beats, simple chimes, and drones.

While the most obvious musical touchstone on first listen might be a trip hop act like Portishead, an even sparser FKA Twigs might be a more appropriate comparison. Dig deeper, however, and there’s also a thread linking what Noiseconcrete x 3chi5 do back to postpunk. Just as the original trip hop scene shared some of its roots with the jazz- funk- and dub-influenced Bristol postpunk scene, there are perhaps echoes in Suna-Ji-Kei of the gothic-edged, Joy Division-influenced postpunk that Nagoya bands like Zymotics/Vodovo, Sekaitekina Band and most recently WBSBFK trade in, not to mention the more obvious noise and hardcore influences. This is reflected in the members’ own roots, with Noisconcrete sharing close connections with the Nagoya hardcore scene, and 3chi5 also performing as part of the postpunk/experimental rock band Ghilom.

What Noiseconcrete x 3chi5’s music shares most particularly with postpunk is the way it seems to be reconstructing the jagged shards of other musical genres in a way that still allows you to see the join. The resulting album is at once dark, minimal and harshly industrial, but also captivating, melodic and beautiful. Most of the people I spoke to in Nagoya were in no doubt what their album of 2016 was, and Suna-Ji-Kei makes a strong case for best thing released in the whole country.