'Heisei Western Carnival' At Basement Bar

What's the deal with Japan and rockabilly?

You needn't look much further than those twist-dancing, pompadour-coiffed, black leather jacket-clad Teddy Boys in Harajuku to figure out that rockabilly is alive and kicking in Japan.

Indeed, when I went to the 'Heisei Western Carnival' event last Sunday, there was a brief time-slip moment when I almost mistook where I was to 1950's America, or late-70's London, or some weird combination of both: I hadn't seen so many pompadours and mohawks, mohair sweaters and biker jackets, beehive hair-dos and Yale caps, since, well, the last time I went to a rockabilly/psychobilly event in Tokyo. Also, I saw the most Virgin Mary images there since the last time I went to East L.A.—any one know what that's all about?

The groovy cats were all there at the Basement Bar to see four bands brought together by a guy named Little Elvis Ryuta, and the first act was a duo called AA & TO¥SOX. They were two ex-furyou types, one slapping a double bass and the other punching a toy (?) piano while pedal-kicking a drum. They did both originals and punk versions of 50's golden oldies sang in Japanese, and I loved their sound—later, Asakusa Jinta's vocalist/bassist Oshow said he was influenced by this bassist's explosive style, something that didn't come as much of a surprise.

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Next up was Junco Partner, a band that was led by a sweet-voiced, white-jacketed Japanese Romeo and a chubby guy in a Shriner hat playing a fun-looking washboard with various horns attached. The band played ballads of the sort I imagined couples listened to on a car radio in, say, a 50's diner parking lot.

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Throughout the event the club was so foggy with cigarette smoke that my eyes stung. Everyone smoked. At their last event advantage Lucy had banned smoking, which was a welcome change, but here the nic-freaks ruled. I wished people would at some point wake up to the fact that it's not a very rebellious, punk thing to smoke, and it might be even more counterculture to give Japan Tobacco the finger by NOT lighting up, but then, maybe smoking isn't a symbol of youthful rebellion to start with. It's just what your favorite older brother did while he listened to rockabilly, and it was natural to follow in his path by taking up Seven Stars or Lucky Strikes etc.

And rockabilly in Japan does seem less like something a guy discovers he like one day on his own, and more like something that the cool, older guy was into so you started listening to it too, a type of slightly juvenile delinquent (furyou) and blue collar music, fashion and outlook on life that have been inherited from generation to generation. The original impetus probably being the idolization of all things American starting around the 60's. I think I've written about this before, but there's a part of Japanese society that welcomes and cheers the furyou mentality, a romanticism about guys who hopelessly go against stifling social conventions, and maybe that's the part of the answer to the first question of why Japan and rockabilly go together.

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Moving on, the third act was the organizer of the event, Little Elvis Ryuta and his band, the S.R.P., and the Elvis that Ryuta was emulating was that from the 1970's Las Vegas gigs, doing a few karate moves on stage, and, at the middle of the set, getting into a blinding white jumpsuit with a gem eagle chest piece and other attached jewels. Little Elvis Ryuta learned his lessons well from the King—he really got the audience going. There was a girl in front of me, who must have been in her early-twenties at most, to whom Elvis was a historical figure at best, but she told a pal you HAVE to see Little Elvis Ryuta because he's amazing. And she was right—Little Elvis Ryuta said we should make so much noise that the King in heaven can hear us, and maybe we succeeded, so that he looked down from his cloud-made Graceland and diamond juke joint to see us all in that little basement club under a liquor store in Shimokitazawa, one of the hardest live houses in all of Tokyo to find.

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Closing the event was Asakusa Jinta, one of my favorite live bands in Tokyo, and, yet again, their show got some of the young ones so excited that at the end they began a slam-dance that wasn't that far away from a regular fist-fight. Well...what can you do? A space in the middle was spontaneously created so they can pursue their pleasure, while the rest of us listened.

I didn't find this out before right before their show, by the way, but Asakusa Jinta's accordionist has left the band indefinitely due to health reasons, according to the band's website. That's too bad—her accordion sound really added to Asakusa Jinta's cool, retro Japan feel, and, besides, she was quite a beauty. Hope she gets well.

Waffles & Tornado Tatsumaki At The Que

Why did the Waffles never become huge? Why hasn't Tornado Tatsumaki hit the bit time? And how about Pop Chocolat?

Seeing those three groups together at the Que got me thinking about breakthrough success. Each of those bands had a lot of momentum at one point, but none of them became household names. The Waffles, for instance, was one of the most successful turn-of-the-century college pop bands and was involved with a major label. Tornado Tatsumaki was signed to Victor Entertainment. Pop Chocolat was for a period heavily promoted in the indie scene. Now though, each has a sizable fan base, but none is Perfume.

I can guess at some of the reasons. There has to be some combination of trendiness of sound, catchy melodies, musical innovation, and talent (though, that last category seems very much optional...). These guys never quite got the combo just right, if they were trying to do so in the first place. It's not a secret, though, that I much prefer a band like the Waffles or Tornado Tatsumaki to the vast majority of musical offerings on TV. The Waffles of the world are doing real music, in my view.

In any case, the Waffles opened the four-band show, and I didn't recognize them at first because vocalist/pianist Kyoko Ono had made a hair change: from straight shoulder length to an orange-colored perm with bangs. But the first song started and the style was unmistakable—facing the ceiling, eyes closed, she performs like she is breathing in and consuming happiness, even though she's singing lines like “I hate Time, it's a thief that pretends to give in abundance (Jikan nante daikirai, michiteku furishita dorobouda)”—that from “Tsugi No Hikari (The Next Light)”, one of my favorite Japanese pop songs. Their show reminded me of the way that, around 2003, when I seriously caught the Japanese music bug, I listened to the stirring opening notes of their album One, and mistakenly thought there would be a whole scene out there with many songs as good as these—no, there are certainly lots of brilliant musicians, but none can quite match the Waffles at what they do best.

