Japan Live

Plectrum, Rockers, 30 Boys Turning 40

2011-11-29T14:29:00.000-08:00

A band called Plectrum turned fifteen and held their birthday gig. I used to feature them a lot, this power pop group that worships Teenage Fanclub, when I started writing Japan Live seven years ago (suddenly it's half their age!). But I haven't kept up the coverage, partly because Plectrum hasn't played as much, but also because I haven't been to all their shows. Sometimes you need reminders that there really was something there.

Plectrum reminded me. Of that feeling when musicians are able to pull you and the crowd into the songs, making you forget everything else.

Plectrum has a song called '30 Boy', written when singer Taisuke Takata was 30, and he said on stage he's about to become a '40 boy' but he wants to continue at it, heartened by predecessors like Mick Jagger sempai and Keith Richards sempai. The way he sang '30 Boy' that night... it had the weight of all those years and feelings.

There's a line in '30 Boy' that says 'I'm still not used to Tokyo/ but I don't mind how I'm left alone (mada Tokyo ni naretawakejanai/ demo hottokareruno wa iyajanai)', and it came alive when Takata sang it. He's a rocker born down south in Saga prefecture, and he's one of the many people from other places who gather in Tokyo, where things happen because so many people are together. For example, shows like Plectrum's, somewhere every night in this city, that open your eyes and make you feel you're living.

Waffles & advantage Lucy At Zher The Zoo

2011-11-12T22:25:00.000-08:00

Advantage Lucy played at the Yoyogi Zher The Zoo after a six month absence from the live stage, and since they were opening for the Waffles, a band that vocalist Aiko said sings such sweet tunes, they also chose their sweetest numbers, including 'Sakuranbo', 'Kaze ni Azukete' and 'Memai' (and, fellow advantage Lucy fans, I'm sure you could appreciate what a delectable offering that was...).

The highlight for me was 'Hibikasete', that winter song, sung so beautifully it felt like the air around me shone. The last song on the mini-album Oolt Cloud, Aiko said its image was of winter in Hokkaido, icicles hanging. 'Hibiku' means to echo, reverberate, or just sound, so 'Hibikasete' could mean 'make (your voice) reverberate', in my imagination in a winter night in the north, the ground glowing white with snow, icicles on eaves.

The Waffles were celebrating a pre-10th year anniversary (it's next year), and they played a few nice songs from an album to be released in January called Tenpo, as well as oldies. What I liked was that from where I stood I could see a few fans in the front mouthing the lyrics to the old songs--these were a part of their lives. Toward the end they performed one of their best songs, 'Tsugi no Hikari', which means 'the next light'. I think it's about hopes of understanding another person (a lover) in spite of the obstacles of time and changes. The Waffles have been at it for nine years now, and many of their fans must have followed them all that time (I'm basically one of those). Wonder if they, we, have discovered the next light?

For the encore, the Waffles invited advantage Lucy back on stage, saying they are huge fans, and they did Lucy's 'Goodbye'--that classic--with the Waffles' Kyoko Ono singing the first part and Aiko taking over on the next. If you like both Lucy and the Waffles, you can imagine what a treat it was to listen to those two gorgeous voices singing together that brilliant tune. During the first verse, Aiko mouthed the words away from the mike. It was sweet to see.

Caraway, Reminding Me Of The Old Days

2011-09-24T21:07:00.000-07:00

Once in a while there's a show that reminds me why I became so crazy about guitar pop around 2003, almost a decade ago now, when I sometimes went to several events in a week. This time it was Caraway, themselves playing for the first time in three years as a band. They're led by Swinging Popsicle's Osamu Shimada, the Beach Boys-loving guitarist that reminds me a little bit of Buddy Holly because of his spectacles and wholesome looks. Off stage, he is down to earth and polite, with just a hint of a charming mischievousness. On stage he's different, giving it his all, connecting with the crowd with his sound and humor.

The event was Guitar Shop Restaurant at the Nishi-Ogikubo Waver, and the flier for it featured a girl in a white dress, floating in the clouds holding a bunny and a kitten. Over drinks one night before the show, my friend DJ Kamaage and I chatted about this picture, which maybe reflected how a younger generation thought of guitar pop, but didn't feel right to us. Guitar pop isn't just sweet and gentle music. Some of us fans think it's a successor to the original punk rock, trying new things, with a Do It Yourself attitude. Or, as twee.net says, "Pop Kids everywhere know that the true spirit of Punk Rock lives on not in the mass-marketed "alternative" scene, or the sub-metal caterwauling of testosterone-poisoned grunge-rockers, but in the simple and pure efforts of kids banging out sweet delicious songs on cheap guitars. "

A certain feeling of being on edge can be seen in the live shows of bands like Caraway. In a different way, another group on the set that night, Three Berry Icecream, shows the true guitar pop spirit, creating beautiful, short tunes with accordion, viola, xylophone, just because those are the instruments that band leader Mayumi Ikemizu wants to use to create sounds.

This was a 'sold out' event, at a tiny venue I'd never been to before. Fortunately, and unusually for a Tokyo show, the audience could exit and re-enter the venue freely, which was good, because the place was packed. There's a relationship between how much you love a show and how much discomfort you are willing to put up with, and these days in my case the love really has to be there to stay at an uncomfortable event, whereas Tokyo audiences seem to be able to put up better with the lack of space, or maybe they just love the music more. Or, I might just be turning into an old grouch. It was good, though, to be able to go outside and walk around in Nishi-Ogikubo at night, a dense neighborhood of eateries and bars, including a huge yakitori joint called Ebisu that occupied multiple storefronts in one block.

Asakusa Jinta & OldFashion At The Kurawood

2011-09-11T05:28:00.000-07:00

The Kurawood in Asakusa is such a nice live house, with a friendly vibe. I recommend it highly for any music-loving visitor to Tokyo, since you won't want to miss Asakusa in any case (and for that matter, anyone who lives in Tokyo should go too).

Kurawood's bar sells, in addition to the usual beer and cocktails, several types of shochu, sake, Denki Bran--'electric brandy'--that specialty of Kamiya Bar in Asakusa, a liquor that tastes like sugar and herbs dunked into brandy, and bar food, including oden for 300 yen, which is a good deal.

Hung from the ceiling of the stage area are paper lanterns that darken when shows start. They're inscribed with the characters for Sanjya festival, a big annual event in Asakusa.

I headed to Kurawood from Asakusa station, and the evening was autumnal, with a cool breeze swinging the branches of a willow tree next to an old restaurant with a black-tiled roof. The night's show was organized by Asakusa Jinta, so I knew it would be good.

The first group I saw was called OldFashion, an energetic, swinging outfit with three sax players, a wood bass, two guitars and a drummer. Nattily dressed in jackets and ties, OldFashion was one of those groups that was inspired by old jazz and pop. They reminded me a bit of Ego-Wrappin and Crazy Ken Band, and I liked them a lot.

Next up was a funny band led by the 'Mick Jagger of Adachi ward', and these guys really learned their stage show from Rolling Stones 101, complete with a lead guitar with Keith Richards mannerisms.

Then Asakusa Jinta came on, and the floor erupted into joyful dancing. An especially excited kid turned around and apologized when he bumped into me, and I felt bad because his hops and swinging dance and arm pumps were what I felt too, inside. Though by about the middle of the show, the music was so powerful, I jettisoned my inhibitions and joined him and the other fans in dancing.

One of the things that makes Asakusa Jinta great is that they've made music that sounds both retro and new, mixing western and Japanese styles. Others have tried this too, but I don't think as successfully. And they're master performers, fun and engaging to watch. It's a stupid miracle that you can still see these guys right up close at a little place like the Kurawood.

This & That Volume 4 In Roppongi

2011-06-25T23:40:00.000-07:00

Photo by Daniel H. Rosen

This & That Cafe is a neat event that a Tokyo-based artist named Daniel Rosen holds every two months or so at the Super Deluxe in Roppongi. First off, it's free, leaving you with more money to consume beverages including Tokyo Ale. Secondly, it features an eclectic mix of performances, which, when I stopped by a few weeks ago, comprised Yuyake Lamp, my beloved piano pop band, the Watanabes, a gaijin ensemble from Ehime Prefecture, another female vocalist and a flamenco group, a live painting, and animation projected on the stage wall. It's an ideal way to spend a Friday night, listening to good music at a place with a free feel.

The Watanabes, who started with a fun song about living in Ehime as foreigners, are based close to Yuyake Lamp vocalist Yunn's hometown in the western Japan prefecture, by coincidence. I wonder what it's like to be a foreigner band in a place like Ehime...

Photo by Tomohide Kimura

Terayama Shuji Music Festival

2011-05-28T04:40:00.000-07:00

I heard about Shuji Terayama a long time ago, but in one those things you never quite get around to, I'd never really read any of his plays or poems and other works of this avant garde writer. So, when I saw that there was going to be a 'Terayama Shuji Music Festival' at the Hatsudai The Doors club, and Asakusa Jinta was playing, I was interested. Plus, as a bonus, Panta, the singer of the legendary left-wing 70's rock band Zunou Keisatsu, or Brain Police, was also on the bill.

Terayama was active in the 60's and 70's, and a lot of the crowd in the small Doors club seemed to be about the age that they probably saw Terayama plays when they first came out. They were a quiet audience, with gray, fuzzy hair. Maybe they were once radicals, protesting, attending Brain Police shows, taking in Terayama's literary experiments. Maybe, to an extent, they are still radical, which is harder to be than, say, in your 20's.

It probably wasn't an easy crowd for Asakusa Jinta, accustomed more to playing for young punk fans, but they pulled it off, helped along by a few diehard fans in the audience who had come to see them, and getting polite applause from the Terayama followers.

MCing the event were a playwright named Ei Takatori, who had collaborated with Terayama and whose background is also interesting, with 'manga criticism' listed in his resume, and an idol singer named Mika Hashimoto, who is the 'chairwoman' of the School Uniform Advancement Committee, which is how I guess I'd translate an idol group called Seifuku Koujou Iinkai. I missed SKI's set, but they appear to be a group of about a dozen schoolgirl singers who motto is to be “pure, upright and beautiful,” according to their website. The special guest was the actress Hitomi Takahashi, a tall, somewhat fox-like beauty, who had been scouted by Terayama when she went to see one of his plays as a student in her school uniform.

Brain Police's Panta played as a duo with another guitarist. A 61-year old rocker with still-long hair wearing black clothes, Panta did an acoustic set, and the highlight was a song whose message confused me. It was a song that was ostensibly about a baseball team, and its nine players, but in reality it was about the nine hijackers of ANA's Yodo-go plane in 1970, the baseball theme invented to prevent the song from being banned. It seemed weird...I only have wiki-level knowledge of the Yodo-go incident, but the gist is a group of radicals took over the plane and had it fly to North Korea, where the nine would be able to join their comrades. It wasn't a critical song. If anything, it seemed to glorify them. Maybe the song made sense in certain circles at the time it was written, but, in 2011, it seems strange. I'm curious what Panta's take is on all this.

For the encore, all the performers got together and sang a famous song that Terayama wrote called , “Sensou wa Shiranai”, a beautiful, if somewhat sentimental song about a girl getting married whose father she doesn't remember died in the war. The title means, literally, 'I don't know war', but I guess the 'know' in this case means more than just knowledge or experience, and is talking about lives where war is no longer something that exists, at least not in Japan, for now.

2011, From Here

2011-05-08T06:20:00.000-07:00

2011, From Here was an earthquake charity event at the Club Que featuring a three-band roster that was hard to beat if you're into Japanese guitar pop: Harqua, the husband-and-wife collaboration of Harco and Quinka, with a Yawn, Kuki Kodan and advantage Lucy. Ticket proceeds, donations and sales of buttons made by artists (showing the prefectural birds of the quake-affected areas) went to a quake relief fund.

More than 200 people crammed into the Que, and the event ended up raising over 500,000 yen, about $6,000.

Highlights of the event for me included:

Harqua's performance. I'm a huge Quinka far, and chose her Field Recordings album as my favorite for 2008. I also like Harqua's CD a lot—I don't think there are many married duos that sing as beautifully together—and this was my first time see them on stage. One of their best songs is “Thank You”, the first tune on their album, and Quinka said that when she wrote it, the message was that you shouldn't miss the opportunity to thank loved ones closest to you, but after the quake, the message became bigger, and now it's also a song to thank people from far away, strangers with a heart. Enamored of the song to begin with, and thinking about its newfound significance, I was emotionally overcome during its performance.

Kuki Kodan's lyrics. Vocalist Yamazaki Yukari writes with everyday words that mysteriously turn into sung poetry that's hard to forget. I could see several fans mouthing those words that mean a lot to them. Yukari sits the side edge of the stage, singing as if she's alone in a living room, and then sometimes looking up, surprised she's on a stage in front of a crowd.

Advantage Lucy. The organizers of the show, whose intention was written on their website (and take a guess who translated it into English :) ). What can we do in this situation? We can start helping, from now, each in his or her own way—that was the philosophy.

But when vocalist Aiko first tried to address the audience, and saw how many had shown up, she was overwhelmed and covered her eyes with a towel. The words eventually came out, and they did a fantastic set of their new material, but for the encore, when they did “Kaze ni Azukete”, and she sang that line, one of my favorite of all Lucy lyrics, because it's so real:

Kimi kara koe ga todoitara nandaka

When your words reach me

Onaka ga suitekita

I start to become hungry

she choked up again. Maybe, I think, because we were there, the fans and musicians, and our voice, of support and agreement, did reach her. (And we did go grab a bite afterwards!)

Pop Planet Nights In Seoul

2011-04-24T00:50:00.000-07:00

One of the discoveries I made during a weekend of pop shows in Korea was a Japanese band—the Fishmans.

I knew about the 90's reggae-pop group, and owned two of their CDs, but it wasn't until I heard their music booming in a Seoul club called Kuchu Camp—itself the name of a Fishmans album—that it clicked. Now, back in Tokyo, I don't know how many times I've listened to songs like “Night Cruising” and “Shiawasemono (Happy Guy)”, bewitched by the high-voiced, yearning vocals.

At the Kuchu Camp, on the wall behind the stage is a famous photo of the late Shinji Sato, the Fishmans' singer, with eyes that are playful, challenging, penetrating. His image watches over every show at Kuchu Camp. Right now, somewhere there must be someone listening to his lines, from “Shiawasemono”:

Kanojyo no koto dake wo yoku shitteru

I only know a lot about my girl

Soshite ongaku ga mune no naka de itsumo natteru

And music is always playing in my heart

Kanojyo no koto dake wo yoku shitteru

I only know a lot about my girl

Soshite itsu datte yume no naka made oikaketekuru

And she always follows me into my dreams

***

On Saturday night, at Club Ta, decorated with a Middle Eastern feel with cloth on the walls, I remembered what a great audience Koreans are, clapping in rhythm spontaneously to songs, and cheering groups they were seeing for the first time (as well as excellent local bands, like my co-conspirator Wonyul's blues-rock ensemble One Trick Ponies and the veteran, sweet pop unit Linus' Blanket).

Yuyake Lamp translated one of their songs into Korean, and the pronunciation must have been rocky because vocalist Yunn doesn't speak the language. But despite that, after, and even during the song, there was a roar of approval. Yunn blogged—when she was memorizing the Korean words, it felt like learning magical spells, but when she actually sang them on stage, they were like a real magic spell that brought the audience closer.

***

I loved the casual elegance of my Korean friends' daily moves, the way they put a hand over the heart as they poured a drink for you, or placed a hand over a forearm as they received a drink. We're friends so pour my drink with one hand rather than two, don't be overly formal, said one friend. There were a lot more hugs, handshakes and pats than I was used to back in Japan.

After a few nights that went by so fast of music by great bands—Ninon, Kounotori, Three Berry Icecream, Yuyake Lamp and the vocalist Mayumi Hozaki from Japan and Do-Lu, One Trick Ponies and Linus' Blanket from Korea—and drinks, laughter and talk with new friends until dawn, we from Tokyo and Osaka were all smitten by Seoul, wanted to stay longer and return again soon—as I knew would happen.

Seoul! Pop Planet - April 16-17!

2011-04-08T23:55:00.000-07:00

Seven years ago (but just yesterday!), I went to Seoul with a bunch of musicians—advantage Lucy, Plectrum, Lost in Found and Miniskirt—to attend a music event called Melody Go Round. It was one of the best trips of my life—getting to know my favorite artists in person, making new friends, and witnessing moving scenes of the musicians of two neighboring but very faraway countries creating beautiful sounds together. Seoul became a special place for me.

Now, some of us are returning. Bands from Japan will be performing together with Korean musicians at a two-night event called “Pop Planet” next weekend. On Saturday, April 16, they will play at Club TA, and on the 17th at Kuchu Camp, both in Hongdae. If you're in Seoul, come join us!

The bands are:

Linus' Blanket, a wonderful Seoul indie pop group influenced by bossa nova, French pop and Bacharach;

One Trick Ponies of Seoul, a cool blues rock band from Seoul, led by my friend Wonyul;

Do-Lu at the Kuchu Camp show, a charming trilingual (K-J-E) staff band of the Seoul club;

Three Berry Icecream from Tokyo, the brilliant indie pop unit of vocalist and accordionist Mayumi Ikemizu, a central character of the Shibuya-kei scene, who was a member of Bridge;

Yuyake Lamp, one of my favorite Tokyo bands, the unit of nature-loving, world music-embracing, high-voiced singing wonder Yunn;

Hozaki Mayumi from Osaka, the gorgeous voiced pop vocalist, formerly with a unit called Margarets Hope;

And, two Osaka groups associated with Minsung Kang, formerly of Linus' Blanket and the organizer of the Melody Go Round event mentioned above: Kounotori and Ninon. I haven't listened to them, but being Minsung's groups, I have no doubt they're excellent.

