In my capacity as the head honcho and sole staff member of Call And Response Records, I was interviewed back in May about Japanese music for an article on venerable UK news organ The Grauniad's web site. Fabulous publicity for the label, natch, so I can overlook the fact that the writer has just cut and pasted an (occasionally clumsily) edited version of my answers into his piece and then claimed for themself whatever pittance C.P. Scott's descendants pay for my work.

I nevertheless have a problem with the way the sentence "Shibuya-kei is the only scene anyone really speaks about here." is somehow put into my mouth. This is both patently wrong and makes me look foolish and ignorant. Anyone who has spent any meaningful length of time in the Tokyo music scene knows that there are numerous music scenes, all with their fans and cheerleaders here there and all over. Anyone who finds their way here as a result of out good friend Mr. Google (I note that the article links to both the term "Shibuya-kei" and the admittedly confusing to dolts term "Sisyphean", but not to any form of the actual C.A.R. web presence) may wish to see the actual questions I was asked and the actual answers I gave.

(Sorry this site doesn't allow comments; If anyone wants to agree/disagree/whatever with anything I've said, I've blogged this on the comments-enabled Call And Response page as well)

Update Oct 16th 00:08: Reading back over the above, I should add that despite the snarky tone, I'm very pleased that the article got published and I've had some great feedback from people today as a result of it.

>What's your name, how old are you, what do you do?

My name's Ian Martin, I'm 30 years old and I'm a writer. I also moonlight as an event organiser, DJ and record label owner.

>How long have you been living in Japan? Why did you come here?

I've been here for about seven and a half years. I came here after finishing university, just for an adventure I suppose, and got really interested in the music scene so I ended up sticking around.

>Tell me about your record label and involvement in the music scene in Tokyo.

I started out in about 2003, writing a blog about music that I was listening to, which, as time went by, became more and more about Japanese underground music. Then in 2004 I organised my first live event, and then in 2005 I put out a compilation album of bands that I liked on my own label, Call And Response Records. Since then I've been involved in a lot of events, either as an oganiser or a DJ, and my label has put out a few more releases and sort of honed its identity slightly more.

>What kind of bands do you release? Why do you pick these bands?

I'd probably term what we do as "post-punk", but then some of the bands I've had on the compilations I've released have been much poppier and more new wave sounding, and some stuff has been a bit more towards hardcore and noise. There are basically two bands that I really focus on. There's a Tokyo band called Mir, who are this quite melodic trio who sound a bit like early Stereolab, with a strong influence of old 70s and 80s stuff like Joy Division, Young Marble Giants, The Raincoats, and krautrock bands like Neu! and La Dusseldorf; then there's Hyacca ("one hundred mosquitoes") from Fukuoka, who are this really intense, hard-edged four-piece who have a kind of Sonic Youth thing going on, but with much more emphasis on the rhythm. Sometimes they come over a bit shoegazer and sometimes a bit progressive or jazz influenced, but mostly they're just this really brutal dance-punk band. More recently, I put out a compilation album where I got together 21 Japanese underground bands and covered the album "Pink Flag" by the UK post-punk band Wire track-for-track. No one bought it because no one in Japan knows who Wire are, but it was an interesting CD. The bands just completely mutilated the original songs to the point where a handful of tracks are utterly unrecognisable, but it was a really fun, if expensive, project to do.

>Why do you think, aside from Shibuya-kei, there has never been any widely remarkable movement in the Japanese indie scene?

I think the thing with Shibuya-kei was that a lot of the people involved in it were already quite well connected in the music scene anyway, and it had close ties with the fashion scene, which made it quite a hip thing to be involved in and something that had an impact beyond just the musical aspect. Live venues are pretty shabby places and music fans are quite drab, unfashionable people generally, so Shibuya-kei gave magazines something worth printing and writing about. The other thing to remember is that major record shops like Tower and HMV give a lot of power to the individual stores' buyers and especially Tower are really good at stocking indie releases. What happened with Shibuya-kei was that Tower and HMV in Shibuya picked up on a certain, loosely defined strain of indie and decided to market it, so the genre itself grew out of a concerted marketing campaign by some quite big names even if major labels weren't strictly the driving force.

Also, musically speaking, what actually is Shibuya-kei? Certainly bands like Flipper's Guitar, and then Cornelius who came out of that band, but Pizzicato 5 had been around for ages before the genre supposedly appeared, then Buffalo Daughter, who are a sort of psychedelic krautrock band, Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her who were a really stripped down, minimalist garage punk band, Yukari Fresh, who is this really eclectic electronic/lo-fi pop musician, and all these other bands. It's really just a catch-all term for indie music that was popular in the mid-90s and promoted by a few Shibuya record stores. There are still bands making the same kind of interesting music, but culturally speaking the media has found other things to make a fuss over, that's all.

>Do you think Japanese society is conducive to independent music? What struggles do you face.. both in terms of trying to find bands that are any good and then creating contexts/environments for them to thrive/mean anything?

The main problem bands face is that most venues expect them to pay anything from 20,000 to 50,000 yen to play a show and then recoup that from tickets that cost 1,500 to 2,000 yen a throw, which is a lot to expect your friends to pay each time, especially when the other bands on the bill could very well turn out to be utterly naff. What this does do, however, is lead to a situation where bands, knowing they're never going to make money from it, have a strange kind of freedom to make the music they want to. I think in the UK, musicians see indie bands getting popular and appearing in the NME, and think, "Ooh, I want a bit of that", which leads to a situation where the British indie scene has a natural slant towards safer, more mainstream music.