Several people seemed happy about my report in the last post that advantage Lucy is releasing a new single; I'm pleased to say that the Waffles are also due to release a new work around the summer, and played several of the new songs, which were good.

After the Waffles was a band called Stainless that had its rock moments but wasn't quite as rust-free as their name would suggest, and then Tornado Tatsumaki came on. Bravo. Tornado Tatsumaki's set blew me away so much that I couldn't get it out of my head during Pop Chocolat, and I ended up taking off in the middle. To get back to the original issue: why doesn't Tornado Tatsumaki rule the world? I suppose their jazzy, alternative pop may be a little too adventurous for the masses, and somewhat lacking in easily identifiable catchy lines, but it's still a mystery. They are one of my favorites, a member of my alternative pop Trinity along with advantage Lucy and Spangle call Lilli line.

Tornado Tatsumaki's vocalist Makiko Naka is an Okinawan girl with a sweet, acidic voice—a shikuwasa voice is the vision I had—and it goes perfectly with the band's indie piano rock sound. I was struck, in particular, by her rendition of a song called “Anata No Koto (About You)”, which is in their last album Fureruto Kikoe and is almost blues-like in the way it builds up simple lyrical lines to come up with a powerful emotional edifice. It wasn't everyone's favorite when I broadcast the song on my radio station a while back, but maybe people's view would change once they see how much emotion Naka puts into it live...

AL Airlines (advantage Lucy)

At the start of advantage Lucy's show at the Que on Tuesday night the static-y sound of an in-flight announcement buzzed out of the speakers and a voice suspiciously similar to Lucy vocalist Aiko's came on and said, “Welcome aboard AL Airlines. We sincerely thank you for flying with us and making this a fully booked flight”—giggles—“Today's captain is Ishizaka”—more giggles—“...during the performance we might hit some rough patches, and rapidly lose altitude, but there's no need to worry because we will soon stabilize”—big laughs—thus beginning the musical evening solo flight of Advantage Lucy Airlines, with Captain Ishizaka on guitars and Aiko, serving, I guess, as the musical co-pilot, navigating a jam-packed Que cabin through two hours of their old hits and some new songs. There was one brief period of turbulence, but otherwise the flight was smooth and pleasant.

In spite of the intro there wasn't any airliner cosplaying or anything like that, and I speculated that maybe the idea came to Aiko because she had just vacationed in the Maldives, a long plane ride away. During a break she talked a long time about the islands, saying how there there's only the sound of the waves, wind and birds, a refreshing change from noise-overflowing Tokyo. Aiko also talked about an inter-island volleyball match she went to watch, with the islanders pounding on drums on the boat over to the competition, and how the two teams feasted together after the game but she noticed that many of her (hotel) team's players were quietly shedding tears of frustration because they were defeated, which suggested a straight emotional quality that we city slicker types may have lost...

Anyway...good news for Lucy fans (or, as we call ourselves, the Lucy-min): they are releasing a new 3-song single on May 20!! At the show the band played all three, and they were great: a pop song, a rocking number, and one gorgeous ballad called “Shiroi Asa (A White Morning)”, which sounded like it was infused with emotion, if not created, in the beautiful Maldives.

(Photo credit: Plectrum Takata's blog)

The Perfume Bubble

Perfume's out of control! A Perfume bubble is puffing up in Japan.

Only a few months ago, I was planning to write about this idol trio to say that one of the standout things Capsule music creator Yasutaka Nakata has done is to become these three's producer and write great songs for them, so that it became at least semi-respectable to love Perfume in spite of their being otaku magnets. And I really enjoy some of their songs, including “Vitamin Drop”, “Monochrome Effect” and “Computer Driving”.

But now, they're out of sight. Their new album Game is number one on the Oricon charts. Their latest national tour is completely, hopelessly sold out. They are top draws on every music variety shows on TV.

Part of it is that, yes, they're managed by a big entertainment agency that markets them well. But that's not the whole secret. They're more than skillfully-sold merchandise. Somewhere along the way Perfume became a genuinely 'hip' item for a lot of people. Look at the Village Vanguard store in Shimokitazawa, the epitome of counterculture cool. Their small music section now stocks Perfume (it's unimaginable that they'd sell any other idol group's music), and they tout the unit's music like they are the Second Coming of Kawaii. Mixi's Perfume community has more than 36,000 members, and its intro calls their beloved three “this century's most powerful girl pop unit”.

Perfume's formula is a combination of things: the way their voices go together perfectly, being one of the best sounding J-pop girl vocal ensemble since Puffy; the stylish and catchy music by Capsule's Nakata, a techno pop sound that seems novel in the idol arena; the android-like, sharply choreographed dance moves; and the three's down-to-earth, humorous public persona—three girls from Hiroshima who toiled for years without being recognized, before hitting the big time, now.

But one YouTube is worth a thousand words, and the video above, just 53 seconds long, is one of my favorite.