***

Minsung wants to do another Melody Go Round event in Seoul later in the year—its idea is to bring musicians of different countries together, going from one country to another—and this event shares his vision and features some great bands from both Korea and Japan. I can't wait for the evenings of music, friendship, soju and Korean food!

Apollo 18's Tokyo Landing

2011-04-04T22:14:00.000-07:00

Apollo 18 landed in Tokyo—and then crashed through the ground and got stuck in the Basement Bar.

...

Well, OK, the space mission is actually an alternative rock trio from Korea, and the hardcore cosmonauts were flying back not from the moon but from the U.S., where they were on a two-week tour, including gigs at South by Southwest and The Valley of the Vapors Independent Music Festival. On the way back they were playing at the Shibuya Kinoto and the Basement Bar in Shimokitazawa.

I found out about the show because a music blogging comrade from Korea, Shawn Despres, got in touch about it. They were voted "Rookie of the Year" at the 2010 Korean Music Awards, he said.

The performance was great—Apollo 18 was spirited, intense, musically proficient...and funny. The probably unintended joke of the evening was that Apollo 18 was playing to a crowd that most likely didn't listen much to their brand of hard core and metal meet post-rock. It wasn't quite the Blues Brothers doing 'Rawhide' behind chicken wire. But judging from the other bands and the fashion, the audience was one that favored the sort of introspective, sentimental alternative pop/rock that seems common in Shimokitazawa these days (album covers showing a sunset bordered by Tokyo buildings...that kind of thing).

To their credit, Apollo 18 got even this crowd going, triggering modest head swinging and foot tapping and shouts in basic Korean and Japanese. The guitarist guy said “Konbanwa (good evening)” at the start, and then in English apologized that unlike the other 'country' music bands tonight (I think that's what he said...), they just did rock 'n' roll, before plunging into an explosive set, he diving into the audience at one stage and doing a solo from the floor.

I would love to see them again in Tokyo, but maybe next time playing with groups like Asakusa Jinta or henrytennis, if that could be arranged.

***

This was my first show since the quake. Nightlife is gradually reviving, and the streets of Shimokitazawa were fairly crowded, though not as much as pre-quake weekends. On the walls of the Basement Bar were signs saying that shows may be canceled if there's big shaking, that the hall may become dark if there's a blackout and that they are limiting the use of air-con and lights to save electricity.

***

Speaking of Korea, my friends are going to be flying in to Seoul to play two weekend events on April 16-17. The bands will include Yuyake Lamp and Three Berry Icecream from Japan and Linus' Blanket of Korea. More on that later...

Spring, Tokyo, 2011

2011-03-26T22:34:00.000-07:00

Radiation, hay fever-causing pollen and floral scents in the air—what a strange spring this is.

After the disaster, Tokyo streets are darker and the crowds are gone at night. Shops and eateries close early to save electricity. Bottled water and bread are gone from store shelves.

I haven't been to any shows since the quake struck, but I imagine they're more subdued, with a smaller audience. Going down to basement clubs while aftershocks are still frequent isn't an appealing prospect, and there's guilt about using electricity for performances at a time of shortage. Some musicians I know are already playing, some as charity events. But I'm not ready to go back just yet.

I've been listening to a lot of Judy and Mary, whose CDs had been gathering dust in my room before the quake. Maybe it's a reminder of a Japan that's gone, temporarily. Now people are serious, public-minded, careful. All good things, but I miss the excesses, the crazy city noise and lights, the drunk crowds, flirtations and jokes. And Judy Mary, as you see in this video, vocalist Yuki over-the-top coquettish, the guitar and bass hyperactive, distilled all that energy into the form of a band.

Eel Nests At The O-Nest

2011-03-09T16:02:00.000-08:00

I didn't get Eel at first.

The first time I saw the girl who calls herself Eel perform live, she was opening for advantage Lucy, and as it was one of the first times for me to see Lucy and I was overwhelmed by the experience, Eel didn't leave much of an impression other than that the performance seemed wild and chaotic (...not necessarily bad things).

The years have passed, and now I'm a fan. Especially after listening to her great new album, For Common People, and a compilation of her earlier works called Kung Fu People Etcetera, I wonder why I didn't get into Eel earlier. Her cute vocals, catchy melodies and inventive noises are things I like.

I headed to the O-Nest for the Tokyo leg of her For Common People tour. While at past shows she's sung karaoke fashion to music from a Mac, this time Eel had a band for the first half, in addition to an ever-present interpretive dancer guy in a pink suit and feather boa. She wore aqua-rimmed sunglasses, a green-yellow hooded sweatshirt and shorts over pink sweatpants.

At one point in the show she said, “I actually quite like punk”, in what context I can't remember, and it got me thinking. Wasn't punk rock when it started out a funny, eccentric, experimental style, and the cliches we associate it with now are later developments? And musicians' unhappiness about what 'punk' was becoming led to post-punk and new wave? Maybe then, someone like Eel, from Osaka, cute, colorful, stylish, outlandish, eclectic, is truly carrying on the legacy of punk?

It's an idle thought, and maybe Eel herself wouldn't feel the need to be bound by labels (her website says her style is 'cute and funky pop with electric punk music as a base'). In the meantime, like in an early punk show of my imagination a lot of wackiness is happening on stage, five male 'dancers', including the pink suit man and a guy with a wig, a paper cutout mask of Eel's face and the Stars and Stripes bopping to her tunes, and for the finale, as many of the audience as can fit the O-Nest stage join them to hop along to her song “Jump”.

Tokyo Pinsalocks At The Que

2011-02-19T05:22:00.000-08:00

What a perfectly casted band Tokyo Pinsalocks are.

Singer Naoko is the sunny, outgoing one. Bassist Hisayo is her lunar counterpart, cool and composed. Drummer Reiko is cute and petite. They look great on stage, though, in reality, it was probably coincidence rather than casting that brought them together, 11 years ago.

The girl trio played at the Shimokitazawa Que at the end of a Japan tour. Naoko wore a big cloth rose in her hair, which descended like a golden avalanche, and she had on a mime-like stripe shirt and what looked like a tutu. Hisayo, tall with long black and silver hair, wore a green blouse with an illustration of a parrot, and shocking pink-colored tights.

On stage there's the classic, rock-band fire and ice contrast between those two, but like the yin-yang symbol, the separation between black and white isn't perfect. Naoko is the show-woman, but you can tell some of it is an act. Hisayo is almost expressionless, but there's passion in her performance that come out to the surface.

They have a spare, New Wave sound, Hisayo pumping out aggressive, distorted bass lines, Reiko drumming in a precise, mechanical fashion, and programmed music from a Mac and Naoko's vocals taking care of the rest. Tokyo Pinsalocks just released a new album called Kurukuru to Guruguru, onomatopoeia for things spinning around, and they played one of the best songs from it, “Kimono Japonaise”, which is an internationally-minded Japanese pride song, with lyrics like:

We're sensitive to fashion [on stage, Naoko holds her stripe shirt]

And our hearts are sensitive too [she touches her chest]

Our legs are short [she points down at her legs, with a frown]

But we dance without care anyway [she dances]

5 Favorite Japanese CDs of 2010

2011-01-29T04:00:00.000-08:00

#5. Spangle call Lilli line
View

My favorite SCLL album since Or, View highlights the band's long, luxuriant stretches of indie pop melodies, guided by the fragile-sounding vocals of Kana Otsubo.

#4. Yuyake Lamp
Uminomori

These are musicians I've been following since 2004 (when they were called Orange Plankton), and they're now friends. So, maybe there's a bias, but I do think their piano pop music stands out. Vocalist Yunn has two gifts: an unmistakable, dazzling high voice, and a talent for weaving memorable musical lines. The piano, bass, drum and flute arrangements are often jazzy. The album title means 'forest in the ocean'.

#3. Soutaisei Riron
Synchroniciteen

These guys have converted me. I liked their previous album, Hi-Fi Anatomia, but was put off by their strict policy against publishing their image, and wondered how they'd follow up on Hi-Fi. Synchroniciteen shows it wasn't a fluke. The melodies are still catchy and the lyrics playful, but what I noticed most was that vocalist Etsuko Yakushimaru's singing intensity had increased, from Hi-Fi's low-blood pressure whispers to something more rocking. It's a good change.

'Sanzenman Nen', or 'thirty million years', is my favorite track, with opening lines that go, ' I've been in love from thirty million years ago/I ride a train from Gakugei Daigaku-mae', an example of the eccentric way they arrange their lyrics. Soutaisei Riron's lyrics favor word play and sometimes the settings are science fiction or fantasy, things they share in common with other contemporary bands, whereas bands a decade ago seemed to be more into describing their lives and feelings with straight words. A sweeping generalization, and there are many exceptions, but that's the impression I get. What caused the change?

#2. Serani Poji
Merry Go Round Jailhouse

This is the first album in five years by a unit that started as a virtual girl pop unit led by a Sega musician Tomoko Sasaki playing music for the game 'Roommania #203'. Before, Yukichi of Cecil was Serani Poji's singer; this time, returning to recording, Sasaki herself is the vocalist of pop tunes that are like updates of the best of the 90's Shibuya-kei sound—my favorites are 'Toward the South', about a 7-year-old girl who dreams about running off to a southern island with her lover; 'Robot's Happiness', Kafka's Metamorphosis with a happy ending about a girl who enjoys her new life as an android; and 'Laughing Frog'.

#1. Ego Wrappin'
Naimono Nedari No Dead Heat

My biggest musical surprise of the year: I knew of Ego Wrappin', and even owned one of their albums, but didn't pay much attention, thinking they're a retro-jazz outfit, which isn't my thing. What was it that moved me to pick up this CD at Tower Shibuya? It led me to music that was both familiar and new. Some of it is like 60's psychelic rock, like 'Kuroi Sweater', an elegy about a granny who knit a black sweater for the singer. There's also jazz with horns in songs like the lounge-feeling 'Love Scene', which, despite my previous avoidance of Ego Wrappin's jazz, has become my favorite song of the album. Bringing alive this band's innovation and re-interpretation of classic rock and jazz are the powerful, passionate vocals of Yoshie Nakano, like a Japanese Grace Slick.

***

Returning to 2009, there was one album I didn't know about at the time, but has become a favorite of mine, not only for that year but for all time—Bice's Kaerarenai Koi no Tameni ('For Love that Can't Be Changed'). Sadly, the woman who was Bice passed away last year. The poems whisper-sung by Bice (pronounced Bee-che) are about love, life and death—one song is titled 'The Two of Us Will Be Gone In 100 Years'—and the directness of the emotions is something I've rarely encountered. One of these days I'll write more about a masterpiece of a song in this album, called “Ordinary Days”.

レッドバルーン

ビーチェ（bice） | Myspace動画

Yuyake Lamp At The Turkey

2010-12-24T21:41:00.000-08:00

On a side-street in Shibuya surrounded by love hotels is the small club Shichimencho, Japanese for 'turkey'. I asked the manager why it was named that, and he said the Turkey was once a bar, and when the Mama of the bar got drunk, her face would turn into many different colors, like the bird. Red, pale, maybe even blue, green and purple...? And thus, the name. At the Turkey the entrance is right next to the stage, so for the minute or two while you pay for your ticket, you become part of the show (and some of the musicians encourage that, calling out 'Welcome!' as a new guest enters).

I was there to see Yuyake Lamp, who just released a great new mini-album called Umi no Mori ('Forest in the Sea'). The event brought together musicians that once lived in a cheap apartment called Shunpu-sou. It's usually not a good sign in terms of luxury if an apartment is called 'sou'. The nicer dwellings have western names—Mansion this, Casa that, Villa, Manoir, etc. Sou's are old, wooden apartments with small tatami rooms and communal toilets.

Maybe the most famous of them is Tokiwa-sou, where some of the greatest manga artists of the 20th century lived when they were starting out—Tezuka Osamu, the Fujiko Fujio duo, Akatsuka Fujio, Ishinomori Shotaro—talking manga, working together, emulating Tezuka. Yuyake Lamp singer Yunn joked that Shunpu-sou in Kyodo was a sort of Tokiwa-sou for musicians. Thin-walled, she could hear the songs neighbors were creating and practicing. Yunn was the only girl in the apartment, and one of only two Japanese. It was a friendly place where, if she screamed because she had an insect visitor, neighbors would rush into the room armed with brooms and slippers. Sadly, like Tokiwa-sou, Shunpu-sou no longer exists, torn down to build a 'mansion' or a 'manoir'.

At the Turkey, Yunn sang her new, beautiful title track, “Forest in the Sea”: 'green, green, blue, and the yellow of light, the forest in the sea'. Such a distinctive, high singing voice, as unique as Chara's. And a stage presence that comes from years of performing, in clubs and on the street, traveling and playing in all corners of Japan.

Advantage Lucy & Vasallo Crab 75 At Munekyun

2010-12-03T23:49:00.000-08:00

Every year on November 26, advantage Lucy and Vasallo Crab 75 get together for a very touching event to remember their former guitarist, Takayuki Fukumura. The two bands meet up a few weeks before to think about ways to make that year's performance special. This time, the concept was a children's book. Wearing a wool cap, Lucy's Aiko and VC75's Daisuke Kudo came on stage to read about a lonely rabbit, lost in the woods, that meets other animals playing music. Their songs followed the short chapters. It was a fable about Fukumura's life.

The event is called Munekyun Arpeggio, 'mune-kyun' being a word Fukumura used in an ad looking for musicians for a band he wanted to create that would later become advantage Lucy. It's that feeling you can't describe when you experience something lovely, like, in my case, listening to an old advantage Lucy song for the first time in a while. Lucy guitairist Yoshiharu Ishizaka's take on the arpeggio is that it's a musical form of kindness. But he also said there's an element of eros in them.

Fukumura was a young master at crafting those 'kindly, erotic' progressions of musical notes. For each of the bands' finales, a song starting with a signature Fukumura arpeggio was played.

VC75's was their best song, 'Vicious Circle', and it was a rousing performance. Lucy's finale was that song that begins with my favorite rock intro, a six-second, miraculous wall of guitar sound—'Red Bicycle'. Lucy singer Aiko once wrote that Fukumura composed that intro in a Shinjuku recording studio, and, after hearing it, when she walked out later she felt the world outside had turned dazzlingly bright. Listening to it brings back to me memories of those early days back in 2003 and 2004, when I first started hitting the Tokyo clubs, walking the narrow alleys of Shimo-Kitazawa, Shibuya and Shinjuku in search of new music, making discoveries, meeting the music-makers, getting a floating feeling in the face of boundless possibilities.

Aiko's eyes reddened as she sang the finale. I didn't see Ishizaka-san, but a Lucy fan named Patrick, who took a midnight bus all the way from Tottori prefecture to see the show, said the guitarist was in tears by the end.

I was terminally mune-kyun for the next few days.

Asakusa Jinta One-Man At The O-West

2010-11-25T23:36:00.000-08:00

Walking to Shibuya listening to Asakusa Jinta on my iPod, I had one of those moments when I suddenly remember I'm living in a strange little country called Japan. In the middle of the most fashionable town for young folks, I was going to see a band that got its inspiration from early-20th century Japanese popular music.

One of the lovely things about Asakusa Jinta is that even though their music references old styles like enka, chindonya and jinta music in addition to punk and rockabilly, young punk kids who probably have little familiarity with those sounds get off on the music anyway. At their 'one-man' show at the O-West, the front-center part of the audience was occupied by a few dozen kids who slammed their bodies together during the fast numbers and rested during the slow songs. They passed around a mini-keg of Asahi beer that the opening band started up on during their last song and then donated the remainder to the Asakusa Jinta audience. Will listening to Asakusa Jinta expand these kids' musical horizons, inspiring them to dig through old records? But I don't want to sound superior, this band has done the same to me. When I hear their sound a crack appears on the shell of my musical knowledge, and what's beyond it is so bright and rich with possibilities that it makes me tear up a little.

For all their seriousness as musicians, on stage they're wholly devoted to entertainment, in a way few other Japanese bands can equal. At first, lights hit the huge Asakusa Jinta banner on the rear wall; two band members come on stage waving the group's flags; and then it's all action, the horns pointing skyward, the tubist marching through the audience pounding a bass drum, the leader slapping a meta-framed double bass with explosive precision. The band talked about how, B-Ken, the mohawked euphonium player, who is the most hyperactive member on stage, diving into the crowd at one point, got nerves before performances. He sits in the dressing room looking pale and making barfing noises. He's following in the tradition of great artists like Elvis and Koshiji Fubuki that suffered from stage fright before coming on to electrify the fans.

The two-and-a-half hour show, one of the best I've seen in a while, was one where just being there changes you a little, and the world outside feels more alive and colorful.

Risette's 15th Anniversary At The Loft

2010-10-30T01:28:00.000-07:00

Grand Old Shinjuku Loft. That legendary Tokyo live house where Southern All Stars and Judy and Mary once played. I always get lost getting to it. Maybe I get distracted trying to steer clear of the colorful Kabukicho street people near the club—touts, Japanese and foreign, hosts in shining suits and mullets, and, sometimes, gangsters. The Loft is in the basement of an incredible building that is otherwise filled with adult entertainment establishments.

After walking down the stairs and paying at its caged ticket booth, you enter one of the ideal live houses of Tokyo. Mysterious vents and pipes crisscross its ceiling and unlikely pieces of Americana cover its walls (is my memory false, or was there a Miller Lite sign somewhere?). There's a bar with food separated from the live music area. And everything in it is stained with the memory of ten thousand rock shows.