Because there's no music press worth speaking of in Japan, it's hard as a fan to break into the music scene at first, but once you find a couple of bands you like, you can usually find more just by looking at who they play with. After a while you notice little scenes here and there. Organising events, you have to be aware of these little networks and recognise which bands you can book together that will bring a decent crowd, as opposed to bands who'll just turn up, play, and then sod off and ignore all the other people on the bill.

>What DOES the Japanese indie scene mean, if anything. Is there even one?

There are lots of little scenes. In Tokyo there's a sort of experimental punk scene, where a lot of the bands I like come from. This is based mostly along the Chuo Line in places like Koenji, and in a couple of venues like Shibuya O-Nest, Akihabara Goodman and Shimo-Kitazawa Basement Bar. Then there's a technopop/new wave scene that's sort of absorbed some of the remnants of Shibuya-kei and mixed it with this 80s, Devo/YMO/Plastics revival sound, which I sometimes get involved in. There's a thriving hardcore scene, and then some districts like Shimo-Kitazawa, Akihabara and Koenji have their own general musical identity as well. Obviously other cities have their own things going on too. Fukuoka has an amazing punk scene, Osaka is famous for weird punk and psychedelic bands with wild live performances, Nagoya has a really odd scene which the rest of Japan seems to ignore like a mad aunt, but which is really worth checking out.

>What difficulties do you find running your label (apart from losing money!), do you ever question why you are doing it and what do you tell yourself to keep going with it? Have you any anecdotes of trule one-off band/unique moments in your experiences of the underground?

It's all tied in with money really. Getting people interested or even just getting people to know about the music is difficult. There are so many bands out there, and they're mostly rubbish, so getting the message across to people, "Hey, but this one's good -- honest!" is a Sisyphean endeavour. The sort of people who go to live venues to see Japanese underground bands are a very narrow, geeky niche, whereas to get popular, a band needs to attract that more casual audience who was indie enough to buy into Shibuya-kei but whose radar doesn't scan lower than that. These kinds of people generally look to British or US indie because it comes to Japan pre-packaged and with its cred already bundled up with it.

>Do you ever get frustrated with Japanese people's attitudes towards music. How would you sum up their attitudes?

People in different parts of Japan treat music differently, and within Tokyo there are different kinds of music fans. I think some Japanese people don't give their own country's music the time it deserves. There's a tendency to look to foreign bands and just to consume stuff that's served to them as some cool foreign thing, and generally just looking at music as a lifestyle accessory rather than something with genuine cultural roots that they can relate to. There's much less of a fanzine culture, which is a shame, and generally I have a problem with the way fans somtimes act just as consumers and don't put much back into the scene. It makes the job of bands, labels and organisers quite emotionally exhausting.

>To what extent are Japanese people behind or ahead of the UK in their understanding of music and the ways they enjoy it. I think it's easy to pick holes but have you spotted any truly innovative stuff going on that you think the UK/West could take notes from?

Japanese musicians are often much more technically skilled, partly because bands play for much longer before they get anywhere so they're always much older. You never get popular indie bands still in their teens like you do in the UK. Experimental music in Japan is light years ahead of the UK, although America and Europe produce a lot of great bands too. The UK is quite self-regarding in that respect. We lock ourselves up on our silly little island, thinking we're the coolest motherfuckers on earth, and we don't seem to notice that the new bands we produce are just faded photocopies of all the brilliant bands from our past and that the rest of the world has left us choking on their dust.

What the UK has that Japan could really learn from is its system of delivery for music. Idotic as it can be at times, the UK does have a vibrant, critical music press, it has a fanzine culture, and it has good music radio that actually broadcasts nationally. Japan has none of these things. Its music press is just cut-and-pastes from press releases, and fanzine culture and music radio are next to non-existent. Music spreads entirely through word of mouth and more recently through social networking web sites.

>What are you favourite Japanese bands and why? (partiularly underground bands on indie labels) What are their backgrounds? What are their prospects as a band when facing the Japanese music industry?

Putting aside the bands on my label, who are obviously the best bands in the universe, I'm a huge fan of a lot of Japanese bands. At the moment there's a band called Panicsmile, who are this completely fucked up post-punk/progressive/jazz/funk/hardcore/junk band. They've been going for ever and they're legends in the Tokyo underground scene, but they've never sold more than a couple of thousand copies of an album and they're probably never going to unless there's some massive realignment of the stars. Nisennenmondai are a superb instrumental no wave/krautrock trio who've done one or two well-received tours in the UK. They're a really intense live experience, but their CDs are really, unapologetically lo-fi so I think it's hard for them to spread outside the live arena. Deracine are a brilliant, really original hardcore band, with this wonderful, really camp, sarcastic vocal delivery. Their main problem is that the drummer lives a thousand miles away from the other two and he keeps sodding off to Argentina every six months or so. Another band I love is Uhnellys, who are a sort of jazz/funk/hip hop duo who build all their music around these loops made live with a delay pedal and who put out an excellent album, "Mawaru", last year. Recently there are a lot of good electro and dance pop bands too. Motocompo pretty much invented a lot of the current Japanese electropop sound, and they're brilliant, but this guy Nakata Yasutaka from the group Capsule has made it quite a major thing these days. He's an ex-Shibya-kei guy who produces Perfume, who are the biggest thing in Japan at the moment. They're a three-girl idol pop unit who do this utterly mainstream pop with this really sophisticated production and arrangement.