It's actually a cover of a 1980's single by the Japanese techno group Juicy Fruits called “Jenny Wa Gokigen Naname (Jenny's In A Bad Mood)”. I salute the excellent taste of Perfume, or whichever manager that got the three to perform it, because this song is one of the more revolutionary of J-pop: as far as I know it's one of the first where a female vocalist sang in that high-voiced, super-sweet, coquettish way that became so common later on (and the strange thing is that in none of their other singles does the vocalist of Juicy Fruits sing that way); for its time the lyrics were risque for prime-time TV, with the main line being that “we will sleep together hugging, because that would calm me down a bit (daki atte nemuruno, sou sureba sukoshi wa ki ga osamaruno)”; and the entire band came on the TV screen dressed up in fruit costumes, a big singing peach, guitar-playing banana, etc. Even as a kid when I saw Juicy Fruits perform this song it was a shock, and I'm happy that Perfume is bringing it back (a YouTube of Juicy Fruits playing the song is below—hmm, in it there's stuffed fruit strewn on the stage but the musicians aren't wearing them. Is my memory false??).

The 53-second clip above shows just how hyper a Perfume live is: listen to the way the male fans shout out the names of the members; see how A~chan cups her hand to her ear to mean 'make some noise' and a few moments later says 'arigato-!' in a very Western Japan accent; and in general, witness the way that three cute dancing girls totally put the crowd under their spell (and I see on the wall a sign saying it's the Harajuku Astro Hall, a relatively small venue—now it's nearly impossible to buy tickets to catch them at the Zepp Tokyo, one of the city's biggest halls...)—I'd love to have been one of the nerds sweating it down in the audience pit.

A Budokan show will be the next thing for Perfume, a gig at a mega-live house like the Zepp being a stepping stone to an appearance at the fabled martial art/concert hall (in fact, ha ha, I checked their official website and it looks like they JUST announced yesterday they are playing TWO NIGHTS at the Budokan in September...). But... after all that, what happens? Fads have been known to happen in Japan, and this Perfume bubble can't keep inflating non-stop. The Perfume three will have to fall back down Earth one day, at which time will we be able to actually get tickets to see them at a 'smaller' live house like, say, the Liquid Room or the Quattro? In any case, these three are a unit to watch.

Japanese Bands To Completely Cover Pink Flag

Just found out that Call and Response Records is putting together a compilation album whose concept "is to take Wire’s debut album Pink Flag and cover the whole thing, track for track." Says Ian of C.A.R.:

I’ll talk more about my reasons for deciding to do this at a later date, perhaps when people will have a chance to listen to it and decide for themselves whether it succeeds or not.

What a crazy idea! Can't wait to check it out--the album is to feature veterans of the Akihabara Goodman-Koenji post-punk-prog scene such as Panicsmile and Tacobonds. (I imagine the reco-hatsu will be quite an ero-guro-nonsense bash of degeneracy and inebriation...)

Mondialito + Club 8

Whatever musical genre you can think of there's bound to be a group of its fans somewhere in Tokyo, and Swedish pop is no exception. It was no surprise that devotees packed the O-Nest on Thursday night to welcome Swedish indie-pop duo Club 8 in their first visit to Japan.

A longing for the exotic is one reason why, I think, many Japanese fans are into a group like Club 8 (though, of course, they love the music too). Somewhere in the music fan's mind there's a wish to be a blond, Swedish musician who goes on stage dressed in an all-white outfit (something you hardly ever see a Japanese person wearing), and acting friendly but a bit aloof in the face of adoring fans. Maybe in another life. And that's even if the person is happy or satisfied with his days in Japan.

This wish to be someone foreign isn't unusual outside of Japan, but it does seem to be an especially big thing here, for reasons that I'm not sure of. Do we have to go all the way back to the Meiji Restoration, catching up with foreign powers, etc., in search for an answer? Or is it a mental reaction to a society that encourages conformity, a way to keep yourself free by dreaming you are someone else?

In any case, Club 8 was a charming act (the vocalist Karoline said they've been wanting to come to Japan for something like 15 years), and their performance had this light and sweet feel you don't experience that often with Japanese groups' gigs. I don't have any empirical evidence for that, but I did feel it and many in the audience must have as well, and it made the time flow in a different way than usual.


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Two Japanese bands opened for Club 8: my beloved 4 Bonjour's Parties, and a unit I've wanted to see for a while, Mondialito. From what I understand, the French-singing female vocalist of this latter duo now lives in Paris so they don't play in Japan very often—another 'emulating the exotic' thing? There was something regal about her whispery-voiced performance (a clear, chilly, mountain spring-like voice it was).

Maybe it was the way she stood erect in a velvety green dress while two seated guitarists and a wood bassist at her sides toiled away at their instruments. Or, perhaps it was the way that her eyes glittered dramatically throughout the show, looking down at her subjects (ok, audience...). She didn't bother spending too much time between songs communicating pleasantries. It would have been better if she didn't wave at her friends from the stage before the show—she should have marched on stage wearing, say, an ermine cape...

REALLY Japanese Music

I've been getting into REALLY Japanese music. That is, music that gets its inspiration from Japanese sources, rather than America, Europe, etc.

J-pop, J-rock and J-whatever-else aren't bad, of course, but they're all derivative of foreign styles. I want to listen to music I know is from the Land of the Rising Sun, and nowhere else. It's something you start thinking of after a while, living as a music fan in Japan.

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The first REALLY Japanese musicians on my list are Asakusa Jinta, whose album Sky “Zero” was my favorite album of 2006. These guys have resurrected the sounds of the late-19th/early 20th century 'jinta' Japanese brass bands, and put them in a contemporary context by adding to the horns and accordion sound an electric rock guitar, drums, and, most distinctly, an explosive ska bass that pounds out beats like machine gun rounds. Their new mini-album Fes! Fes! Fes! shows that the first album was no fluke—this time they combine old festival music sounds with rock conventions to come up again with something unique.