Hearing that Risette will hold its 15 year anniversary gig at the Loft surprised me a bit because they seemed more of a Shibuya or Shimokitazawa act, but when I got there it made sense. A veteran band like Risette shines in an old club like the Loft. The music, the act and the atmosphere come together to create something you can only feel in that space.

One of the bands that Risette invited to play that night was a group that's been around for two decades called Yes, Mama OK. I'd heard of them and even own a tribute album for them but this was the first time for me to see them live and listen to their music. Instant conversion. Catchy rock tunes, abundant stage action, and general silliness—one of the members is a sax/harmonica player who chugged a bottle of wine during the songs where he had nothing to play. The vocalist and guitarist, Takeshi Kongochi, is also an actor, TV personality and the fourth best air guitar player at a Finland world championship, according to Wiki...

Risette itself played both an acoustic and an amplified set. Its singer Yu Tokiwa has a clear, sparkling voice that advantage Lucy's Aiko once said she wished she could put into her throat like a cartridge to sing with, and it mingles perfectly with the two, dueling lead guitars. Ex-Cymbals Reiji Okii guest-bassed for some of the songs. Not showmen like Yes, Mama OK that preceded them, Risette nevertheless charmed with the beauty of their melodies and the intensity of their performance. Not great orators on stage either, when they said simple thanks to the audience and the other bands, and Tokiwa said “Ureshiidesu (I'm happy)”, it felt like the most genuine appreciation I'd heard in a long time.

Hoover's Ooover At The O-West

2010-10-16T19:48:00.000-07:00

I have trouble with big concert venues. A phobia of sorts. Ax, Zepp, Tokyo International Forum...I'm not a fan of any of them. Visions of animals being herded through the slaughterhouse... But these places can't always be avoided. Some good musicians are going to be successful and play the big halls, and I still want to see them. Recently, finally, I got into Ego-Wrappin, and bought a ticket to see the popular group at a large venue. I even considered catching Perfume at the city's ultimate mega-venue, Tokyo Dome, until figuring out the tickets were long sold out. It's clear I need to build some tolerance to these places. So, in that respect, going to see Hoover's Ooover's Japan tour final show at the O-West was probably a good thing.

The O-West is, along with the O-East, Quattro and Liquid Room, one of the second-tier live houses in terms of size. It was pretty full with Hoover's Ooover fans. The band was dressed up as usual in hipster-looking dark jackets and ties. They alternated between rocking renditions of songs from their latest album, 0.025%, and somewhat inane chatter about topics such as competing to push the 'stop' button on buses (to be first, should one press it right after passing the stop before one's own, risking the driver thinking you're pushing for that stop, or should one at least wait for the announcement to begin? etc). It was also Hoover's Ooover's 10th anniversary—on a show held on the tenth day of the tenth month of 2010. During the song “Mamimumemo”, some in the crowd spun one arm over the other, imitating the girl character in the music video. For the encore, Masami came on stage wearing a hand-made Thunder God headpiece, consisting of a green afro and horns (they played a song called “Kaminari Moyou”—signs of thunder—about a girl unhappy about her boy friend coming home in the morning) .

The show seemed shorter than other bands' “one man” gigs I'd been to, at about an hour and a half, which felt like an extended regular performance. Maybe that's their style. It was good show, and the band especially shined when doing faster songs like “Mamimumemo” and “Collection”. But there wasn't the close-up view of the band at a small place like the Basement Bar, and the musicians themselves seemed to have less movement and expression, though that might have been because I was watching from the back of the hall. At a Basement Bar show a few months back, I liked the way that Masami whipped her body away from the mike after song phrases. I've been to lots of great gigs at the Basement Bar...little places like it are always going to be my favorites.

Yuyake Lamp At Azuma Soba Sake House

2010-10-04T07:59:00.000-07:00

I wrote before about the Udon Rock of Asakusa Jinta. On Saturday night, I listened to Soba Pop.

The venue was Azuma Soba Sake House in Asagaya. Performing was Yuyake Lamp's Yunn on keyboard and Tamarou on cajon, the Peruvian percussion box.

The soba joint was designed like an old-fashioned Japanese house, with tatami mats and wooden pillars. The air smelled of soy sauce; kitchen noises accompanied the music.

As the crowd slurped noodles, Yunn sang and played the piano in that way of hers, as if it's only for her most trusted friend, as if the audience aren't strangers.

She said the office that produced the band's last CD (Yuyake Ballad) went bankrupt after the Lehman shock, so their next album will come out at first on iTunes. Yunn, who devours National Geographic-type programs on foreign cultures, marveled about how a financial crisis also brings the world together.

The soba that the waitress brought me was thin and al dente—on a normal night it would be eaten last, after getting through some sake and dishes like sashimi. The waitress was casual and didn't seem too concerned about formal manners. A straightforward, unpretentious Chuo line personality, I thought. (Tokyo has somewhat different personalities according to the area, I think.)

The only thing I wished for was for the audience to treat the show more like a party, chatting and drinking, and less as something serious like a Classical concert. A little hot sake, talk with friends, great jazzy pop music in the background, and soba to wrap it up—that would be perfect.

Three Berry Icecream, Acoustic Soft Parade

2010-09-19T23:12:00.001-07:00

Many of the musicians friendly with the group Three Berry Icecream live in that rectangular zone in Tokyo west of Shibuya, surrounding Shimo-Kitazawa, along the Inokashira-line and east of Mitaka. It's a (relatively) green area, with modest homes for the most part, school kids, locally run shops and restaurants, and a feeling of community. Tokyo is a huge metropolis, but inside it are lots of neighborhoods that are like small towns. Leaving those communities, their residents are swept back into the anonymity and isolation of Tokyo's large crowds.

I thought about these communities because I knew that the musicians playing an afternoon gig at Mona Records belonged to them. Living just a few blocks apart, bumping into each other in the local market, chatting on the street—those are important things.

Mona Records is one of those nice local cafe/clubs in this community. I hadn't been there in a while. Before, people performed on the second floor, taking off their shoes to play on the raised floor, in their socks or bare-footed. Now they had taken over an old Go club on the third floor and made that into the performance space. The windows were open and I could see on the roof next to the club a platform to hang laundries, next to a vined wall.

The musicians have known each other for years, giving the event a relaxed reunion feel. Kiyotaka Sugimoto, the vocalist and keyboardist for the late Orangenoise Shortcut performed together with Shunsuke Kida, the leader of Little Lounge Little Twinkle; Mayumi Ikemizu's Three Berry Icecream also featured Little Lounge's violist Keiko Tanaka, Corniche Camomile's guitarist Yasushi Sakurai and Sugimoto.

A third group that played that afternoon, Acoustic Soft Parade, was a happy discovery. They played soft pop with tropical-sounding percussion, and the whisper-voiced vocalist had a shapely, round stomach—she was due the next month. As she sang, little kids screamed in the audience section, but that was fine—it was a crowd that included young parents, and they were used to children. As fans of Shibuya-kei grew up and became parents, time passed in other ways too. Another friend of Ikemizu's, an artist named Bice, had recently passed away, in her late-thirties. Three Berry Icecream covered one of Bice's songs, in memory.

Luminous Orange And Furukawa Miki At Unit

2010-09-11T01:16:00.000-07:00

Luminous Orange, Rie Takeuchi's shoe-gazing, My Bloody Valentine- and Sonic Youth-influenced band, is my one of my favorite Japanese indie groups. They just released a new album called Songs of Innocence, which I liked a lot, so I went to see their gig at the Unit.

Appearing as a 'special guest' at the show was someone special indeed, Miki Furukawa, former bassist and vocalist for Supercar. For someone of my age and with my musical preferences, Furukawa is almost legendary—Supercar's ever-evolving alternative rock must have inspired the launch of a ten thousand Japanese indie bands.

Others may have shared my awe, because when she came on stage there was a whoop from the audience. She was tiny with short hair and a small face that contains that over-sized lipped mouth that looks like something internet ads try to sell to women. Saying only hi at the start and thanks at the end (I seem to remember that Supercar never talked on stage either), she put on a decent performance, with a powerful female drummer standing out most in my mind. Luminous Orange came on next, and during the entire first song I thought the keyboardist was Takeuchi because she was at the center of the stage and also singing (though it was actually chorus), when in fact, Takeuchi was at the very left of the stage, so I didn't see her at first. It was a spirited performance too.

But...ok, to be honest...I was a bit bored during both sets. It's unfortunate, but I think live bands like these suffer from the legacy of the shoe-gazing style, and the belief that music should be listened to for its own sake. There's not that much engagement with the audience. I can understand how the attitude must have come to be, as a reaction to the excesses of over-produced musical performances, and I sympathize with that. But what does the musician offer instead? Maybe great live music? What I heard at the Unit, though, didn't seem to go much beyond the recorded music. I also no longer can keep up my interest in musicians just because they were legendary for me at some point in the life, if they don't have the goods now. In other words—for the first few minutes, I'll be thinking, 'wow, that's Furukawa Miki!' But unless then the gig really rocks, I'll start pondering where to get dinner afterward. It might have been better if it was at some intimate live house with character, where the music fuses with the atmosphere of the place. The Unit remains one of my least favorite venues in Tokyo, with apathetic, unfriendly staff.

Before the hate mails are typed, may I remind readers that I am huge fans of both of these groups, owning all of Luminous Orange's CDs as far as I know, for example. I just didn't come away on fire from the show.

GREAT SONGS: advantage Lucy's "Nico"

2010-08-27T23:41:00.000-07:00

The ballads of advantage Lucy! Japanese musical national treasures!

Songs like 'Koko de Oyasumi (Rest Here)' from their Memai EP; 'Today', the B-side of the Hello Mate! single; 'Hibikasete' from oolt cloud; and 'Nico', from advantage Lucy, back when they were still called Lucy Van Pelt.

I could write about any advantage Lucy song; all of them are good. But the ballads are especially beautiful, marrying Ishizaka's genius for creating melodies with Aiko's poetry and heart-felt vocals.

Nico of the song's title is the late German singer, model and one-time Velvet Underground collaborator. Except in the song title, she isn't mentioned at all. Maybe it's that the mood of the song is like something that Nico herself would have written. Or, maybe the song takes place in a scene where Nico records are playing in the background.

The lyrics are impressionistic. A girl wakes up before sunrise, hearing rain outside. She lights a candle. And she walks outside. The mood is of sadness, resignation and faint hope—though the causes of these emotions aren't given. (I wonder if Aiko was aware, when she wrote the lyrics, what a tragic figure Nico ultimately became?)

The candle that the girl lights, irritated but wishing, becomes a “lonesome heavenly body (sabishige na tentai)”.

And then, those ever-shining lines:

Moshimo kotoba ga hoshi yorimo

Kazoekirenai hodo arunara

Tsutaerareru kamoshirenaikedo

If words were numberless like stars

Maybe then I could explain

But she thinks it's not that important. And she goes for a walk, expecting the morning to be bright when the sun comes out.

And that's where the song ends. But leaving me with a feeling I'd also try to describe, if only words were as numerous as stars...

My Seoul

2010-08-19T01:37:00.000-07:00

I went to Seoul, after a too-long absence of six years. In 2004 I traveled to Korea together with Japanese bands like advantage Lucy, Swinging Popsicle and Plectrum, getting to know them for the first time.

This time the mission was simply to meet friends and to consume lots of Korean food and booze. Soon enough, in the summer heat, I was sweating garlic and soju. A new discovery was makgeolli, the Korean rice wine—I had it before, but never realized what a variety of flavors it can contain, from super-sweet and bubbly to mild and subdued. At a great makgeolli bar in Hongdae called Taste of the Moon, they served many different types of the wine, and North Korean beer too (it was decent, but I wondered who was able to drink it in that country). As is always the case, kimchee accompanied the makgeolli. Red and white, spicy and sour and sweet and effervescent—unique combinations. Korean food is often explosive—there's a little green pepper that destroys the taste buds for about 10 minutes, paralyzing and burning the tongue, and nothing seems to be able to cool it down. The BBQ places are smoky and the floors slippery with grease.

I went to a show at Hongdae's Club Ssam with my friend Martin, but it wasn't very satisfying. The couple of bands that performed were technically skilled and acted like they were playing an arena, when in reality it was a small club with a couple of dozen fans and the music wasn't that original. But the show made me wonder about the musical impulse. What inspired the musicians to form a band? How long will they continue? Will careers end their bands? And who are the fans? Why did they choose to spend a Friday night at the club rather than some other place?

Over beers I talked with another friend, Wonyul, about Korean music. He thought the problem with Korean pop music is that it's almost uniformly influenced by Japanese enka, usually even without the musicians' knowledge. It's a legacy of the Japanese colonial era, and Wonyul thinks the enka influence prevents Korean musicians from creating their own sound. His answer is to look elsewhere for inspiration, to try out music that isn't listened to much in Korea like blues. But while experiencing new styles of music must be worthwhile, I wasn't sure whether it could, just by itself, help a unique new sound to come into existence, and felt that that would be my friend's big musical mission in coming years.

He gave me a pile of indie Korean CDs that I'm now working my way through, including a nice album called Hanei Sky by Cosmos.

In the sweaty summer heat we hopped from one beer joint to the next, one on the third floor reached climbing what looked like a fire escape. Behind the counter at a couple of places were shelves filled with CDs and LPs and barkeepers who were serious about music. Knowing no Korean, I had to rely on my friend's interpretation, reading body language and guessing to figure out what was happening and what sort of ideas and thoughts occupied the people. But only in Seoul for a few days, it wasn't possible for me to get a very good sense of what the people were like. Still, that's my Seoul. It's a different Seoul than what someone on a tour package may see. It's a Seoul presented to me with the help of good friends, vivid and flavorful, populated with people that care a lot about music.

Rakugo, Asakusa Jinta

2010-07-31T18:26:00.000-07:00

Tokyo's biggest fireworks festival was happening, and the explosions could be heard even inside the theater where I sat. Big crowds were out in the street, about half of the girls in colorful yukata.

Several rakugo comedians commented on the fact that it was the night of the Sumida-gawa fireworks festival, some thanking us for coming to the show instead, others saying you're crazy to miss the fireworks. But I'd experienced my share of hanabi, and didn't have a strong desire to see it again in the summer heat and crowds. I was much more interested in this unusual show, pairing one of my favorite Japanese rock bands, Asakusa Jinta, with the traditional, comedic monologue of rakugo.

The venue was Asakusa Engei Hall, a rakugo mecca right in the middle of tourist town Asakusa. I read that it was originally a strip theater after the war, and became a rakugo hall in 1971. I also read that because it's so close to the red-light district of Yoshiwara, prospective clients of the latter would kill time listening to comedy while waiting for their appointments.

Whether that's true or not, there is no denying that most rakugo tales deal with the joy of living. Eating and drinking sake are constant subjects. Many times after seeing a rakugo-ka pantomime happily slurping soba, I've been tempted to seek the noodles myself. And the same is the case when the comedians form an imaginary sake cup with their fingers and down the make-believe liquor with delight.

Sexy subjects also abound. One skit had to do with a dim-witted servant who was asked to tail his master by his wife, to check that he isn't visiting a mistress (he was, and lots of complications ensue). Rakugo is filled with the emotions of its characters, deftly differentiated by the single comedian sitting on a cushion—the jealousy of the wife, the vexation of the master, the incomprehension of the servant, and so on—but they're always drawn with a light touch, and with a humane feel. It's idealized, Edo period emotions—maintaining proper human relationships is important, and even when, say, one character is angry with another, that's at the back of his mind, as well as sympathy for one's fellow man.

The rakugo acts begin with a few minutes of small talk about current events and recent happenings, and then, signaling that the main tale will begin, the rakugo-ka slowly takes off his jacket. During one of the small talk parts at tonight's show, a comedian talked about how he goes out drinking near the theater after performances, and sometimes drunks accost him, saying it must be a good life getting paid for just talking. Don't you earn a full day's salary simply by talking for 15 minutes or so? No, no, not true at all—I only talk for about 13 minutes! But, having said that, making your money talking in front of a big audience is—very easy!

The audience laughs because if you've been around for a while, you know that speaking in front of people and keeping their attention, never mind making them laugh, is a tough task. Behind their light-heartedness and mirth you see in the comedians a professionalism as well as pride that they're carrying on the tradition of rakugo, while keeping it relevant for current audiences. The stage is a holy place for these performers.

So, I wondered how Asakusa Jinta, the band, would fit into this environment. As good as they are, could they compete with these masters of stage performance? Asakusa Jinta came on after all the rakugo acts were done, and I knew right away they were doing the right thing. They didn't try to adjust their act to the venue—they just played like they always do, which is a different kind of but equally fine form of stage entertainment.

Apparently, it was the first time in the history of the Asakusa Engei Hall for a rock band to perform. Strictly speaking, their show wasn't allowed (I wasn't sure how they got around the rules). But the elder rakugo-ka that performed at the event, Sanyutei Koyuza, is a friend of the band, and gave the band its name in fact, and it seemed that he helped arrange the gig, maybe as a way to get more young people interested in rakugo. And it was indeed a nice change of pace to have a rock show preceded by comedy acts, and to see a band playing barefooted on a stage made to look like an old-fashioned Japanese home. Koyuza joined Asakusa Jinta for the final song of their set, bringing out his trumpet and playing together with them “When the Saints Go Marching In”.

