http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/ music reviews, event and record label from Tokyo ja Nucleus CMS v3.2 ｩ Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net//nucleus/nucleus2.gif http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/ http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/index.php?itemid=387 check it out.]]> features http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/index.php?itemid=387 Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:56:34 +0900 http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/index.php?itemid=386 read it here.]]> features http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/index.php?itemid=386 Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:49:46 +0900 http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/index.php?itemid=385 Read it here. ]]> features http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/index.php?itemid=385 Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:48:02 +0900 http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/index.php?itemid=384 Japan Times review I wrote last December for "henachoco"'s new album. ]]> reviews - album http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/index.php?itemid=384 Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:40:47 +0900 http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/index.php?itemid=383 out now in The Japan Times.]]> reviews - album http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/index.php?itemid=383 Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:17:28 +0900 http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/index.php?itemid=382 feature on the "Best Japanese Songs" in the latest issue featuring contributions from a number of Japan-based music folks. Friends of mine like Cal Lyall, David Hickey, Daniel Robson and Fashion Crisis event compadre James Hadfield all have excellent contributions, and if you scroll down pretty far, you can find me spouting guff about P-Model. ]]> features http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/index.php?itemid=382 Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:12:44 +0900 http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/index.php?itemid=381 Call And Response blog about why this is important.]]> journals http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/index.php?itemid=381 Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:20:19 +0900 http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/index.php?itemid=380 Yolz in the Sky album up on the Japan Times web site now, complete with huge amounts of girlish swooning and numerous militaristic allusions to its Germanic qualities. ]]> reviews - album http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/index.php?itemid=380 Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:24:35 +0900 http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/index.php?itemid=379 Saeki Kenzou for an interview, part of which appeared as part of a couple of features I wrote for The Japan Times on the Drive to 2010 punk and new wave festival at Shinjuku Loft. The event forms part of a series together with 1979's Drive to 80s and 1999's Drive to 2000, all of which focussed on Japanese punk and new wave music. I wasn't able to use all of the interview, and I was forced by space restrictions to cut, edit and paraphrase more than I would have liked, so here's a slightly less edited version of the interview.

Tell me a bit about how the "Drive to..." events started.

Drive to 80s was organised by Jibiki and Shimizu at the old Shinjuku Loft. Different to the current one, with maybe a capacity of about three hundred people. Drive to 80s was perhaps the first time there was a standing gig in Japan, in the style of CBGBs. Before then there were standing gigs in smaller places. Before that, gigs were all seated, and actually Drive to 80s was originally conceived like that. At first they were supposed to make that gig sitting on the floor, but once it started it was too crowded so everyone stood up.

There was already a connection with the New York punk scene from some of the musicians though, right?

Some of the people who were playing at the event had played at CBGBs previously. They knew about the CBGBs atmosphere. Reck from Friction had played in The Contortions and done sessions with DNA as well. This was the era of punk rock in America so sooner or later that culture was going to come over here. On one day there was three hundred people, so over six days that's two thousand five hundred people.

The first event was a mixture of "Tokyo Rockers" type bands and new wave, and since then the new wave influence has grown. Is that thanks to your influence?

In Drive to 80s, the Tokyo Rockers scene was the core of the event, but then added to that there many other kinds of bands played, like P-Model. P-Model were the first successful band of that style, and then bands like the Plastics. Basically the central theme was punk though.

I began booking in Drive to 2000. For example Crazy Ken Band, who are now very famous, but at that time it was before they got their break; and then there's Dip in the Pool, who are here this time as well, who have a kind of soft vocal and high quality sound; Shishido Rumi, who was an idol.

But everybody at this event has a sort of new wave sense, because new wave influenced so many different kinds of music. For example kayoukyoku, had a strong new wave influence. I wrote the lyrics for Kyoko Koizumi's song "Muscle Peach" (from the album Flapper), the music was written by Akiko Yano and it was arranged by Masahide Sakuma from the Plastics, which was a very new wave song.

And it keeps getting bigger each time.

Yes. In Drive to 2000 one hundred bands gathered for ten events in seven days. Every time it expands. This time we've billed it as thirty days, but actually it's thirty-six days because there are some all-night concerts. Maybe two hundred and fifty or so bands.

Can you tell me about your own music?

At first I played in a band called Shonen Homeruns, which was kind of the prototype for Halmens, my next band. In fact Nomiya Maki, who was later in Pizzicato Five, sang for the first time in my band. After that I formed Pearl Brothers. I did collaborations with lots of Chiba musicians and then I moved to the Chuo Line, Ogikubo. I always work with other people. I did a French album a few years back, although it was still in my own style. I basically do the same thing every time.

What do you think are the differences between the first generation punks and the bands nowadays?

Bands nowadays are kind of clumsy. Now musicians are flexible and you can do anything with many kinds of sounds or effectors, but I think a simple band that kind do so many things is attractive to me now. Because they have so much choice, they get lost in it.

When I was forming my first band, I had to try really hard to make my sound, but now people can do it so easily. Back then we were trying hard to make our sound. Sometimes things went wrong, so we'd try to make it better; band members would sometimes fight, but when it went right, we could be happy. The value of making the sound was different to what people making music have now.

There was a world or an image that I wanted to express with my music, and there was a kind of anger too. About civilisation, the direction of the nation. The point was clear, things like the environment and the emergence of the computer age. Technology at that time gave us a great sense of uncertainty. On the one hand we were expecting wonderful things from it, but on the other hand we were expecting it to make everything worse as well.

I say 'angry' because young people nowadays have less feelings of anger, but I think twenty or thirty years ago, people who were playing rock music had this sense of rage.

Lately there seems to be a kind of nostalgia for that innocence and uncetainty, even extending to mainstream chart acts, especially Nakata Yasutaka's work with Perfume.

Back in the late 1990s there was a movement in Tokyo called 'New Wave of New Wave', and now we have a kind of 'post-new wave of new wave' situation, where groups like Perfume are borrowing a lot of that imagery, but there's often something a bit critical or ironic in the lyrics. Irony is very important.

So what do you think the attraction of some of the older bands this time is?

It's really interesting that there are bands like Hikashu who are still playing music and even now we're still listening to it and it's still interesting. Old people are interesting -- old is the new new. Young people aren't interesting!

I'm playing Halmens songs with Boogie the Mach Motors, who are a younger band that I think are interesting.

Ten years ago the younger generation of bands were the most interesting thing, but this time round, there are a lot of really legendary first generation of bands like Lizard who have come back, and that is the really outstanding point. ]]> features http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/index.php?itemid=379 Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:15:28 +0900 http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/index.php?itemid=378 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.]]> journals http://v1a2904.shiftweb.net/index.php?itemid=378 Thu, 15 Oct 2009 02:42:05 +0900