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Number two is Umekichi, a shamisen player/songstress who performs old popular songs known as hauta and zokkyoku ('old' as in, going back to the Edo and Meiji periods...). These were originally geisha songs listened to over sips of sake, and from there they went on to be performed at rakugo shows, comedic entertainment for the masses in Japan. Rakugo continues to be popular and its performances are like vaudeville shows—the comedic monologues are the main acts, but they are interspersed with various other entertainers such as guys who spin plates at the end of a pole, scissor artists that cut portraits out of paper, and traditional singers, which is what Umekichi does.

I bought one of her CDs expecting music that is quaint and traditional, but was pleasantly surprised to find melodies that are old-fashioned but appealing, and unexpectedly swinging rhythms. Umekishi's singing is high-voiced, nasal and sweet, and her style is playful but unsentimental: what I'd imagine geishas sound like when performing in tea rooms. I'd like to see her one of these days at the rakugo theater. I also heard she's toured the U.S. before—anyone seen her over there?




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Moving on, number three isn't a 'musician' per se, but what she does involves music: Yamazaki Vanilla is a narrator of silent movies, a woman who is reviving a disappearing art. If you're in Japan you might have seen on TV, clad in a kimono and a blond short-bob wig, narrating black-and-white movies while plucking a taishogoto. Watching her working the crowds—fluently explaining the movie's setting, reading out the actors' lines, and mixing in humor and mentions of current events—I was able to begin to understand one reason why silent movie fans rued the introduction of talkies: watching a movie was much more of a community event in the days of narrated silent films.



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Finally, one of the strangest and most fascinating Japanese pop culture developments these days is the emergence of Jero, the 26-year-old black (and one-quarter Japanese) singer from Pittsburgh, dressed in hip-hop fashion, who belts out excellent enka. The Times U.K. has a nice profile of him and enka; I didn't realize until I read it that the music mainly developed in the post-WWII era:

Although originally a form of 19th-century political oratory, enka in its current form began in the late 1940s when its singers and its audience were predominantly young. The music – in many ways the theme tune of the Japanese economic miracle and the birth of the salaryman culture – subsequently grew up with them.

This article and others make the point enka is becoming more popular with a younger audience due to Jero. Who knows whether enka will end up as anything more than a passing fad among the youth, but in any case it's a good thing that it's getting more attention. Enka will never be cutting-edge music, but I do believe that its lyrics are a window into what regular Japanese people (as opposed to Harajuku hipsters or the Roppongi rich) think and feel, and there's really no other music to listen to in some old, wood-built izakaya away from the big cities, over some hot sake and dried fish.



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The cherries are in full bloom in Tokyo, and that's a good excuse to mention the words of bestselling erotic-romance novelist Junichi Watanabe: cherry blossoms are like a mistress, while plum blossoms are like a wife. Cherries are attention-grabbing, flashy but of short duration, like a fling with a lover, whereas the more subdued but long-lasting plum flowers are spousal, says Watanabe-sensei. He also says peach flowers are like cheating housewives, but I can't remember what his reasoning was on that...

Go To Hell Youth Graduation Ceremony: Yamada Jackson Band

I had a feeling my friend's show would be fun when I read in his invitation e-mail: “People tend to think of us as weird guys, but we're very serious about what we do”. And I wasn't wrong.

The first sign of the whackiness ahead was when I entered Club Que on Sunday afternoon and saw that it had been transformed into a school auditorium on graduation day: on stage was a grand banner in red, pink and white, saying, in Japanese, 'Die and go to hell youth graduation ceremony'. A high school anthem played in the background. And all of the audience members had been given mini pom poms to shuffle around during the upcoming celebration.

Soon the lights went out and out came my friend Mr. Navetin in a shirt and tie as the school principal, stiffly MC-ing for the graduation proceedings. He said special guests had been invited for the ceremony, and immediately a gang of black-Prussian-uniformed men piled on to the stage: the Ouendan! With expressions of samurai-in-sword-battle seriousness and concentration, they went through school cheer routines.



What these guys were parodying was the Ouendan ('oh, N, dan'), who are fixtures at high school and college sporting events, crews of grim-faced men clad in heavy black wool uniforms even on the most humid Japanese summer afternoons. They move and shout through military dance routines as one guy swings a huge school banner the size of a small truck. (The flag-bearer is one of the top posts in these groups, reserved for a senior member, and it's considered a deeply humiliating thing if the guy ever has to put down the flag, according to the Japanese Wikipedia's 'ouendan' entry...) Ouendan guys never seem very popular with girls, but I think a lot of Japanese have a soft spot for them because they represent something Old Japan.

Once the Gamushara Ouendan finished their act, Yamada Jackson Band came on stage, and proceeded with a show that was hyper and crazy during every second of its duration: the singer, Yamada Jackson, began by climbing on top of an audience member taking a photo of him, collapsing together and then spending a big chunk of the act singing in the audience pit rather than on stage.

This band's gag is that they're punk-rocking high school teachers. Teacher Yamada Jackson air-guitars on a big wooden triangle ruler. Lead guitar Flask is “a chemistry teacher who makes his students conduct weird experiments during class. Big explosions and queer voices are heard sometimes from the chemistry lab but no one knows what he's up to. Also, no one has ever heard Teacher Flask's voice,” explains the band's website. The green wigged girl dancer/teacher Grammar/Glamour is “a high-tension, hysteric English teacher. She stands up to authority, and calls the school principal a 'bitch'”.