***

Rakugo shows often vary the program by including a number of unusual acts, and in this night's case, that one act was certainly unusual: it was a woman who imitated animal noises. Incredibly, she inherited the act from her father, who took it over from his own father. The highlight was an imitation of a kappa—the legendary, pond-dwelling blue-green creature with a turtle shell on his back, a dish on his head, and webbed hand and feet.

Literature says that the kappa's call is a combination of high-pitched whistling and low warbling—the woman did an act in which she imitated the sound of a gentle stream, a dog and a cat, their alarm at seeing the kappa, and the kappa's whistle. I can tell you it was one of the strangest stage performances I've ever witnessed, and wonderful too, making me feel like I was in some foggy river bank watching a dog and cat react to the kappa emerging from the water...

Thank You, Risette

2010-07-20T11:24:00.000-07:00

Things I love about Japanese indie music:

* That after all these years, I still sometimes discover brilliant bands like Risette. They formed in 1995, influenced by Swedish pop and 'neo-acoustic' (a genre Japanese fans invented to cover bands like Aztec Camera, Prefab Sprout and the Pale Fountains). Twin lead guitars dazzle with their electric conversations, while washing over them are the inimitable, unmistakable vocals of Yu Tokiwa, girlish yet adult, fragile yet strong, crystalline.

* That even though their popularity climbed fast in the late-90's, they took their time to release their first album, your own sweet way, which didn't come out until 2001. And then after another album and anime songs, they faded away for a few years before coming out with a third album called Risette.

* That Risette is a great album, but their old fans, my friends, who have been following the Japanese indie pop scene longer than me, still insist that the older works are superior. And, indeed, some fanatics are so desperate to own the early, out-of-print albums that, at one point, your own sweet way was selling used for about $150 to $250!

* That the band members, seeing this, felt happy about the enthusiasm for their music but bad about the exorbitant price tags, and decided to work to re-issue the songs in a new album, called it their 'Risette Re-issue Project', and tweeted about it.

I read through them. The one at the start of their project said, “The current situation: 1. the record label is gone; 2. it's not clear where the master recording is; 3. we can't get in touch with the record label president, who we think has the master recording.”

Eventually, the president is reached, the master recording materializes, the songs are remixed, a business plan for the new albums is written up, and two albums come into being—Compact Snap, featuring the old hits, and Extras, highlighting rare tracks.

Thank you, Risette, for bringing this music back. Songs like “whitehouse”, “Nagisa”, “hardcore” and “leaf scattering” are beautiful. They are their own unique room in the big apartment building of music.

Another tweet: “We were worried about what we would do if we only sold about 30 copies, but we're breathing a sigh of relief because the pre-orders have been more than expected. If we make money it will certainly go toward (our new music). So, from today, we will start getting working on the material (laugh).”

I'm waiting for their new songs. And for some more shows. Here's a taste of them live, though, as usual, it's inadequate compared with the real thing.

Vasallo Crab 75, 10 Years Old

2010-06-22T07:08:00.000-07:00

Congrats to Vasallo Crab 75, now 10 years old.

They celebrated with two other great bands, Plectrum and Condor44.

A quick one for now, because I don't have any time. More on the scene soon...

Serani Poji's Laughing Frog

2010-05-30T06:06:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite albums so far this year is Merry Go Round Jailhouse, the first work in five years by the unit Serani Poji (it went into 'hibernation' in 2004), and “Laughing Frog” is one of its best tracks.

Like other songs on the album, “Laughing Frog” is at first listen pleasant, catchy girl pop, but the lyrics are quirky (among the other tunes, for example, “Robot's Happiness” is about overcoming the fear of death and avoiding uncertainties by becoming a robot; “Toward the South” concerns a seven-year old girl planning her escape to a southern island with her groom-to-be). This one is a meditation on lies: it has to do with a man who was once a rock star that wrote popular ballads that were filled with falsehoods, and one day a witch in the audience cast a spell on him so that everytime he told a lie, a frog would pop out of his mouth. So now he lives away from civilization, selling his frogs for a living.

The album reminds me of Soutaisei Riron's Hi-Fi Anatomia, both in terms of its eclectic mix of music styles, and the unusual lyrics. In the past, most bands wrote songs about things they feel, or what their lives are like—these two units and other recent bands have more fun with the lyrics, using them to create stories. I wonder if this is an emerging trend in Japan, and if so, whether it reflects changes in musicians' attitudes toward song-writing and its purpose, and if so, what's behind that?

Serani Poji was formed at the end of the 90's to make songs for a Sega video game called Room Mania #203. A Sega employee named Tomoko Sasaki wrote the tunes. (A Wikipedia entry on her says she was also the creator of a song called “Dreams Dreams” that's considered a legendary classic for retro-gamers all over the world...) In previous Serani Poji albums other girls were in charge of the vocals, but in Merry Go Round Jailhouse, Sasaki herself does the singing. As far as I can tell, the unit rarely, if ever, plays live.

In one of those slap-my-forehead moments, I realized only a few days ago that in early Serani Poji songs, the vocalist was Yukichi, the singer for one of the bands I love most, Cecil. In the first album she's listed as 'Yuki', but, still, I should have realized that's who it was. For years I'd been listening to both Cecil and early Serani Poji, thinking to myself, Japan has such sweet female vocalists—when in fact, at least for those two units, there's only one sweet female vocalist involved. Still, she does sound a little different when singing for Serani Poji compared with Cecil: the former seems more stylish, whereas with Cecil she sounds like the most perfect girl-next-door who ever sang.

Fabulous Soundscape Event At Nogizaka Bar Coredo

2010-05-20T02:49:00.000-07:00

Time-traveling back to the not-too-distant past again, I went to a great event organized by Mr. Henachoko at a venue called Bar Coredo in Nogizaka, featuring the leading lights of the Tokyo indie pop scene, Little Lounge Little Twinkle, the Caraway, Humming Parlour and Lilacs in Bloom.

It was my first time at Bar Coredo, and it was an interesting place: describing itself as a hideaway bar plus theater, it's divided between a room with a U-shaped bar and a small performance area with chairs, almost like a lecture hall.

Little Lounge Little Twinkle

Perhaps unfortunately for Mr. Henachoko, the event, called Fabulous Soundscape, was on April 10, the tail end of the Tokyo hanami season, and, as most Japanese do in those spring days, I used cherry-blossom viewing as an excuse to consume abundant amounts of alcohol with friends, so that by the time I arrived at the Bar Coredo there was already plenty of wine and beer coursing through my blood vessels. In my happy state, I greeted Mr. Henachoko, who I was meeting for the first time, like an old best friend reunited after decades, shaking his hand energetically.

The first band, Humming Parlour, are advantage Lucy-gig going friends of mine, and they themselves are influenced by that sublime guitar pop group—sunny melodies, acoustic guitar, toy instruments.

Humming Parlour

The Caraway is Swinging Popsicle guitarist Osamu Shimada's side project, and my hanami companion DJ Kamaage shouted praises between songs, prompting Shimacchi to say, there's a strange man that I know in the audience tonight...

As is often the case days, Little Lounge Little Twinkle, pictured above, was the highlight of the event. They played songs from their excellent new album Stitch and newer songs too. This pop-classical-toy-lounge ensemble is one of the best Japanese acts these days: band leader Kida, a composer in real life, supplies the gems of songs; Keiko's viola is elegance made into life in musical form; and vocalist Miyuki, as I said in a previous post, has an incredible, intoxicating sweet voice.

Mr. Henachoko especially recommended the last band of the night, Lilacs in Bloom, but, as suggested above, I could already be said to be tipsy when I arrived at the Coredo, and by the time the final act came around I wasn't remembering much. But it's obvious Mr. H has fine taste in music, and so the Lilacs are probably worth revisiting.

Lilacs in Bloom

By the way, if you noticed that these photos look a lot better and more professional than the usual Japan Live fare, you are right, because these beautiful pictures are all by Mr. Henachoko friend Takanashi Haruno.

Asakusa Jinta At Maru-ai Bldg, Above An Udon Joint

2010-04-25T05:41:00.000-07:00

Traveling back in time a bit, I went to the Asakusa Jinta event on April 3 at the Maru-ai Bldg, the venue right above a noodle joint called Yamada Udon, where I had a quick and reasonable dinner of udon with pork and draft beer before heading upstairs for the live music.

Maru-ai is a two-story space in the middle of Asakusa that looks like a social club, complete with a stuffed deer-head on one one wall. Asakusa Jinta put up a cable of colored paper lanterns that went across the room, and their banner behind the stage area. In the back was a food stall serving curry, sausages and drinks, which the band members also helped dispense.

By the time I finished my udon supper and climbed up to the hall, the place was packed, and a long line had formed for the booze. There was a fair number of foreigners too—I wonder where they heard about the show (not this blog, gulp??)? The stage wasn't elevated, so, to help people in the back see, everyone in the front sat down. But when the second act, Little Elvis Ryuta hit the stage, everyone stood up anyway—as Little Elvis wanted it.

Little Elvis Ryuta is great. He's a Japanese guy dressed up like Vegas-era Elvis, and leads a group of ultra-cool rockabilly boys. Little Elvis's act revolves around a sort of Japanese rock 'n' roll honne and tatemae. The tatemae, the facade: Little Elvis demands that everyone in the hall sing along to the song, loud enough so that even the Big Elvis up in Heaven can hear. The honne, the truth: a whispered, 'but if you're with a friend and are too shy to sing along, do it in your head instead'. And so on.

Little Elvis's First Rule of Rock 'n' Roll: audiences must participate in call and response. Little Elvis's Second Rule of Rock 'n' Roll: they must also pump their fists in the air. Little Elvis's Third Rule of Rock 'n' Roll: and they must do the Twist. I loved the show so much I hope he doesn't mind that I took the honne option and did all those in my head.

The crowd warmed up by Little Elvis Ryuta, Asakusa Jinta closed the event with another excellent performance. The people in the front sat down for the first few songs, but as the voltage rose everyone got up. There was a guy in front of me at least in his sixties who was having as much fun as anyone in the hall, and I made a silent vow to myself to try to be as cool as this man when I became his age. But I was a little worried whether, with all the people and the stomping, the floor of this old building would hold, or whether we'd all go crashing down into the udon joint. Oshow, the band leader, said one day he wants to make this event even bigger so they also take over the noodle place on the ground floor, which sounded cool—the birth of Udon Rock!

Little Lounge Little Twinkle At The Club 440

2010-04-10T20:18:00.000-07:00

Whatever happened to Shibuya-kei? I believe I saw its remnants at the Club 440 last month.

The band was Little Lounge Little Twinkle. The trio just released a brilliant debut album called Stitch, and the show was to celebrate its release.

The guy keyboardist Kida and girl violist Keiko used to be in LP chep 3, a group of classical instrumentalists who came within the orbit of the Shibuya-kei phenomenon. They are part of that complex web of characters who made up the movement.

What was Shibuya-kei? I think that the main players like Flipper's Guitar and Pizzicato Five were hungry connoisseurs of foreign pop music, who then wrote songs based on those jazzy, lounge or French pop sounds.

Little Lounge Little Twinkle follows that legacy. The instrumental palette of their Club 440 show was color-filled, including viola, violin, oboe, clarinet, accordion, wood bass, a red musical toy that made animal noises, on top of the usual guitars and keyboards. Vocalist Miyuki was striking as always, with orange-gold hair and the palest skin, and I was reminded how sweet her voice was. There are plenty of female Japanese singers with attractive voices, but not many voices are as sweet as Miyuki's. It comes wafting down from some heavenly, new Eden, fragrant orange-colored olive in the air.

These guys live the sort of lives I daydream about—Kida is a composer, and both he and Keiko went to music school. They reside along with many of the old Shibuya-kei people west of the Yamanote Line circuit, near Shimokitazawa, in that part of Tokyo where time seems to move a little slower than the central metropolis. Many of them grew up in wealthy families, but now they lead regular people lives, though ones containing the flair of the artistic and musical.

Nagira Ken'ichi & Asakusa Jinta At O-West

2010-03-13T20:10:00.000-08:00

It's a common belief in Japan that when the weather warms up in spring, the weirdos come out of the woodwork, emerging from their shelters against the cold. Having lived in Japan for a while I have to say there's some truth to this.

During his Thursday night show, folk singer Nagira Ken'ichi talked about one such 'early spring person' he'd met recently. The man, dressed in a salary man outfit, conducted a flag raising ceremony—on the train. He pulled out a Rising Sun flag from his bag, and singing the national anthem—'kii, mii, gaa, yoo'—unrolled the banner. Then, declaring that the flag raising has ended, and again chanting the anthem, he rolled it up again.

Nagira said that everyone on the train except him acted as if this was a normal occurrence, which sounded so Tokyo to me.

Nagira was accompanied by two others, and they all wore cowboy hats—Nagira said he was “born in Asakusa, and grew up in Mexico”—not really true, but maybe a way for him to say how influenced he was by country music. He sang in deep and thick voice black humored songs about subjects such as how expensive funerals are, pinkie-less gangsters and a little girl playing with her older brother's bag of 'white powder'. Nagira is apparently one of the few guitarists in Japan who is adept at Carter Family picking, something I'd never heard of before, which Wiki explains as: “a style of fingerstyle guitar named for Maybelle Carter of the Carter Family's distinctive style of rhythm guitar in which the melody is played on the bass strings, usually low E, A, and D while rhythm strumming continues above, on the treble strings, high E, B, and G.”

In addition to being an underground folk singer, Nagira is an actor, TV personality, comic speaker and essayist. He's also a friend of Asakusa Jinta vocalist and bassist Osho, who Nagira said he often scolds, for reasons not elaborated. I doubt he criticizes Asakusa Jinta about their stage performance, though, because they're terrific.

I've written enough about these guys, in my opinion one of Japan's greatest musical entertainers now, but their show at the O-West was again excellent, explosive, totally involving. They'd put up a huge banner on the back wall, and on the sides of the stage two paper lanterns. The show was to mark the sale of a DVD about their UK tour. And Osho said that the band has been banned from playing in most places in the town from which they get their name, Asakusa—he said the cops are called even if they just set up their instruments outside; maybe some town folks don't like their loudness—but that they found an old hall in the center of Asakusa where the elderly do karaoke now, and they're playing there on April 3. I'll be there.

Tokyo Pinsalocks, Noodles, Kinoco Hotel At The Que

2010-03-08T03:37:00.000-08:00

Sunday was girl band night at the Club Que, but the three featured groups had little in common other than that they were all girls.

First up was Kinoco Hotel, AKA "mushroom ryokan" (...OK, not really), a quartet in red, Sgt. Pepper-like coats with miniskirts, whose songs were a throw-back to 60's Group Sounds, surf rock, and kayou hits. They were spirited (both the vocalist and lead guitar dashed into the audience section on separate occasions), skilled at their instruments, and looked great, with short, sharply-cut hair. The singer had a voice like a Golden-gai bar mama's; she called the other band members "employees" while they called her "general manager", of the mushroom hotel.

They seemed to have lots of fans, and the word from the Japan Times is that they're in talks to play at high-profile festivals, so maybe they're rising stars. Personally, I felt the band would benefit from some sort of extra ingredient--the retro 60's thing has been done by others, and wild stage action isn't new either.

Band #2 was Tokyo Pinsalocks, and though I remembered I liked them in previous appearances, this time I was a bit shocked how good they were. Had they changed their style, in a perfect way? Their guitarist quit a few years back, and they've replaced the guitar band sound with this driving, electronics-heavy musical creation of Mac samples, synthesizers, bass and drums. The bassist, in particular, was super-cool, tall as a volleyball player, with two-toned long hair in black and blond. She plucked out repeated, effect-laden parts wearing an expression that was at once expressionless and nirvana. The trio's loud, rainbow outfits were also dazzling on stage. Here's a recent performance by them (though, as always, it loses something in the transfer):

I only caught a few songs of the last band, Noodles. They were great--vocalist Yoko is a Tokyo indie scene demigoddess--but I was pretty tired of the event by then. The Que is a lovely live house, but it's far from the most comfortable spot when crowded, with no space to move. It has to be a band I'm crazy about for me to want to risk a sold-out gig at the Que, but I'm old and jaded.

Japan Kuruu Special At Club Phase

2010-03-06T06:14:00.000-08:00

I remember a few years back a Korean all-girl band played in Tokyo, and even though their show was excellent, they looked unhappy later, because they thought the audience didn't enjoy the show that much. And I tried to tell them that wasn't true, the crowd did have a good time, but Tokyo audiences tend to be on the shy and quiet side, and so their enthusiasm might not have been obvious. I don't think they were convinced.

I was reminded of this episode watching Japan Kuruu Special for the second time, this time at the Club Phase in Takadanobaba. Kuruu is an energetic, lively, comedic Osaka band. They do things to an excess, including their huge hair-do's, and the non-stop stage action. It's great entertainment, and it seemed to me hard to imagine people who wouldn't like it, but the Club Phase gig revealed that those people do exist.

There was an insider-outsider thing going on, something I've often seen at live houses. At the front near the stage were the inside people, almost all girls, a fun bunch that sang and danced along to the songs, and occasionally got into a sort of joking, non-violent slam dance. But a few steps behind them, toward the back of the small hall were the outsiders, who didn't know Kuruu, and when I glanced back their expressions varied between mild amusement to apathy. I can't read minds, and possibly some of them enjoyed the Kuruu show, but it did seem like they were biding their time until the more 'serious' bands they came to see hit the stage.