On stage these guys were power pop + rock + punk without all its cliches and just the energy and anarchy. Great melodies and ceaseless activity (teacher Grammar/Glamour gave the audience the Finger after each song)—I hadn't had so much fun at a show in a long while. At one point Teacher Yamada Jackson said this graduation ceremony is actually for the band, i.e. implication is that they're going to be quitting, a statement that was met with puzzled silence, but then, at the very end of the show he said, no, that's a joke, they're never going to really 'graduate', and will continue playing. Great! Thanks! Because I want more!

Little Lounge Little Twinkle At 8 Bit Cafe

Up a flight of stairs in a bland Shinjuku building is a Shrine to nerdy teenage living in the 80's, a Temple of Famicom, manga and anime figurines. It is called 8 Bit Cafe.

Well, actually, it's just a cafe, but a remarkable one. 8 Bit Cafe's website says its concept is “recreating that after-school hangout” you had when you were a kid—and the kid they have in mind is the 80's Japanese boy who spent too much time battling friends on Nintendo, or, on Mondays, lying around flipping through the latest issue of Shonen Jump. But this hangout is more stylish than any playroom ever was—the walls are painted white in the trendy Tokyo cafe fashion, and on the wall are artsy, framed portraits of cartoon characters. Scattered everywhere are old Famicom consoles and cartridges, manga books and toys and figurines.

What blows my mind is that there was someone for whom those teenage days of game-playing and manga-reading at home were so important that the person decided to open up a business to glorify them. I played the Nintendo too—but was there really that much there? Is this a hangout for people who don't want to grow up (and if so, why don't they want to)? The cafe weirded me out a bit (the same way a lot of the Akiba places and the whole Cult of Famicom—a big thing among some of the piko piko groups—weird me out). But the concept is novel, and I suppose that's a necessary thing for a cafe...

Anyway, I was there to see Little Lounge Little Twinkle, who put on a brilliant solo show. They fit in well at the 8 Bit Cafe: many of their songs have a playful, kid's music feel (one song uses a strawberry-shaped music sampler toy, for example), which shares something with the cafe's concept. But, still, behind all their fun little songs are solid arrangements by classically-trained musicians (I wrote more about them here), and their kiddy songs aren't very Famicom-like and more like handmade, wooden European toys, if that makes any sense at all...

Ore Wa Konna Mon Janai!

Ore wa konna mon janai could enter a weird Japanese band names competition and go pretty far. It means “you ain't seen nothing of me yet”, something a guy might say after messing up royally at work, being yelled at by the boss in front of all his co-workers, and shedding some hot, frustrated tears in a bathroom stall. Why this prog/psychedelia/rock quintet named themselves this is anyone's guess.

In any case, OWKMJ was my one fresh discovery at disk union event in Shinjuku on Saturday night. The event was held at the Marz and Motion, two live houses on the same block in Kabuki-cho, and you could go back and forth between the two, and, if you so desired, grab a meal outside or make a convenience store stop while doing so (actually, since the event went from 2PM to past midnight, there would be nothing stopping you from catching a movie or involving yourself in other Shinjuku activities and when you return, the event would still likely be going on...). The Motion is on the 5th floor, so after a show if there was a good band coming up at the Marz, a big line formed at the elevator to get out of there.

I was at the event to see 4 Bonjour's Parties (photo above) and henrytennis (photo below OWKMJ), and OWKMJ's set was between theirs. It started out like some sort of new religion gathering, the sax/snare drum guy spreading out his arms to welcome the converts while moaning and smiling. It developed into an exhilarating blend of prog, psychedelic rock and jazz, and the band especially had good moments when the sax guy pounded on his snare drum, creating complex beats along with the main drummer.


Ore Wa Konna Mon Janai

Here's a good description of OWKMJ's sound:

Mixing psychedelic rock with mysterious ambient spaces lends a timeless flavour to their music, while at the same time remaining immediate and captivating. Each song is a journey in itself, with a host of influences giving you a backpacker's view of the road less-hitched. From Moroccan desert themes and solemn pastural melodies to bastard noise-punk from the inner-city, OWKMJ covers every inch of the musical terrain with intensity and originality. by cal lyall(soundispatch)

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The more shows I go to like this one where you can go in and out of the venue as you wish, the more I grow to dislike the Tokyo live house convention of not allowing re-entry into the club once you leave. The Marz even had a sign saying, 'please try to watch all the bands and not just the group you're a fan of, because all those bands have something they want to communicate to you'. Which is no doubt true, but really, to quote from Boogie Nights, that's YP, not MP: if I can help it I'd rather not waste hours listening to bands I don't like, and I appreciate musicians that subvert the Tokyo live house convention by letting fans know beforehand what time they will be playing. (And, of course, there's hypocrisy involved on the live house's part—maybe they want you to see all the bands, sure, but they no doubt don't mind the added drink revenue that comes from keeping the audience in their clubs for as long as they can).

I admire the Shibuya O-Nest in this regard: partly because they have their own bar on a separate floor from the live space, they let people go out and come back by showing the ticket stubs. Other Tokyo live houses! You can do it too! Open up your doors!

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As an LA guy, I couldn't help but crack up seeing this Engrish street sign...

Hola, Swinging Popsicle!

I've just found out that Tokyo pop group Swinging Popsicle will be playing in Monterrey, Mexico (!!!) in early March! I'm tempted to hop on a plane across the Pacific to witness what will surely be a musical fiesta extraordinaire, but I don't think I can afford to... Here's the press release by JapanFiles.com:

February 13, 2008 - Japanese pop pioneers Swinging Popsicle have been invited as the first-ever musical guest for the 32nd Convencion de Juegos de Mesa y Comics in Monterrey, Mexico. The event will be held March 7-9, 2008, at Monterrey's Cintermex Center, hosting thousands of Mexican fans of Japanese entertainment.