Kuruu are outsiders in any case in Tokyo. They talk and sing in the Osakan dialect. And they have different ideas of what good conversation is—inserting joking exchanges in chats is important for Osakans, but that's not necessarily the case for Tokyoites. So, at one point, Kuruu's vocalist said they would continue playing the same part all night unless everyone in the audience sang along—then, a few moments later, added, “that's a joke; don't take everything we say seriously.” The implication being that Tokyo people don't have a sense of humor.

You also often hear that not a lot of Tokyoites are originally from Tokyo, but that the city is populated by people from all over Japan, whereas most Osakans are really from Osaka. I sometimes wonder whether the regional origins of many Tokyoites account for the shyness of live house audiences, though this is a pretty underdeveloped hypothesis.

***

This was only my second time to go to the Phase, and I only have dim recollection of my last visit there, probably about five years ago. I don't know much about the town of Takadanobaba either, but I enjoyed the walk from the train station to the club. It's a retro town, like time stopped in 1970, with lots of neon signs in Japanese fonts you don't see that much anymore. A major neon advertisement on the wall of a sinister-looking, dark building was for 'student loans', which I assumed wasn't what you'd usually associate with the term, but instead high interest loans for young students who overspent during their first time away from home, and which the parents are expected to repay. It's a big college student town with many schools, right between sin city Shinjuku and Saitama residents' metropolis Ikebukuro, and also one train stop away from Shin-Okubo, where you get the sensation you are in some other Asian city other than Tokyo, maybe Seoul or Bangkok. The name means the horseback riding grounds of Takata (apparently older Tokyoites pronounce it, presumably correctly, as TakaTanobaba), because that's what was there in the Edo era.

Umekichi & Rakugo At Hare-Mame

2010-02-24T04:41:00.000-08:00

Not sure what it was but when Umekichi came on stage in her light pink kimono and started a traditional dance, my eyes started watering up, and they didn't dry during the first few songs. It happens sometimes—perfected art makes me emotional. And Umekichi's dance—confident, flowing, graceful, and bearing the weight of centuries of tradition—was indeed beautiful.

I've written before about Umekichi, a singer of old popular tunes and geisha songs. The last time I saw her was in an auditorium, but this time the venue was more intimate, a live house in Daikanyama with the unusual name of Haretara Sora Ni Mame Maite, which means, 'if the sun comes out, toss beans at the sky', apparently a line from a poem.

It's a small hall with aboriginal-looking illustrations of branches and vines on the orange walls, and in the back is an elevated stage with a red umbrella where audience members can sit on the floor. The crowd was a mature one, mostly over thirty, many gray hairs, and 'around-forty' ladies who drank draft beer. But there was also one little girl who shouted a big 'Hai!' when Umekichi asked if anyone had come specifically to see her.

Umekichi's show was like entertainment from another era, less self-important about the music, more of an effort to make it feel like a casual gathering, even though the professionalism was obvious. The songs, accompanied by the shamisen and the sparse beats of the taiko, were mostly over in minute or two, and the singer filled the rest of the time with talk, elegant, humorous, sometimes mildly flirtatious. Umekichi often does her sets at rakugo theaters, and her act reminded me of the spirit of that storytelling art: be an artisan of words, giving it your best effort to put the audience at ease and to get them to have fun.

***

The event also featured a genuine rakugo artist, in addition to a woman who played what might be called koto jazz. The rakugo guy was the 28-year-old Kichibo Katsura, a practitioner of Osaka-style rakugo. I'm no expert, but it seems that rakugo has always been big in Tokyo and is making a come-back in Osaka. Rakugo is a spoken art so knowledge of Japanese is probably needed to enjoy it, but if you know the language, it's great entertainment. It's uncanny the way that when reciting a comedic rakugo tale, just one man in kimono sitting on a cushion can play multiple roles and seamlessly switch between one character to the next solely with a turn of the head, a slight change in expression, an adjustment of the voice. Kichibo had that down. But I think it's a deep art—how could it not be when you're expected to keep an audience interested and laughing with just your words—and I got the feeling that to really master it, to learn to draw the crowd into the tale and to lead them to that ultimate, sublime rakugo punch-line, is something only decades would bestow.

8 Favorite Japanese CDs of 2009

2010-01-25T05:45:00.000-08:00

Alas, at the moment I can't think of a nice, round '10' favorite albums for 2009, and can only come up with eight. I'm not sure if that's because it wasn't a good year, or I just wasn't looking hard enough (always a possibility). Still, there were some bright spots—my two favorite albums of the year were also a couple of the best in the last few years, for one thing.

#8. Soutaiseiriron
Hi-Fi Anatomia

For reasons explained in a previous post, I'm not a huge fan of the Soutaiseiriron's activities as a band. I don't like it that they've imposed a media black-out on their image. Maybe I'm traditional, but I want more than just music from favorite bands: also desired are their words, their visuals and fashion, the whole package. So, the 'faceless Soutaiseiriron' falls short for me. But, judging solely by their music, it does appear that Hi-Fi Anatomia is one of the better albums of 2009. The melodies are unfailingly catchy, and then there are the vocals of Etsuko Yakushimaru—soft, sleepy, yet also emotional and sexy, a wavering desert mirage voice. If these guys can make a few more albums as good as this, I may have to forgive their tiresome image control policy...

#7. Perfume
[The Right Triangle Album]

Moving along to about the most un-indie Japanese group one could come up with, a trio of dancing girls who don't even write their own songs, still, it's impossible for me to dislike the effervescent, bright plastic sound of Perfume. Their latest album has its share of skippable fillers, but “Love the World”, and, especially, “Dream Fighter” and the finale “Negai” are great songs. One interesting thing about Perfume is how wholesomely inspirational some of their lyrics are. “Dream Fighter”, for example, is a song about striving to do your best: “It must be evidence we are living that we take this endless trip to seek perfection” goes one line. Perfume's brilliant young producer Yasutaka Nakata (also of Capsule) is responsible for the trio's lyrics, and it makes me wonder whether lines like those were commercially-inspired—being the sort of stimulating lines that young consumers like to see accompanying appealing melodic hooks—or whether it reflects his own feelings. Probably, both. (The album title is an image of a right triangle, so I'm calling it the Right Triangle Album.)

#6. Hoover's Ooover
A-gata Sentimental

Hoover's Ooover was probably my biggest discovery of 2009. Well...actually, I knew of them since at least 2004 or so, but it took me fully five years until I figured them out. And repeated listens were required of past songs like “Palette Knife”, “Propane Gas” and “Rival Wa Rickenbacker” before I recognized them as classics. Even now, it's hard to put into exact words the attraction of Hoover—some combination of Masami Iwasawa's Literature-conscious lyrics, the distinct emotionalism of her singing, and the driving rock. Moving on to this album: I still don't really get it. With the exception of the exhilarating, quick-paced “Mamimumemo” (for which the band made an animation video), I haven't found a tune as good as their past stuff including the three mentioned above. But, considering the long time it took me to turn on to Hoover in the first place, I'm reserving judgment and putting it in as a favorite, on the assumption that I'll eventually see the light.

#5. Nirgilis
RGB

Combine an 80's New Wave-like synthesizer pop sound with a powerful singer who seems to dive into an ocean of feeling with every phrase of a song, and you get one of my favorite groups, Nirgilis. Their latest, RGB, isn't one of those albums you finish listening to on fire with the fresh realization of what an album can be; it feels more like a collection of singles; but they're excellent singles, including “Rainy Day”, “Koi no Resistance” and “Update”. As with their other work, RGB is a pick-me-up sort of album.

#4. Japan-Kuruu-Special
This Is Namennayo

This Osakan punk quartet KO-ed me twice: the first time when I saw their frenetic live show at the Loft with Asakusa Jinta, and the second, when I listened to their album, which I hurried to buy after the Loft gig. What makes their high-energy but pretty ordinary punk rock special is the vocals of Junzo, a tomcat voice spouting lines all in Osaka dialect, his words tapering off at the end like flaming jet plane tracks. I've only listened to this album a few times, but I'm going to be punk rock about the decision and immediately declare it my fourth favorite of last year.

#3. Quinka, With a Yawn
[Su]

Number three is by one of my recent big favorites, Quinka, With A Yawn, the solo unit of Michiko Aoki. Quinka's Field Recordings was my best album of 2008; [Su] is great too, but it's lower down on the list because most of the songs are new versions of previously released tunes. Still, this is an album that puts on vivid display the poetry of Quinka songs and the growing, touching expressiveness of Aoki's singing. I particularly like “Harunire”, which I wrote about recently, and “Story”, a ruby of a song that comes at you like dream music during a twilight nap.

#2. Frenesi
Cupra

Cupra took me by surprise. I'd been a fan for a while of Frenesi, another one-woman unit, but even so this album far exceeded my expectations. It doesn't sound like anything Frenesi's done before; it doesn't sound like anything I've heard before. Frenesi takes a big gamble with these songs—everything is on the verge of just not working, the vocals almost, but not quite, too child-like, soft, out-of-tune, the music almost, but not quite, too silly, forced, the lyrics on the verge of being senseless and self-absorbed, but in the end, not. Instead, by taking things about as far as they can go, Cupra ends up with songs that walk in new territories ...Unless you don't have the ears for this sort of music, and something about it makes it fall flat for you. That's Frenesi's gamble—this isn't music that will appeal to everyone.

My favorite songs are “Kasou Kako (Virtual Past)”—like a children's TV song that mutated into an alternative hit; “Sky Bus Tokyo”—wherein our heroine sings place names, 'Chidorigafuchi, Kasumigaseki, Tokyo-eki, Marunouchi' etc. to underwater kingdom background music; “Watashi no Yes-man”—a bossa nova piece that seems to hide within it something icy and tragic; and “Lowitz Arc”—like an unexpected karaoke gem in a far frontier disco bar.

#1. Asakusa Jinta
Setsuna

I dig Asakusa Jinta's vision: the way they unearth old and obscure Japanese sounds, mix them together with modern ingredients like punk and rockabilly, and end up with something totally new; the engaging theatricality of their performances, the bright, hipster costumes, the dancing horns, the waving banners; the retrospective, Showa-feel of many of their melodies and lyrics, that nevertheless speak to us, music lovers of the 21st century.

Their latest album, going even further than their previous, dazzling Sky Zero, establishes them as hard-working, talented inventors of new sounds. Setsuna ranges from a tune out of a fuzzy pre-war radio (“Junpuu Yakyoku”) to a frenzied drum-and-horn cabaret number (“Grand Cabaret”) to a ballad that could accompany some energy-overflowing 60's Japanese youth movie (“Star”) to an epic, deep rock anthem (the title track) to my favorite single of the year, “Tokyo Sabaku De Jidanda”, an unstoppable musical orgy of fast, exploding bass notes, far-gone screams of horns and guitar, and in the background a super-cool but insistent Japanese male singing about the Tokyo sabaku, the metropolitan desert.

Amazingly, it all holds together. And it tells a story, purely musical, without plot, about what Asakusa Jinta is.

Setsuna is a Buddhist word that means the briefest moment in time. The 54 minutes of the album is also not long, like the dream on a spring night. But it's vivid.

***

ONE EXTRA:

I only found out until after I created this list that the girl solo unit formerly known as Hazel Nuts Chocolate, now named HNC, released a new album in December called Cult. A few listens and I'm fighting the urge to possibly prematurely declare this new work a masterpiece—but wow, is it good...After more listens, it might turn out to be one of my top three favorites of 2009. Yuppa, the HNC girl, has jettisoned her image as a children's picture book-made-into-music type of composer, and transformed herself into techno-addicted, random-sampling-manic (meows, 'uno, two, tres, four'), sexually-sometimes-sorta-explicit ('all day long walk a girl/with a little lips/little crack/little fxxk/every little girl things' goes one line in the great song “Girl Things”), edgy-cover-art artist. “Girl Things”, in particular, I love, with its attractive melody, and the feel that it may be one of the first steps in a new movement, of songs written by girls, for girls, about girl things.

Contrary Parade, Ashigaru Youth, Plectrum At Que

2010-01-13T07:47:00.000-08:00

Strange how standing on the concrete floor of the Que can feel sofa-like, at a pal's pad, when there's good music.

And there was, including Contrary Parade. Their drummer always sends me invite emails to their shows when they come in from Osaka. Now they're all moving to Tokyo, so I'll be able to see more of them. Contrary Parade sounds to me post-Waffles, which for its part is probably a post-advantage Lucy band. I like the way the three girls at the front of the stage (they're all girls except the drummer) giggle elegantly during breaks between songs.

Ashigaru Youth, also from Osaka, featured two male vocalists/guitarists with full cheeks, double chins, and round stomachs (photo at the top). 'Ashigaru' means a samurai foot soldier, but its literal meaning is 'light-footed', which may be ironic in this case. But the duo sang beautifully, and the band's power pop was pleasing. Their girl fans were lined up in front of the stage, dancing along to their songs. I may have been affected by a beer and a glass and a half of whiskey and soda by then, and though it might have partly been flattery to the venue, even so I was touched when they said they've dreamed about playing at Shimokitazawa's Club Que and were therefore very excited to be there.

Wrapping up the event was Plectrum, a great band I wrote a lot about when this blog was getting started. I eased off on the reports on them after a while even though I continued to see them, just because I'd said so much already. But seeing them tonight reminded me that when they start playing it can be space warp-like and I'm in a place where time is filled with pleasurable music action. I remember why I was so crazy about them. Fourteen years as a band, and they were probably good to start with. And it feels very worthwhile that they are making music like this. Times like that, the real message I want to send is: there was something there.

Japan-Kuruu-Special & Asakusa Jinta At The Loft

2009-12-19T01:04:00.000-08:00

I knew Japan-Kuruu-Special was a band worth checking out when I took a look at their website, the funnest I've seen in a while.

It parodies a sports tabloid, with eye-catching primary colors. Where the breathless, huge tabloid headline would go is an announcement that Kuruu is going on a national tour. The cover art features four bosozoku-looking guys with gigantic pompadours and afros, astride an old Japanese automobile shooting out from the Rising Sun (and there's a fineprint in the corner saying, 'Note: We're not actually bosozoku [biker gangs]).

Their profile page is headlined, “Not Again, Osaka! Japan's Most Powerful Violent Music Organization Is Formed In A City-Run Slum Housing Project”. In the corner is a picture with the caption, “The Osaka city-run housing project where the incident occurred”. Taking up all the left part of the page is, as if introducing secret pictures of notorious gangsters, another headline saying, “EXCLUSIVE: Pictures of the four members!!” The drummer, whose afro is bigger than his face, wears one of those ominous surgical masks that bikers are said to wear with a red line cutting through the middle.

Crazy Osakans!

Anyway, Kuruu was on tour and playing with Asakusa Jinta at the Shinjuku Loft, so I headed over. It had been a while since I last walked through Kabukicho on a Friday night, and I lapped up the town's erotic, drunken, seedy, money-hungry energy, the hostesses in their dresses, the hosts with their long locks and shiny suits, the real and phony gangsters. How many other towns are there like this in the world, this Far Eastern Sodom? Maybe it's the recession, or maybe it's a reflection of Tokyo's increased internationalization, but several touts invited even me, an obvious gaijin, for an evening of flirtatious conversation in cabaret clubs. Ignoring them, I walked down the stairs to the Loft in a building whose every other tenant appears to be a girl bar or red light establishment of one sort or another.

Kuruu lived up to their “exclusive” photos: they did have monstrous poofy pompadours and afros. They were like a cross between the Ramones and Carol-era Eikichi Yazawa. The singer, Junzo, stood nearly the whole time at the center with one leg permanently on the stage speaker, and he went through every cliched rock gesture there was, but since he did a new one on every single beat, twirling the mike stand on one beat, doing a clenched fist the salute the next, kicking the air the next, etc, it was great fun to watch. In front of them in the audience section was spirited slam dancing, including a few guys in business clothes, maybe letting off some steam after a hard day at work. This was a good band—Junzo said between songs, in a joke-filled, earthy Osaka dialect, that they're aiming for the Budokan. Who knows whether they will make it there, but these guys might become popular.

***

It had been a few weeks since I last saw Asakusa Jinta and when I heard Osho slapping the bass while setting up for the show, those precise sonic explosions, it came back to me what this band was all about. His bass comes down like bomb runs, destroying our day's banalities and boredom. And the band's music, a beautiful fusion of hard rock and horns and old Japanese popular music, illuminates something inside me I'd forgotten about.

Their latest album and title track are called Setsuna, which is a Japanese word meaning the briefest moment of time. It's actually a Buddhist term—according to trusty Wikipedia, it comes from the Sanskrit word ksana, and if you divide one day by 30, and then divide that again by 30, and then divide that by 60, and finally divide that by 120, you get a setsuna. So one literal school of thought says that a setsuna is 1/75 of a second, but another denies this, saying that you can't measure it.

The period of time watching Asakusa Jinta is always a pleasurable one. These guys are professionals of entertainment, proud shokunin, artisans, of music, and they are committed to making the show fun for the audience. The 30 minute shows like these are dense in content, but go too fast, though maybe that's because this is another sort of setsuna, just a blip in the long flow of time.

Goodbye, The Capris; Fukui Surf Scene

2009-12-11T23:33:00.001-08:00

Until quite recently, I had no idea there was surfing in Fukui prefecture. In fact, it never really occurred to me that people surf on the Sea of Japan side. Which is ridiculous if you think about it: if there are good waves and a beach, surfers will come.

Anyway, what awoke me to the realization there's surfing in Fukui was the discovery of a great surf pop-punk band called Browny Circus from that prefecture. They were one of those groups whose CD I bought but didn't listen much to, until that one moment, when, during a random listen, suddenly I got pounded by their brilliance. I remember when. I was walking in LA, listening to their album SURF-TRIP! on the iPod, when the song “Ride On” came on. When it was over, I repeated it. And then again. And again...

An energetic but fairly run-of-the-mill 2-minute pop-punk song, the thing about it that got my attention was the vocals. It was an unusual female voice that was sweet, nasal and kid-like. But there was also electricity that ran through it—it tapped into some rock current. It was a cherry coke voice, spiked with some rum or vodka.

When I got back to Tokyo, I bought their other albums, and found great tunes like “Super Surf Jet Girl”, “Happy Days”, “Summer Beach” and a nice cover of Sadistic Mika Band's “Time Machine ni Onegai”. I also learned that while Browny Circus had disbanded, the vocalist Kaori had formed another group in Fukui called the Capris. I daydreamed about traveling to Fukui, about a four hour train trip northwest of Tokyo, to see them perform in their local scene. Fukui wasn't a strange place for me, in any case. I'd been there one winter, and had one of my most memorable seafood dinners ever—fresh shellfish popping over a fire, the meatiest crabs...

I wanted to see what Fukui surfers and surf rockers were like, and the characteristics of their scene. What was a Fukui live house like? Did the musicians talk in a Fukui dialect, stretching out vowels at the end of words in that distinctive way? Mostly though, I wanted to see what Kaori and her new band were like on stage.

But, alas...a few weeks ago I read on their website a short notice saying they've decided to call it quits. Now the website itself is gone. My Fukui pilgrimage to see the local surf punk wasn't meant to be. Unless...perhaps Kaori will one day form yet another band?

***

By the way, one thing I've been pondering recently is that fact that so many great Japanese girl rock bands and groups led by girl vocalists were formed in the 90's, and what was behind that band boom. Just listing my favorites, this was the period of Browny Circus, the sublime Teeny Frahoop, Mix Market, Ketchup Mania, the Automatics, and the genius Supersnazz. What were the factors that came into a perfect alignment to lead to the birth of bands like those? A major thing is there must have been a shift in consciousness that made it normal, acceptable, and cool for girls to play together in a rock band. How did that happen? (And I'm not saying there weren't girl bands before the 90's, the idea of them just seems to have become more normal in the 90's. Am I wrong?) K.O.G.A. Records' Mr. Koga must have been one big impetus too: all of the bands I listed above except Supersnazz have recorded on K.O.G.A. I don't know how many of that label's CDs I own.

What's the status of girl rock bands now, nearly at the end of the turn-of-the-century decade? Honestly speaking, I haven't discovered that many good ones recently. Sometimes I wonder if (for reasons I haven't worked out), rock in Japan is reverting to be a guy thing. Or am I missing awesome great girl bands I should know about?

Watching advantage Lucy Live 5,000 Miles Away

2009-11-27T14:35:00.001-08:00

How remarkable it is that you can now watch a live Tokyo rock show 5,000 miles away on the internet. From LA, on a vacation, I caught advantage Lucy and Vasallo Crab 75's Munekyun arpeggio show. Sitting cross-legged like a Buddhist monk, I meditated on the MacBook plopped on a stack of futon, that beamed in live music from Club Que in Shimokitazawa.

The picture quality from the single, stationary video camera was basic: the performers looked like little dolls in a toy box, their expressions indistinct. The stage lights melted and trickled down as colored boxes of pixels. But the sound was surprisingly good, crisp, and giving a feel for what it must be like to be at the Que. Also, this time, unlike when I watched Munekyun TV, the signals were stable, and the webcast never froze—I'm not sure if that's because the organizers fixed things or it was because I had a better set-up here in LA (which would be ironic if I can watch a webcast better 5,000 miles away than 3 miles or so away from my Tokyo home...).

What's missing, of course, is that feeling of being in the live house. The huge noise that envelops you. The perfume and sweat of strangers. The wonder of seeing favorite musicians up close, creating music for that moment that will never be repeated again. Maybe one day technology will find a way to reproduce even those things...

I have to confess I only watched about an hour and a half of the show, because it began at 2:30 AM LA time, and I was wiped out by 4. The portion I saw was fantastic: the concept was to have continual performances on the stage, without breaks between bands, and instead having new musicians walk on to play as each song ended. The guest musicians were all people that were friends with the late Lucy and VC75 guitarist Takayuki Fukumura, whose memory this annual event celebrates, people like Three Berry Icecream's Mayumi Ikemizu, the Primrose's Keiji Matsui and Round Table's Katsutoshi Kitagawa.

Here's an excellent review of the show from someone who actually went. This person put into words something I've always felt, but, in one of those forehead-slapping realizations, in 400-plus posts I don't think I ever wrote down (though I hope the spirit of this has seeped through to the surface in my stories...):

What made the performance really really special, aside from the guest musicians, was how the two bands engaged the audience. This is probably the one thing I love about Japanese bands, indie or not. They make an effort to let you now that hey, you exist and we know you’re standing right in front of us now, enjoying our music. It’s a real interactive, human experience that I don’t get with most of the Western bands, who while enjoy themselves on stage seem to be going through the motions of performing yet another time.

These webcast shows are neat because they embody musical freedom. Anyone with an internet connection anywhere in the world can tune in for free. They are the opposite of strictly supervised, exclusive, expensive corporate music events. Until the picture quality improves enough that I can see the performers well, I probably won't be watching many webcasts of artists that I'm not already fans of. But I have a feeling things will get better fast. And in the meantime, I hope bands continue with this great idea.

No-Show Report: Zunou Keisatsu

2009-11-25T15:06:00.000-08:00

Brain Police, also known as “the radical protest band” Zunou Keisatsu, is near the zenith of the celestial list of legendary Japanese rock groups, so when I heard they had reunited and were doing a national tour, I was intrigued. But, for a variety of reasons I ended up not making it to the Tokyo shows, a major one being that the tickets were pricey, about three times the cost of regular live house gigs. Did anyone go?

Zunou Keisatsu's legend and notoriety stem mainly from their involvement with radical leftist politics in the 70's, and the banning of their first two records because of the controversial lyrical content. As Julian Cope writes:

They were formed in the late ‘60s by vocalist and guitarist Panta, who had formerly played with festival obscurities Peanut Butter, Mojo and Spartacus Bunt, and Brain Police songs were all built around the guitarist’s fist-in-the-air people-at-the-barricades lyrics. Taking their name from the early Mothers of Invention song ‘Who Are The Brain Police?’ the band survived long enough to make six LPs and continued until the end of 1975. However, there are two obvious peaks in their career, the first being their rousing duo performance at the GENYA anti-airport protest festival, when Panta and conga player Toshi shared a bill with Blues Creation, Masauki Takayanagi’s free rock New Direction For The Arts, and Keiji Haino’s Lost Aaraaff. Performances of the songs ‘Pick Up Your Gun’ and the seven-minute chant ‘World Revolutionary War Declaration’ received such a positive response from the crowd that the nihilism of closing act Lost Aaraaff was greeted with large rocks hurled from the Sanrizuka fields.

One thing I wonder about this band is the extent of its interaction with the Japanese Red Army. There's the matter of their first album containing a song called "Red Army Soldier's Poem", though, in an interview with the great Jrawk.com site, Panta says the song comes from a Bertolt Brecht poem about the Red Army in Germany, “but politics in Japan were so sensitive that nobody bothered to pay close enough attention to find that out.”

OK...but then Zunou Keisatsu's website also says that in 1972 the guys performed at a memorial event for the three Japanese Red Army members who were killed at the Lod Airport massacre (is this a mistake? I thought that two of the three perpetrators died, while the other was arrested). A few questions come up for me: did they sympathize with the purpose of the event? If not, was this just an instance of musicians playing at a show because it was happening? What did they think of the 26 people killed by the Red Army trio?

And, moving on to the 21st century, what's this about Panta and ex-Red Army leader Fusako Shigenobu exchanging letters and writing songs together?

I'm assuming that this all reflects how Revolution was in the air in early-70's Japan, that Panta liked the idea of a worldwide communist uprising, but that he was first and foremost a musician rather than an activist. Was it all radical chic? But I am curious about what he thinks about the legacy of the Red Army and his verdict on people like Shigenobu. I haven't dived deeply into the literature on all this; I just read some stuff online. So maybe the answers are out there...

Anyway, the show. It was two weekend nights at a place called The Doors, but the tickets were 6,000 yen (about $60), way more than the usual price of around 2,000. And I thought that leftist bands were supposed to ask for donations—kanpa (short for the Russian word 'kampaniya'), so that the workers attending their shows pay as they are able? However, as a friend said, 'you need money to fund the revolution,' I guess. Plus, the shows were sold out or nearly so, and, with exceptions for those by favorite bands I generally try to avoid sold-out gigs because they really pack you in Japan at those events and you start having flashbacks of rush-hour Keio Line trains... If anyone caught them, I'd love to hear if they lived up to the hype.

(A final pedantic note: the Japanese for 'brain' of Brain Police has been spelled both zuno, and zunou. The problem is that the last O in zuno is a long vowel—you stretch it out when you say it. The formal, academic way to write it would be to put a macron, a horizontal line, above the O. Most rock 'n' roll types can't be bothered, so they spell it Zuno, macron-less. I like the way it's rendered in kana, with a U, after the No character—that seems to give a good feel for the pronunciation.)

Munekyun TV - advantage Lucy & Vasallo Crab 75

2009-11-15T04:58:00.000-08:00

Did anyone see this?

It was a live internet broadcast of advantage Lucy and Vasallo Crab 75, ahead of the Nov. 26 Munekyun Arpeggio show, and for me it was unstable at first, the screen froze often, but toward the end it became smoother, and I had no trouble seeing their performance of a song that Fukumura-kun wrote, which was fantastic.

And the Nov. 26 show is going to be broadcast on the internet too!

What a great idea...though one day we're going to laugh about how much trouble it was to watch these things, and the young will wonder why it was such a big deal for us to do something as simple as broadcast something online to the world...

Advantage Lucy TV

2009-11-12T04:08:00.000-08:00

The sixth anniversary of the passing of advantage Lucy and Vasallo Crab 75 guitarist Takayuki Fukumura is approaching, and in Japanese Buddhism it's an important occasion, so the show this year on Nov. 26 is going to be extra special. The bands are even planning an internet TV event this Sunday to get prepared for the event, called Munekyun, which in a previous post I described as "a favorite word of Fukumura's—it's that feeling you get when a cute or lovely thing bulls-eyes your heart".

So, if you are a fan, and understand Japanese, or don't but want to see it anyway, tune into this site here, at 9PM on Sunday the 15th for fans in Japan, or 10AM Sunday for those who love Lucy in Brazil, or 7PM for the true believers in Indonesia, or 1PM for the smitten in Sweden, or 4AM for the sleepless in California, etc. etc.

I don't know if it will work in all these places, but I hope it will where you are.

Mom & Kid Pop Show At Mori No Terrace

2009-10-18T00:03:00.000-07:00

I doubt many people will ever make it to the Mori no Terrace in western Tokyo, but I like its concept so I'll write about it anyway.

The 'Terrace in the Forest' is a two-story home in the city of Chofu, about a ten-minute walk from Sengawa station, and the ground floor living room with a grand piano is used for mini-concerts. It's in one of those neighborhoods in suburban Tokyo that amaze you with their quiet and peacefulness if all you've seen of the capital is its crowds and bustle. The Terrace is reached walking down stone steps amidst trees.

I was there to see Three Berry Icecream, the band of singer and accordionist Mayumi Ikemizu. Unfamiliar with the area, it looks me longer than I expected to get to Sengawa: from Shinjuku, I first got on the semi special express to Meidaimae, then took the express to Chitose-karasuyama, and finally boarded the local for a one stop ride to Sengawa. Wonder if there was an easier, faster way? The living room was already packed; but I could watch the show from above the room, through a window with wooden railings. Later on, I sat and listened to the other performers in a Japanese room, with tatami mats. The brown and dark orange wood, the trees outside, and the incent smell of a burning mosquito coil reminded me of when I was a kid.

The show's concept was to be a music concert a mom could bring her baby to, and there were lots of little kids running around and exploring the garden. Songs were punctuated by the screams and cries of the children. On the pamphlet for the event was a note saying that “there is a diaper-changing and breast-feeding corner in the Japanese room next to the entrance.”

This isn't where cutting-edge music is made; but I still like it. I like it that people have made their home into a little music hall, performing music locally. And it's good to see people continuing with music, and not dropping away after their twenties, like so many sadly do.

***

An after-show party was held in a funky old yakitori joint near the train station, and at the table next to ours I saw a guy meeting his fiancee's parents. He was doing all the right things, and the parents seemed to approve: he sat on his knees in a seiza style; he spoke formally and with respect; and he asked the dad for advice. But...this was happening in a yakitori joint? And all four were wearing casual clothes? There were some mysteries for me, but then again, I was only eavesdropping...

"Sorry for the inconvenience."

Advantage Lucy & D.W. Nicols At The Que

2009-10-10T23:36:00.000-07:00

I've been curious about a band called D.W. Nicols, mainly because of the name. It must refer to C.W. Nicol, the Wales-born writer and environmentalist, who lives up in the hills of Kurohime, Nagano Prefecture. After adventuring in the Arctic and Ethiopia, Nicol came to Japan to learn karate, wrote a book about whaling, befriended authors like the late Takeshi Kaiko, and is now a Japanese citizen. Are these guys fans? I tried to find an explanation of their name, but was unsuccessful.

D.W. Nicols was playing with advantage Lucy at the Que, so I had a chance to see them. A two-guy, two-girl quartet, they were unusual in that the girls made up the rhythm section, while the two guys took care of the guitars. Their overall sound was blues-rock and country-rock. The songs were well written, the playing skilled, and the lead vocalist guy had a good voice and was an engaging character. But, in spite of all that, they didn't leave a deep impression with me. Maybe it's because they're still a young band.

Advantage Lucy were great. They're an innovative band, always trying novel things, without sacrificing their melodious pop goodness—a new song they played that night used not one, but two melodicas! There's assurance in the way they perform, a product of a decade-plus career plus talent. Some of the old songs they played, like “Citrus”, “Kaze ni Azukete” and “Memai” I've listened to so many times that they feel like a part of my body. Hearing them played live reminds me they're part of me, the way its pumping makes me remember the heart, or the stomach asserts its presence after a great meal.

I heard Lucy vocalist Aiko say once that, although it may appear so, she doesn't actually cry during songs, because it ruins her voice, and she thinks about other things to avoid it. But now I'm not sure if she was being entirely honest. At the Que show, during those old songs, her eyes became noticeably red, even seen from the back of the crowd where I was. She has also said that she knows a melody that guitarist Ishizaka-san writes is good when it makes her cry.

***

During the two shows, at the front-center of the crowd was a petite Japanese man, who hopped manically during the shows, the height and speed of his jumps appearing to increase in line with his excitement level. He stood out in a relatively staid audience, and there must have been a few funny looks directed his way, but I liked the guy. I dreamed he didn't actually exist, but was some spirit of rock 'n' roll, absorbing the great music and becoming energized by it.

GREAT SONGS: Quinka, with a Yawn's "Harunire"

2009-09-20T23:29:00.000-07:00

Just one line from the Quinka, with a Yawn song has gripped me. It's a simple line. Vocalist Michiko Aoki sings, in the [Su] version of “Harunire”:

Anata wo shiawase ni shitai.

Translated to, not very poetically, “I want to make you happy.”

Or maybe the nuance is more like, “I want to bring happiness into your life.”

It's the way she voices the words. She takes them slow, filling them with emotion over a dozen seconds. They make you feel like you are eavesdropping on some scene of an outpouring of love that you're not supposed to be witnessing.

And there's also a whiff of the radical about the line, because this is something that usually, in Japan, you'd expect a man to say to a woman when proposing. She's going against conventions—it's as if a woman is proposing to a man.

I was talking with a friend about Quinka, with a Yawn, the solo unit of Aoki, and he said Quinka wasn't his thing because the music is just too pure, too unspoiled and unbending, and his adult taste was for music that was more crooked. I could understand the view, but I like the purity. Aoki has a distinct singing voice that may take some getting used to, but I've found that the direct emotions of the singing have always won me over.

This “Harunire”, which means 'Japanese elm', is the second recorded version, the first having made its appearance in an earlier album called Micro. I have to confess that I overlooked that version—the melody was pleasant, but it just didn't have the emotional impact of this latest version in Quinka's new album, [Su]. (The version in the YouTube video above is the first one, from Micro.)

It seems that Aoki has grown a lot as a singer. Or, maybe more accurately, she's gotten so she's able to express emotions more deeply in songs. This is just speculation, but I wonder if Aoki's marriage with singer Harco has helped with this—her singing in the two's combined work, Harqua, is also outstanding. The couple are environmentalists, and they collaborate on various shows and projects with 'eco' themes. From what I've heard, they are pretty adamant about the cause. Maybe the 'purity' that my friend mentioned makes her dive deep into the eco thing, and also lets her sing in a breathtakingly direct fashion about love. As an impure adult, I almost envy the steadfastness.

One other thing about the [Su] version is that many lines she not so much sings as she declares musically, and that highlights the poetry of the words. The lines leading up to the 'I want to make you happy' climax are especially beautiful:

Dorodarake no watashi, nagasanaide
(Don't wash away, mud-splattered me)

Toki ni ame yo
(Rain of time)

Chiisa na ai wo
(This little love)

By the way, the album title, [Su], is Japanese for 'nest', but 'su' can also mean 'plain', or 'unadorned', perhaps reflecting that this is an unplugged type of album, containing both new songs and gorgeous new covers of old ones. Recent tunes of hers like “Harunire” have convinced me that Quinka's Aoki is one of the best Japanese pop musicians out there these days.