Swinging Popsicle was requested by the event's coordinators based on their 10-year history and their status as one of JapanFiles.com's all-time best-selling artists. The band is currently nominated for Best Japanese Pop Band by Shojo Beat magazine.

Swinging Popsicle has appeared previously at Fanime Con (San Jose, CA) and Anime Mid Atlantic (Richmond, VA). In February 2008 they played a special concert in Seoul, Korea for their Korean partner-label, Pastel Music.

Swinging Popsicle appears at Convencion de Juegos de Mesa y Comics by special arrangement with JapanFiles.com and Entretenimiento Creativo.

Ainu Rebels

Flipping through the TV channels the other day I stumbled upon a great documentary on, of all places, the NHK education channel (usually home to shogi and go match broadcasts, foreign language lessons, physics lectures, etc. etc.—hmm, come to think of it those are probably an improvement on usual Japanese TV fare...). It was about a group of Ainu kids who put on a dance and music show in Tokyo to introduce people to their culture. They called themselves the Ainu Rebels.

The Ainu (pronounced 'aye, noo') are an ethnic group living in the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, different in appearance from the ethnic Japanese, and possessing their own culture and language. In the Jomon period, that is around 14,000-400BC, they lived in the main islands of Japan but after the Yayoi people came to Japan from what is now China and Korea, they were gradually driven north and south. The northerners are now known as the Ainu, and the southerners are Okinawans.

The Ainu's recent history is a tragedy of oblivion: they were made to be forgotten by the Japanese. In the Meiji period (1868-1912) the Japanese government tried to assimilate them into a unified Japanese race, banning their language and restricting their work to farming and fishing. It largely succeeded: now, many people of Ainu descent aren't even aware of their ancestry, often because their elders hid it from them.

However, there's been a movement since the end of WWII to revive the Ainu culture, to learn again their almost-forgotten language, and to take pride in their heritage. The Ainu Rebels are part of that.

Watching the NHK documentary about the Ainu Rebels holding a musical event in Tokyo, what struck me was how different Ainu culture is from mainstream Japan's even though they live in the same islands. Their art and design, for example, look nothing like their Japanese equivalent; the thick, curved lined designs you often see on their traditional clothing resemble Celtic art more than Japanese art (though there's no connection to the former). The Ainu also look different from the ethnic Japanese, to a much bigger degree than I expected before watching the documentary. I think that an Ainu person's appearance would often fall outside of that spectrum of looks that a Japanese person would recognize as one of their own.

The interesting thing about Japan, though, is that in spite of what you hear about the homogeneity of its people, even the main Japanese group is a blend of ethnicities: the native Japanese Jomon-jin appearance mixes with the Chinese/Korean look of the Yayoi-jin look, and, if you look carefully, some people have much more Jomon characteristics than Yayoi, and vice versa. (Some of us got a kick out of the museum exhibition posters that popped up all over Tokyo a couple of years ago showing a representative Jomon girl—on the left in the photo below—and a typical Yayoi girl, to the right.) But all that hasn't stopped the mainstream Japanese from often being racist towards the Ainu anyway.



Which is what one of the Ainu guys featured in the NHK documentary rapped about during the Ainu Rebels' performance: he did a rap about growing up looking different, being called out by the other kids on that, trying to hide and forget that difference. But he has a sister who's much more into her Ainu identity, and one day he finally understands where she's coming from, that his ancestral heritage is a rich and deep one, and it's worth embracing and even letting other people know about it through performances.

It was a moving rap. What would be even greater now is if they go further, beyond telling people about themselves and their culture, and create new art that incorporates Ainu elements. The documentary showed that they're already doing that with their dances, combining modern and Ainu dance styles. In their music and rap it would be very cool if they brought in some Ainu words, traditions, points of view, and so on, and made something that speaks to us. I think that would really be NEW, and something I'd certainly want to listen to.

Howling At The Buddha: Mona Rock Caravan

Do Buddhism and rock music mix?

I pondered this question while watching bands rocking out under the serene gaze of a wooden Buddha statue on Sunday. The setting was Ikegami Honmonji, a grand, Nichiren-sect temple in southern Tokyo. Mona Records had chosen the temple as the site of its annual Mona Rock Caravan music festival, and bands performed on a stage set up in the Grand Hall, right under a sculptural line-up of a seated, meditating Sakyamuni and four standing Boddhisatvas. The scent of incents filled the hall.

Anyhow, my conclusion was, 'probably not'. Rock/pop is all about desires (for sex, fame, money...), and action, passions, excesses. Buddhism is about extinguishing desires, and serenity, stillness and enlightenment. They make an odd couple.

Still, it was a fun event. The female vocalist of the first act, a jazzy pop band called Mopsy Flopsy, said before starting one of their songs: “Even though we're in a place like this, we're going to do an intense song. I'm going to howl in front of the Buddha.” In my imagination the Buddha wouldn't have minded, and I think would have smiled peacefully.


The hall

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Quinka With a Yawn was one of the performers, and their set actually matched the atmosphere of the venue well. They'd just returned from recording an album outdoors in the wilderness of Nagano, and the new songs had a country music feel. In one song one of the guys blew a bird whistle while another shook a rattle, recreating the feel of the woods in the candle-lit darkness of the temple hall.

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Why a music festival at a Buddhist temple? For the organizers, Mona Records, I think it was an opportunity to have an event at a more interesting place than the usual live house or club. I've written before about Tokyo musicians who want to try new things with music shows, who want to hold events at unusual venues, and this was in line with that movement.