The Glistening Eyes Of Salome Lips

2009-09-08T08:10:00.000-07:00

There they were, the band I'd been wanting to see, the 21st Century group that cherishes the 60's and 70's, the creators of a mini-CD called Theme of Atami Sex Museum—Salome Lips. To a bittersweet kayou melody that made you forget you were in Shinjuku 2009, two girls go-go danced in shimmering pink and aqua, while between them, the stunning diva sang. What I noticed most were her glistening eyes, on a little face always wearing a restrained expression—the eyes acknowledged the melodrama of the lyrics, and accepted it. They made her seem like from some other place, the eyes of a sad cabaret singer in a desolate port town, in a time long past. What an enchanting actress! She sang in a low voice while her partner, the bassist in 70's hair, boogied to the retro resurrection.

Salome Lips were beautiful and captivated me, but other parts of the Shinjuku Jam event made me realize that retro music for retro music's sake can fall flat. The mediocre stuff is at an even bigger disadvantage because the music is already so old. Lovers of past music still need to create their own sound—and I think of the epitome of that, the great Asakusa Jinta.

***

The Lady Spade's MC-narrated, hip, nostalgic karaoke is nice too, but the third time around, I knew the act, including the dancing. A first time Lady Spade sighting is a shock, and should be included in any music lover's Tokyo visit itinerary if possible, but for the benefit of the regulars I hope they continue innovating.

Wow, the Jam was packed though, and there was one bartending girl to take care of the whole, mostly all-you-can-drink crowd, resulting in long lines—I was thirsty at first. They were lucky it wasn't, say, an Australian or English audience.

***

I liked this article on Tokyo, by the way, though some of it seemed to verge on the fantastic. Still, it's true in many nameless, cramped buildings, you can feel like you are in a dungeon or maze of the unexpected, something that you don't experience much except in big Asian cities.

Rangsteen, Supersnazz, Firestarter At The Shelter

2009-08-22T23:49:00.001-07:00

There's something about live houses like the Shimokitazawa Shelter. They're dives—dark, dusty, falling apart—but only in these clubs do you get that sound.

The other day I went to a certain brand new live house in Tokyo, and it wasn't the same at all. The sound was clear, but a bit harsh. A friend who was there said that part of the problem might be that the speakers etc. are new—they get better with age. I'm no acoustics expert, but I do know that some people seek out old speakers exactly for that reason, for their warm, enveloping sound. The Shelter's sound system has gone through a lot, and its walls are stained with the memories of a million rock shows. The Que is like that too; as is the Jam, definitely, and the Loft.

***

A band I'd never seen before, Rangsteen, was a perfect group for this Shelter sound. A hard-rocking trio, they had the sort of muscular, angry, direct delivery that I hadn't seen in a while. I was thinking it was becoming like an endangered species; but maybe I've just been traveling in the wrong musical continents. In any case, they were my favorite band of the night.

Next up was Supersnazz, ex-all-girl rockers and now a girl-guy quartet, who were in good form as usual. Vocalist Spike was in LA Lakers colors (probably not consciously)—yellow T-shirt and purple mini-skirt. One moment of their show really impressed me: during a vocal break Spike turned around to take a swig of water, but it seems some of it went the wrong way, up her nose. You could tell even with her back to us she was coughing hard; the Shelter's stage attendant guy had this look on my face that said, shoot, what should I do, the vocalist is choking. But, right at the moment the vocal parts were to resume, she turned around to the mike, and continued with the song. Professionalism, even at a small place like the Shelter!

Band number three was a band I'd heard a lot about, but had never seen before: Firestarter. After the show I surfed the web to find out that they consisted of members of the punk band Teengenerate and the vocalist is a vocal veteran of the Tokyo indie music scene (there's this interesting interview, for example—that looks like a fun bar to visit). They were tight, they knew how to get the crowd going (at one point a middle-aged-looking man struggled to try to crowd surf, got deposited on to the stage, was escorted off of it by the attendant, was taken through the dressing room to the exit and then re-emerged later from the club entrance), and the punk/power pop music was good but, I have to confess, I didn't really get them. Or, put it another way, I didn't become a Firestarter convert on the spot, ready to follow them around to see all their future shows. It might just be that I was unfamiliar with their music. I later did take exception, though, to the vocalist's opinion in the above-mentioned interview that Japan has only produced a handful of great bands, a notion that is so self-evidently untrue that it made me wonder about his judgment...

Asakusa Jinta & Gyoko At Asakusa Kurawood

2009-08-02T00:33:00.000-07:00

Asakusa Kurawood may have just become my favorite Tokyo music club.

Declaring that after just one or two visits may be a tad risky—the experience could have been made rosier by the quality of the shows—but it can't be denied that this new live house has a nice vibe.

I even like the walk over there. If you have time before the show, you can stroll through the Asakusa old town just a few blocks away, seeing the temples and shrines and little shops and eateries. En route to the Kurawood is an old restaurant with wooden walls and paper lanterns outside, the Komagata Dojo, which serves dojo, a fish that looks similar to an eel and called in English 'oriental weather loach', according to Wikipedia. (The kana spelling of the restaurant is old-fashioned, so 'dojo' looks like 'dozeu'.) Also nearby is the Bandai toy company, with statues of Gundam, Ultraman and other characters on the street outside.

Entering the Kurawood, I noticed that the ticket counter girl was friendly—a contrast to older live houses, where the staff can be apathetic or worse. There was a small bar area separated from the music hall—always a nice thing for when you want to take a break from the show and have a drink in peace—and the guys at the bar were also into their jobs, plus, a bonus, the drinks were a little cheaper than other clubs, at 400 yen per glass.

But, in the end, maybe it was the crowd that made me so keen on the Kurawood: they were Asakusa Jinta fans, there to see the band in the band's home town, and you got the sense that they understood and supported the band's vision of creating music based on traditional Japan as found in Asakusa. In other words there was a clear sense of community. There were lots of little kids, and people the age of the band members' parents, and all ages in between.

The fashion for the most part was Yokohama rockabilly, Hawaiian shirts, caps and tattoos, and this was a dancing crowd. DJ-ing between bands was Ego-Wrappin's Masaki Mori, who spun old Japanese pop singles. The music, the dancing, the rockabilly hipsters and beauties around me all gave me visions of being in a 50's teen flick. Or, maybe, a scene from a Ayumi Tachihara manga.

I missed most of the first band, Tokyo Howling Record, but I liked what I did see. Calling themselves a modern kayou swing rock band, they had lots of energy and nice melodies, with a cool horn section and a girl playing the double bass. They seem to be regulars at the Kurawood, so, hopefully I will see a full set of theirs soon.

Up next was the ever-entertaining fisherman rockers Gyoko. I wrote about them in a previous post, but the gist of it is they're a rapping trio centered around Captain Tsurizao Morita, who runs a fish shop in Chiba when not rocking the crowd from his Gyoko stage. Between songs, Captain Morita talked about how commercial fishing used to be a big thing in the Tokyo area too—the city of Urayasu, where he's from and which is home now to Tokyo Disneyland, was a fishing town—“The town was more Norakuro than Mickey Mouse,” he said—and the captain's grandfather was a fisherman, but a decline in business forced him to quit. Still, he wanted to stay involved in the fish business, so he established the shop that Captain Morita now operates.

You hear a lot these days about Japanese guys who are 'herbivores'—gentle, cooperative fellows who aren't very aggressive on the courtship front—and maybe part of the appeal of Gyoko is that they're the opposite of that. They are rough, macho, fish-eating men of sea. To the background beat of huge taiko drums, and wearing expressions of serious, unsmiling concentration, they shout staccato their paean of fish and the ocean. But that's all for show, and a lot of what they do is tongue-in-cheek: at one point, two of the guys, still looking stern, began cheek-dancing to a song, until one of the guys broke away into the crowd to dance with men in the audience. The final guy who was picked was a red Hawaiian-shirted rocker, who was a good sport about the whole thing, spinning the Gyoko guy around and going on stage with him. The climax was, as always, a live tuna cutting demonstration, and giving away some of the fish to audience members.

Captain Morita cutting the tuna.

The last band was Asakusa Jinta, and it was a touching set because, as I said earlier, the crowd were genuine band supporters, and it was apparently the first time in a long time for the band to play in Asakusa, so there was a lot of back-and-forth between the band and the audience. Vocalist Osho said something mysterious about the fact that while he loved Asakusa, he was also down on some of the annoying aspects of the town (he used the Japanese word 'dorodoro' which I have no idea how to translate into English...), including that people had called the cops on him many times (??), and so hadn't played the Kurawood in a while, but that it was great to be back. I came out of the show enveloped by that warm feeling you get after seeing a great gig surrounded by a happy crowd. But, surprisingly, the band itself apparently didn't think it was their best effort; maybe they were tired after a grueling schedule that included an appearance at the Fuji Rock Festival. In any case, they are planning these Kurawood events, called 'Rocking' Shintenchi', once a month, and I'm sure they will be bringing along other great bands, so I want to go to many of them as I can.

***

By the way, Nippon Rock has a great review of Asakusa Jinta's latest album, Setsuna. I agree with it that Setsuna is one of the best Japanese rock albums of the year.

Mime, Funky Dancer, Vasallo Crab 75

2009-07-26T06:37:00.000-07:00

It is pretty unusual for a Japanese woman, who is a mime, to do her act during a rock show, at a club in Shimokitazawa, right? I'm beginning to become unsure about these things. I've certainly seen stranger stuff.

In any case, the female mime was part of Vasallo Crab 75's 'one-man' musical extravaganza earlier this month that I'm now time-traveling back in my head to write about. I was really impressed by the mime—the only image I had of mimes before was of those white-face-painted guys in striped shirts patting imaginary walls in the air, the kind of thing they parody in Hollywood movies. This mime was dressed in fairly ordinary earth-toned clothes, and even spoke a bit when not in her act. She mimed along to Daisuke Kudo's solo acoustic guitar, and the cool thing was that it was an all-body performance: the legs, arms, head, neck, eyes, mouth all working together to create imaginary action. I wonder if there's an active mime community in Japan? Maybe one day this site will change to Japan Mime...

Vasallo Crab also got a funky dancer to shake her body on stage along with a couple of their songs, and the beginning of the show started with a recording of the choral part of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. It went on far longer than I expected, they played about 10 minutes of it, including the solos and the grand chorus, before they came on stage in their pimp/glam costumes, to play some funky rock under a spinning disco ball. So over the top, to choose as your stage intro the 9th Symphony's chorus, but that's Vasallo Crab 75, tongue-in-cheek, funny, but also one of Tokyo's best live bands I know.

Vasallo Crab 75 started out as two shy friends from high school who recorded atmospheric indie pop songs at home. Now, many years later, they are six guys who expertly energize the audience, with a music that's a combination of pop, rock, funk, and anything else the members like, including Yasuhito Kawabe's violin Bach solos and keyboardist Akihiro Yoshida's jazz improvisation (and the band played a Michael Jackson cover that night because his passing was recent, and vocalist Kudo grew up listening to Jacko).

You never know quite what will come out of a VC75 gig, but one thing you can count on hearing at their big shows is a song called “Vicious Circle”, which is one of their best and also one of my favorite Japanese pop tunes of this young century. It was one of the last songs that Kudo and his old high school friend Takayuki Fukumara made together before Fukumura passed away, and that simple, unforgettable guitar line was a creation of Fukumura's (he was a master of simple guitar licks that stay in your mind—the incomparable guitar intro to advantage Lucy's “Red Bicycle” was his, for instance). Below is a video of “Vicious Circle” performed at another place.

Hyacca, Cottonioo, 10,000 Yen Encore Etc. At Koenji Roots

2009-07-20T06:12:00.000-07:00

Saturday night was one of those evenings when I was forced to choose between two equally compelling possibilities of live music entertainment, with one of those options probably being much more promising on the pleasing-eye-stimulation front—that was the futurepoplounge event at the Shibuya O-Nest, featuring among others the sexy dance and song troupe The Lady Spade as well as beauties such as Marino and Eel. In the other corner was the post-punk party organized by Call and Reponse Records' Ian Martin, who, as he does every few months, brought together his favorite indie groups, most of whom I'd never heard of before, for an evening of aural adventure and bacchanalia at a dingy Koenji club of his choice. The former, the O-Nest event, was certainly tempting—one of the performers was Frenesi, whose recently released album Cupra I love—but I'd seen most of these people before. And I felt I was overdue for another Ian-organized Koenji experience. So, I got on the Yamanote line to Shinjuku, transferred to the Sobu line to Koenji, got out of the north exit to head to a funky alley of bars, food joints, and 'health' parlors decorated in pink and other pretty pastels, until I was at the Okinawa-themed building that housed the Club Roots.

Right away I was glad I was there—there was that Koenji live vibe, where it's obvious everyone is there because they like the music and are in search of new sounds, and at the same time there's a community feeling and a lack of nervousness about foreigners (the event was organized by one, after all). These guys seemed polite—there were little 'excuse me's when they had to walk through tight space in the audience section. I got the feeling that this was for the most part a college-educated, intellectual, petit-bourgeois crowd (some bands in Tokyo are proleterian, as are their fans—some of those I'm crazy about too; maybe one of these days I'll write about this divide).

Act one was Mir, who I'd seen before, a trio featuring a girl wearing a bunny rabbit headress and using a carrot antenna. Self-described as new wave/experimental, they were an eccentric, minimalist ensemble that played forlorn-sounding tunes. But at the end of the set they all came down off the stage and led the audience into a conga line.

Next was a lovely duo called Cottonio, two girls in tropical shirts with pink feathers in their hair, who created with guitar, bass, wooden synthesizer (?) and do-re-mi carpet what sounded like Hawaiian or exotica on hallucinogenics. I really liked them.

The last three acts were sort of a blur, though they were all excellent, playing energetic alternative music with fast, challenging rhythms and unusual chords. Indie rockers Owllights had a super-skinny vocalist who liked to jump into the audience pit; the Mornings were described by Ian as “the wildest, noisiest, and most athletic live experience in Tokyo” and indeed had head-bang-inducing virtuosic prog/punk techniques; Hyakka, 'a Hundred Mosquitoes' from Fukuoka was similar to the Mornings, but with a more punk grounding and male-female vocals. They were great, and made me start fantasizing about a trip to the southern, Kyushu city of Fukuoka to check out the scene, not to mention the local gourmet offering such as tonkotsu ramen, mentaiko pollock roe, food stalls in general and shochu. Hyakka's encore was a rousing punk number that got the already overexcited male portion of the front row audience into a frenzy of friendly slam-dancing, and for once I was very sympathetic to the physical outburst.

Owllights

The Mornings

Hyakka

Probably by coincidence, every band except Cottonio included a single female member, the drummer in the case of Owllights and the Mornings.

Ian said, by the way, that if the show wasn't done by 10PM the club would charge a 10,000 yen fine, and the Hyacca show did put the finishing time after ten, meaning it may have been a 10,000 yen encore. Well, to me it was worth more than $100, but I wasn't the one paying it, and I'm not sure whether the organizer got the fine in the end and if so, what he thought of it once he was sober again the day after the show or so...

You Should Have A Band Like Yuyake Lamp In Your Life

2009-07-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

I went to see a show in Kyoto, in a part of town away from the temples and tourists, at a cafe on a big street that could have been on any city in Japan. From the cafe's window you could see the auto parts shop Autobacs; just down the street was a Jusco supermaket; this was an ordinary man's Kyoto. I was in a strange town again to see Yuyake Lamp on the road.

When this band was called Orange Plankton, I followed them way down south to Nagasaki and Okinawa. When they quit and then were reborn as Yuyake Lamp, I crossed a sea to see them play in Taiwan. And it's a rare thing for me to miss them in Tokyo.

In other words, I'm a devoted fan. Maybe you haven't heard of them—they've released a number of albums and done a lot of shows, but have never really hit the big time. Their membership has dwindled over the years, so that now it's basically just vocalist Yunn and whichever musician accompanies her. But in my mind they are one of Japan's great bands. Their piano pop melodies are always catchy and memorable. The lyrics are pure poetry, and about everything from love and friendship to our planet's precambrian era and the wonders of the human body. Above all, though, there's the vocals of Yunn—with her high, almost child-like voice, she has this way of bringing to life the words she sings.

Here's a video of a show she and flutist Kopan did at a Shinto shrine somewhere (it's pretty good but it shows so little of what a great Yuyake Lamp show is like...):

For a select few, Yuyake Lamp's music seems to have the ability to stimulate a nerve that controls the tear ducts. Someone at their Sendai show, part of their current national tour, commented that the joy of seeing them again and the emotion of the music caused her to cry. A friend I saw after their Tokyo gig said she was in tears from the first song to the last. I also felt the water well up at the first song of that show, when they played a tune called “Nami Wo Nuu Kaze Yo Te Yo” from the album Yuyake Ballad, a rarely-performed classic that I like to think of as extraterrestrially inspired, because it's hard to imagine such a strange, slow, beautiful music being germinated in the human mind...

Having said all this, if you do give Yuyake Lamp a listen and the music doesn't do it for you, that's okay. Tastes differ. But what I want to say is, you should have a band like Yuyake Lamp in your life. If you are alone in thinking a band or musician is genius, you are right, ignore the others. If a band's music makes you happy, it's the right thing. And that's the sort of band Yuyake Lamp is for me.