For the temple, it was a chance to get young people interested in Buddhism, and it's been hosting a lot of events like this. Around the midpoint of the festival, the temple's number-two priest, a man named Nishuu Hayami, came on stage for a talk about Buddhism, which he describes as being like a drop of water in a dry world. “If not for a live show like this, you might never have an opportunity to listen to a talk by a priest,” he said. “If even one of you begin to believe in the Buddha's thoughts, that's enough.”

Did this event convert any of the hundreds of youth in the audience? Hard to say. These days typical Japanese people have a passive, undevoted relationship to Buddhism: if they're in a temple, they might go through the motions of praying, and funerals are usually still conducted by a Buddhist priest, but it doesn't seem to be a big part of people's lives for the most part.

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After the event I moved on to the town of Koenji (also originally a name of a Buddhist temple) to see Yuyake Lamp at the tiny club Roots. The building housing Roots is all-Okinawa-themed, including an Okinawan restaurant, and is well worth a visit. Yuyake Lamp's shows are so full of life, I never tire of them, and instead they always give me new energy...

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I just learned that the Kitchen Gorilla, a great rock trio, is going to be 'taking time off', in other words, they're quitting. Sad news, they were one of my favorites.

Lost In Found & Piana At Lush

I've been listening to a lot of classical. Saturday, the NHK orchestra was performing one of my recent favorite pieces, Sibelius's 2nd Symphony, so I went to Shibuya to listen to that, then afterward headed over the Lush to check out something more in line with this journal, an event featuring pop bands Lost in Found, Piana, the Guitar Plus Me and Conchill. It was a music-filled day, and one that made me think about the contrast between classical and pop.

A classical concert is overloaded with rituals and rules: welcoming the conductor onto the stage with applause, waiting until all the symphony movements are over before clapping, etc. The musicians of a good orchestra are incredible, and a strict rule of silence is enforced so everyone can listen fully to their work, as well as the blend of sounds the conductor creates with his baton. Except...our being human beings, there's never complete silence. There are the coughers, the fidgeters, the whisperers. They get glared at and shushed for these relatively minor violations.

After a while this totalitarian rule of silence begins to affect your own mind, so you begin to look at disapproval with the noise-makers too. That may be why, somewhere around the 2nd or 3rd movement of the symphony, I began to notice that the middle-aged lady next to me was rubbing the sleeve of her sweater. Rub, rub, rub. It was some sort of fabric that squeaked a bit when rubbed. Rub, rub, rub. Rub, rub, rub. Rub, rub, rub. She wouldn't stop. It was a tiny sound, but I heard it, and in that place where no sound was allowed except the orchestra's, it got on my nerves. But...what could I do? Tell some random lady to stop rubbing her arm? I put up with it, in silence.

At a rock concert it's inconceivable that I'd care about some person next to me rubbing a sweater. There's little likelihood I'd even hear it in the first place. But, strangely, even in the amplified racket of a rock gig, some rules of silence exist. Blabbering away during a favorite band's show might earn you evil eyes from the fans. And anyone who's been to even a few gigs knows they have their share of silly rituals, maybe even more than even classical concerts, from pumping the arms to head-banging to mosh pits, and on and on. (Is it something about music's way of turning on primitive impulses that gives rise to all these rituals?)

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Gigs that Lost In Found are involved in are good because they never have too much of the stupid rock show rituals you see elsewhere. Their events are just places to hang out and listen to music, and to chat with a friend over a beer. Nothing more than that. And that's the sort of scene I like. Of course, we wouldn't all be there if LIF didn't create lovely indie pop on-stage, having a blast the whole time, cracking up over both jokes they share with the audience and private humor they keep to themselves.

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Piana, as you can see in my previous post, released one of my 10 favorite albums last year, so it was with excitement that I went to the Lush show to see her for the first time. She stood on the left half of the stage, accompanied by a single pianist on the right. Piana's performance was understated—she didn't move much, and the emphasis was on having you listen to the voice and the way it interacted with the piano. But Piana has such an ethereal, soothing, soaring style of singing that listening to it was enough to captivate me. She also has a wonderful way of creating musical space out of pauses in her singing.

10 Favorite Japanese CDs Of 2007

2007 was a good year.


#10. Texas Pandaa
Days

Maybe it's not the best idea to call this album one of my favorite of 2007 considering it came out at the end of the year and I've only given it a couple of listens. Still, Texas Pandaa is a fabulous band, and Days, with its mellow, slow-flowing, riverine shoegazer tunes and its lovely two-female vocals, seems destined to spend many hours in my CD player this year.


#9. Various Artists
Good Girls Don't! Neo



Do compilation albums belong on best-of lists? They aren't the product of individual artistic visions, so I don't think they could ever be as important as a great album by a single band or musician. Still, I love the way compilations introduce me to new artists, and few Japanese indies labels create better ones than K.O.G.A. Records. Neo is the latest in a series of K.O.G.A.'s Good Girls Don't girl rock compilations, and contains gems by bands I'd never heard of before, including Napolitans, totos, the Monmons, Pajii Imps and Stinky Rat (what a name for a group of young Japanese lasses!), as well as nice new songs by two of my favorite units: Teeny Frahoop and Hazel Nuts Chocolate.


#8. Piana
Eternal Castle

A whispery-voiced girl and her keyboard create gorgeous, laid-back songs that seem designed to be consumed in those warm, comforting moments between being awake and falling asleep.


#7. Lantern Parade
Zessan Zessenchu

Can Lantern Parade really be said to be hip-hop? I wrote a post using this one-guy unit as a springboard to air some of my views about Japanese hip-hop, but now I wonder whether that's his intended genre in the first place. In any case, this album is NEW—vivid, even violent lyrics, a deadpan delivery, dark, non-funky mixes—I'm not a hip-hop expert, but I've never heard anything like it in Japan or elsewhere.


#6. Coltemonikha
Coltemonikha 2



I prefer this album produced by musical workaholic Yasutaka Nakata over the three (!) albums released in 2007 by his main unit, Capsule. Though a big fan of Capsule, I liked them most when they were at a mid-point in their transition from a lounge pop unit to a club electronica act—album-wise, L.D.K. Lounge Designers Killer is my favorite, a work that deliciously mixes the lounge feel with electronics sounds. Capsule's latest album, FLASH BACK shoots too far into the electronica/house/club/disco realm for my tastes. And their other album is a remix collection. But...check back with me in a year—I might have been converted by then by FLASH BACK.

Compared with recent Capsule, Coltemonikha is much more straightforward, catchy electronic pop. You can't get songs like “sleeping girl” and “Namaiki” out of your head. The nasal-voiced female vocalist projects a sonic aura of being someone who is neck-deep in a stylish, fashionable world, somewhere around Shibuya or Harajuku. In fact, I checked her blog, and she's a model.


#5. Luminous Orange
Sakura Swirl


Keikaku.net's review of this album said that the title track takes some getting used to because of its eccentric sound, whereas the rest of the album is vintage, rocking Luminous Orange. Strange...I had the exact opposite reaction: the song “Sakura Swirl” totally put me under its spell, while the rest of the album was good but not that different from songs in earlier albums like Drop You Vivid Colours (though, having said that, Luminous Orange is still, no question, a great shoegazer-influenced band, as listening to tunes in the album like “Silver Kiss” and “Half A Boy” will make abundantly clear). Wow, but “Sakura Swirl”...it's a whirring, echoing, beeping communication from a distant, musically-advanced planet of a song. You need to listen to it.


#4. The Kitchen Gorilla
Soup

#3. Mix Market
Shiawase No Elephant






The Kitchen Gorilla and Mix Market are both female vocalist-led groups, and the music they play is plain, vanilla, rock. If you want cutting-edge or revolutionary, don't listen to them. This is music as hamburger rather than haute cuisine—but the most delicious, lovingly-made, well-crafted one. Don't you sometimes yearn for the simple stuff?

To a large extent, though, I like these two because of their singers. Kayo of Kitchen Gorilla has a lovely high voice that undulates snake-like with emotion. Mix Market's Yutty sings like the archetype of a playful J-girl rock heroine, sweet and filled with feeling.

Both albums have one or two knockout singles that I've listened to I don't know many times. Kitchen Gorilla's KO single is “Milk”; Mix Market's are the title track, “Shiawase No Elephant” ('shiawase', meaning happiness, is pronounced something like 'she ah wah seh'—'An Elephant of Happiness') and also 'Frank'.


#2. Yuyake Lamp
Yuyake Ballad



My old favorite band Orange Plankton was reborn in 2006 as the trio Yuyake Lamp, and inherited many of its virtues. The appealing, hard-to-forget piano pop melodies. The great lyrics, which are pure poetry, about everything from friendship and love to the Dawn of Life on Planet Earth. The beautiful, intuitive singing style of vocalist Yunn, that soft voice that radiate inside you. All of that is on display in Yuyake Ballad.

This album also has two great songs that stand out. One is “Natsu No Toorimichi [A Summer Path]”, a ballad of just voice and piano, and one of the most beautiful, emotionally direct songs I've heard in 2007. The song is about a memory of loss in summer, which has led some to think it may be a song about the recollections of a war widow (because the Pacific War ended in August).

The other is “Nami Wo Nuu Kaze Yo, Te Yo [The Wind & Hand That Shapes The Waves]”. Yuyake Lamp's Yunn sometimes creates songs that appear to be extraterrestrial in their inspiration. They stick out because they are so unlike any other songs you've heard before, and strangely gorgeous. The songs seem to be guided by nothing other than emotion. In recent years there's been about one song per album like this—“Hissorito” in Orange Plankton's Mizu No Niwa, “Mebuki” in the same band's Wakusei Note, and now this. To me, the feeling of “Nami Wo...” is like that when you wake up from a nap at dusk on some tropical island like Okinawa or Bali. Does that make any sense? Probably not... In any case, it's a master-work, and worth a listen (you can listen to a snippet of it on Yuyake Lamp's MySpace page—it's currently the second song from the top).


#1. 4 Bonjour's Parties
pigments drift down to the brook


I already knew by October that this debut album by this chamber orchestra-like pop group would likely be my #1 favorite work of the year, and I wasn't wrong. My assessment of the album hasn't changed since I wrote about it in this post in October, so please take a look there if you are interested in my take on it. This, in any case, was the first paragraph: “My favorite J-music album so far this year is 4 Bonjour's Parties' debut effort, pigments drift down to the brook, a work that's so different from anything I've heard before that it made me want to go and listen to the group's favorite musicians and influences, to get a sense of their origins. I listened to Yo La Tengo, Broken Social Scene, Architecture in Helsinki, Belle & Sebastian and others that they list as favorites, but that didn't help me much in figuring them out, and there were only trace signs of influence. 4 Bonjour's Parties are original.”

I'm looking forward to their next album, and new songs.

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ADDITION TO PREVIOUS LIST: If I knew a few years ago what I know now, I would have included in my 2005 favorites list Macdonald Duck Eclair's The Genesis Songbook, which I've written about here, and Capsule's L.D.K. Lounge Designers Killer, in my opinion the duo's best work so far (and I wrote about one great song on the album here.)