The Collectors & Hoover's Ooover At The Que

2009-06-21T04:36:00.000-07:00

I looked forward to, but also somewhat dreaded, Club Que's sold-out Hoover's Ooover and the Collectors two-band event, because a sold-out show at the Que can be an ordeal for an older guy like me. There won't be any free space in the club—the entire place is packed with fans. Good luck going to the bathroom or getting a drink at the bar: it will be a challenge to come back and reclaim your spot, unless you have a friend guarding it. Most people stay put.

At this show I had an additional problem: during Hoover's Ooover's gig, I stood behind two tall guys who blocked my view of the petite vocalist Masami. In front of me was one guy, with samurai-like, long, straight hair; to his front was a man with a poofy, curly do; those two heads created various visual obstacles, with Samurai Hair sometimes coming down like a black curtain in front of my eyes, and Poofy Head forming an uneven mountain range of hair, through the recesses of which I could sometimes glimpse the stage. To get a better view, I could stand on my toes or crane my neck backward. But then I'd become worried about the diminutive girls I knew were behind me, who were also having problems seeing the band. Maybe I've been in Japan too long worrying about these things...

The stage-view issue aside, though, the show wasn't bad at all. Hoover's Ooover was in prime form; it still surprises me how deep and strong a voice singer Masami has, contrary to her fragile looks. She said that the Collectors were her favorite band and that the song “Collection” was named after them. They played it, and maybe because the band that inspired the tune was right there, it was a passionate rendition, the rapid-fire vocal phrasing even sharper than usual. (There's an old BBC clip where they are playing “Collection” below.)

By the way, though the band didn't say anything about this during the show, their latest flyer says a new Hoover's Ooover album will be released on Sept. 2, called A-gata Sentimental (Type A Sentimental). Yay!

***

At the end of the Hoover's set I went to get a beer and staked out a spot near the door, so I could leave early if I wanted during the Collectors' show. I'd listened to their music before, but had never seen them live.

But...

No.

There was no way I could leave once the Collectors got started.

The club became theirs.

And it became a different club.

I liked the Collectors' music, but I had no idea how great they were as a live band.

They've been playing their British Beat-inspired rock for 22 years, and they've done big concerts, so maybe it's the experience, plus talent and energy.

Whatever it was, the Collectors had that thing that made you forget you were in a small, cramped hall, and instead feel happy you could share this time with the crowd around you.

They were a regular four piece with a vocalist, guitar, bass and drums, but there was nothing regular about their sound—incredibly tight, and the musicians were superbly skilled. And the vocalist was a true showman, singing facing sideways looking like a fencer, then marching all over like it was the biggest concert hall stage, and high-fiving and hand-shaking the crowd (and also griping that all the fans in the front were guys rather than girls...). These guys weren't kids anymore; the singer had a bit of a chin; but when they played that didn't matter, they were sexy and you could see why they had oodles of female fans.

***

During the Collectors' gig, at the back of the club, above the partition that separated the audience space from the dressing room, I saw a couple of faces in the darkness: they were Hoover's Ooover, probably standing on chairs behind the partition, watching their favorite band.

Japan Live Radio An International Genre Pick

2009-06-19T23:02:00.000-07:00

As some of you may know, Japan Live has its own internet radio station called, creatively, Japan Live Radio. I've just been informed by the people behind the internet radio system, Live 365, that Japan Live Radio has been featured as part of its International Genre showcase. It's an honor.

It's actually quite a neat list: if you go to the map and click on the headphones in the Pacific Ocean right below the sailboat, for example, it lists two Hawaiian music stations—The Hawaii Network and Haku's Hale Network. Accompanying Japan Live Radio in East Asia are Radio 1HK Hong Kong and Shakuhachi Radio, though the latter is for paying customers only. In India, there's Anuraag; there are also Jewish World Radio and NUSACH Jewish Music; from the Middle East, Arabic Night Life, Soukos Radio and Mazaj; Bossa Nova Breakfast is one of the picks from South America; and so on. I want to check all these out.

Japan Live Radio itself has been updated with music by my recent obsessions, Fukui-based surf rock band Browny Circus and its successor, The Capris, and the various rock, punk and rockabilly bands that are friendly with them, as well as a lot of other stuff in a 4-hour-plus program. I'll soon be adding new Sucrette and Frenesi too. Enjoy!

Odds and Ends

2009-06-04T04:36:00.000-07:00

This video by Sucrette is crazy cute...

Who are these guys? It looks like they're based in Kyoto. I hope to see them one of these days, and I'm in any case overdue for a Kansai trip. There are some really good bands over there, including Jenny on the Planet.

***

Here's one by Frenesi of Tokyo. No one sings like Frenesi.

***

May was a quiet month for me on the live music front (I ended up missing Haikou Fes, the abandoned school festival, but Ian of Clear & Refreshing went, wrote a preview and interviewed the organizer), but this month is more lively. There are a couple of Saturdays when I have to make tough choices on which equally fun-sounding lives to catch.

One of those is June 20, when I'm going to see Hoover's Ooover with the Collectors at the Que (the show's sold out), but on the same day, a couple of train stops away in Shinjuku at the Loft/Plus One, is this insane sounding event featuring one of my recent favorites The Lady Spade, a drag queen show, a silent movie narration ('katsuben eiga') show, a Julie show--the Julie being an imitator of former heartthrob singer Sawada Kenji, a 'Perfume Show', featuring a Perfume copy unit named Peachume, and a 'color therapy' session.

The Lady Spade seem to always be involved in fun, eclectic projects like these--they're a group to watch. You know, just occurred to me, the Loft/Plus One event is from midnight, so I can make it to both the Que and Shinjuku gig if I'm really feeling energetic. We shall see...

***

Peachume sounds fascinating. They're described as a Perfume copy dance unit with "an adult feel". Hmmm....

***

I also want to see Milk Guy Murakawa.

SAITAMA--To mark World Milk Day on Monday, Norihiro Murakawa began a nationwide performing tour in a car painted to resemble a Holstein cow, all to promote his love of milk and raise awareness of the plight of the dairy industry.

...

Murakawa's lyrics express the dairy industry's woes, such as, "If milk does not sell well, we feel a little worried because we are Holstein cows." He sings and dances to his songs while wearing a cow-print outfit, and his lighthearted performances have proven popular.

GREAT SONGS: Hoover's Ooover's "Rival Wa Rickenbacker"

2009-05-30T19:18:00.000-07:00

A domestic quarrel involving a kitchen knife might not seem very promising material for a great love song.

But that's what “Rival Wa Rickenbacker” is, and it's one of those Hoover's Ooover tunes that astonishes with its newness and lack of cliche.

The song opens with a girl's spat with her boyfriend.

I broke a plate
Cut guitar strings
Threw a frying pan
And brought out a kitchen knife

So far, everything's fine. But then,

I still wasn't satisfied, so
I threw the Ricken
And finally you became mad
Saying “that's it”
You left the room

And so you find out that boyfriend is a guitarist, whose proudest possession is a Rickenbacker (abbreviated 'Ricken'). And the girl knows that, which is why she leaves it until the finale of the fight. But when she tosses the guitar, the boyfriend, who earlier appeared to tolerate dodging kitchen utensils and risking a stabbing incident, finally loses it. The opening lines have no subject ('I' and 'you'), which can be left out in Japanese, making them even more terse and masculine-sounding.

Even though the words are about violence, you get the sense that while the girl is angry (the song nevers says about what) she isn't seriously trying to harm the guy, and is instead making a point, at some bodily risk to him to be sure. Indeed, the phrase saying the girl “brought out” the knife—'mochidashitemita'—sounds quite tentative.

So the guy storms out after his Rickenbacker is made into a flying projectile, and then the chord changes, as well as the scene:

In the sky, shooting up and popping are fireworks
The summer night, seen from the veranda
Would I have been watching it now with you?

The girl is left alone in her room, with fireworks, the symbol of summer, visible from her window.

A couple of lines down, time has passed. She's gotten a haircut, trimmed her nails, changed her look in general, and along the way she's totaled a new car. And then, suddenly, she remembers her room used to be his too.

Chord change again, and she wonders whether he ever got that letter she dropped into the mail box, tripping twice on the way there. The night is ending, the morning is freezing, and she can feel herself becoming used to the loneliness.

So, the Rickenbacker is the 'rival' that took her boyfriend away from her, though she doesn't really mean that.

This isn't a perfect song—the first 20 seconds or so of the intro with drums could probably be lopped off, for example, because it doesn't do much—but it IS a vivid and living tune. Only 2 minute and 57 seconds long, the song contains a life that seems real, including the change of seasons—from the hot summer when the fight takes place to the lonely cold of the winter, when she's remembering him. As with most Hoover's Ooover songs, the music is catchy, and the singing heart-felt, but it's those lyrics...one out of a dozen of so Hoover songs I listen to has words that electrify, and this is one of them.

***

I just happened to realize the excellence of this song as I was listening to my iPod on the way to a Hoover's Ooover show at the Shimokitazawa Basement Bar. I repeated it. And again. And again. Pretty soon I was wandering the residential streets around the Basement Bar just so I could listen to the tune a few extra times before I entered the club. (And, happily, this song was on their set list that night.)

***

“Rival Wa Rickenbacker” is on Hoover Ooover's Tansansui mini-album. I've never seen a video of this song on YouTube, but there used to be one for “Tansansui” (which means 'carbonated water'), though it looks like it's been taken down. Here's a more recent video of the song “Timer”.

Goodbye, Kiyoshiro Imawano 2

2009-05-10T05:31:00.000-07:00

By coincidence...or maybe not, maybe something drew me there...I was taking a walk along Aoyama Cemetery on Saturday, when I noticed a line of people. When I got closer, I saw that the line extended for blocks, and then I knew what it was. The queuing multitudes mostly looked to be people in their twenties to forties, though there were some teen punks with dyed hair. Some wore proper black suits and ties, while others were in T-shirts, some saying 'Kiyoshiro' on them. Many carried flowers, and I saw one girl clutching an old RC Succession LP in her arms. By chance I'd come to Kiyoshiro Imawano's public farewell service.

The lines moved slowly forward. I looked at people's faces, and most were smiling, as if this was some place like Bali where a funeral is a celebration. The queues twisted around for blocks around the cemetery—it crossed the Aoyama Bridge in one direction on one side, and the other direction on the other. News reports said that over 42,000 people showed up, and the service went on until late at night. Looking at the masses, it hit me—so, this is RC Succession, and this is Kiyoshiro... Although the crowd wasn't gloomy, seeing so many people there to say goodbye overwhelmed me, and at times I had to look away.

Goodbye, Kiyoshiro Imawano

2009-05-03T22:41:00.000-07:00

So Kiyoshiro Imawano has left us, only 58, to jam on a stage somewhere with Elvis, Lennon, Kyu Sakamoto...

Kiyoshiro's band, RC Succession, introduced me to Japanese rock 'n' roll 20 years ago. My teen heart was thrilled by the most thinly-veiled sexual innuendo imaginable in their hit “Ameagari No Yozorani (To The Night Sky After The Rain)—along the lines of, the car batteries are charged, so why don't you want to go for a ride? I also listened to their live cover of “Ue Wo Muite Arukou” (or, Sukiyaki), before I discovered Kyu Sakamoto's original. Having been exposed to lame Japanese top-10 songs all my life, RC Succession's Japanese rock sounded so fresh and ground-breaking, during those young days of first beers and mischievous cigarettes...

When I moved to Japan, quite by coincidence my first apartment was near Tamaranzaka, the slope in western Tokyo that is the name of one of their famous songs. Around me were young guys who grew up listening to RC Succession—they were proud Kiyoshiro was a native son, and his music was real to them, including that bittersweet love ballad “Tamaranzaka”—it was everyone's secret song.

We always laughed at the lines in “Transistor Radio”: “I yawned so much in class, my mouth became big/ I napped so much, my eyes turned small”. When he's not bored in class, he listens to music from the Bay Area and Liverpool on the roof of his school.

And now he's gone. Truly, as a line in “Transistor Radio” says, I've never been able to explain this feeling well...So I think I'll leave you with a few of his videos instead. Goodbye, and thank you, Kiyoshiro.

Transistor Radio

Ameagari No Yozorani

Ue Wo Muite Arukou

A Jazzy Advantage Lucy At The Que

2009-04-28T21:09:00.000-07:00

Advantage Lucy played a couple of news songs at their Que show on Friday night, including a tune called “Teacup Ride”, and they had a jazzy feel, with swinging bass and drums. Aiko swept her fingers through a chime tree at climactic moments to color the music with glissandos.

It was an interesting new genre choice—the sort of jazz you might hear in a lounge—for a band known mainly for its sunny indie pop tunes. But I've always thought it's a misconception to think of advantage Lucy as just an upbeat guitar pop group—one listen to the longer, more complex tunes of theirs such as “Shiosai” from Echo Park, or the single “Photograph”, or “so” from Fanfare, etc. etc., would likely alter that view of their sound. They're a musically adventurous bunch.

Advantage Lucy are also masters of the pop ballad form. How many times have I listened to, and how much has my life been made richer by, pure gems such as “Koko De Oyasumi”, “Today” and “Nico”*? Ballads like those are miraculous unions of the most beautiful melodies and unforgettable lyrics. After so many listens, I'm still always moved by these lines in “Nico”: “Moshi kotoba ga hoshi yorimo/ kazoe kirenai hodo arunara/ tsutaerareru kamoshirenai kedo/ sonna taisetsu na mono dewa nai to omou (If words were more countless than the stars in the sky, maybe then I'd be able to let you know how I feel, but then I think it's not that important after all)”. At the Que show, they played the emotional, nostalgic ballad from Echo Park called “A Distant Day” (there's a Youtube video of the song here), and it was a gorgeous rendition as ballads usually are when they perform them live.

***

By the way, totally unrelated, and a bit in the past now, but this 'toy music event' described in Patrick's chipple.net sounded like a lot of fun. Great report and colorful photos!

*“Koko De Oyasumi” and “Today” were B sides on their singles Memai and Hello Mate!, respectively, and they are also available on the best hits collection Have a Good Journey. "Nico" is in Lucy Van Pelt's Advantage Lucy EP.

Wrench, Poodles At 'Abura Derabu' Event

2009-04-23T06:37:00.000-07:00

My main mission of the evening attending a Shibuya event called Aburade-rabu (word play on 'abracadabra', I guess, but ending with Japanese pronunciation of 'love') was to see the band Wrench, who I've been listening to a lot recently. Their CDs are in the punk rock section of Tower Records Shibuya, but a more accurate genre designation may be something like Hard Electro Dance Psychedelic Stoner Rock. I especially like their ambitious latest effort, Nitro.

The event was a two-club deal, where shows are divided between two live houses and you can go freely between them. There are more of these multi-live house events these days, and they are great: they let you exit and re-enter the clubs (something not allowed in most venues), grab a bite outside if you desire, or procure cheaper beverages at nearby conbinis. This one was a joint O-Nest/O-West event, and Wrench was the second band up at the O-West. I wasn't sure how popular they were, so I decided to go to the O-West from the beginning to stake out a good spot if there was a big crowd (you tend to make these calculations when you've been to many Tokyo shows...).

On before Wrench was an instrumental band called poodles that played trippy, jam music heavy on African percussion and 'ethnic' musical instruments like the didgeridoo, the Australian aboriginal horn, and that long tube thing you spin around to make a whirring noise. The poodles' website describes their sound as an “earthy, tribal groove”. It was pleasant music, but I found myself wondering why, if they are into creating something new by mixing together instruments of various cultures, they apparently steer clear of Japanese ones. That's, of course, their choice. They're free to build music out of whatever sounds they fancy. But to me, it would be more interesting if the band added a taiko or some such to their sound, in the process making new music that also acknowledges their own heritage. Not really related, but I found out googling that there's also a Swedish glam metal group called the Poodles...

The crowd increased when Wrench came on next. The true believers stood at center front, next to the stage—they were mostly young guys in T-shirts, some of them on the chubby side. When the music began, they broke out into a mosh-pit dance that looked like a combination of hands-up-in-the-air Okinawan dancing and Harajuku rockabilly twist. You could tell they were intensely into the music—they danced like it was their last chance before the giant asteroid hits the planet. Or, it was like some cult's frenzied bacchanal.

Their prophet was Shige, Wrench's vocalist/keyboardist, who was bearded and reminded me vaguely of a smaller, Japanese James Hetfield. To his sides were the skinny, serious-looking guitarist and bassist; whenever Shige stuck his head out of his Korg/synthesizer/gadget headquarters, he'd pump his arms into the air or otherwise get the crowd going while shouting out the lyrics, and the fans would go even wilder. Their musical signature was rapid, repeated riffs, sometimes relayed between guitar and bass, and played over a flood of feedback—an interview I read said the band was into Goa trance music, though to me the harsh but orderly passages seemed almost martial, like the marching music of some super-disciplined, psychedelic robot army. (The YouTube video above should give an idea of what their shows are like.) The whole thing was an exhilarating spectacle, one I wanted to see again soon.

The Faceless Soutaiseiriron

2009-04-12T07:55:00.000-07:00

Soutaiseiriron, which means 'Theory of Relativity', is, in theory, a relatively promising band. But there's also something very weird about these guys.

They seem to be refusing to reveal anything at all about themselves. There are almost no pictures of this quartet anywhere (well... more on that in a second). In fact, they make it clear they want their image hidden—on every page of their website is a note saying that photographing at their concerts is prohibited. That's normal at major-label band gigs, but I've never seen a band being quite so adamant about it on a website. The bio on their site is sketchy, giving only a brief run-down of their 2 ½ year career. And the CD Hi-Fi Anatomia doesn't supply any more info either. Also, they don't do interviews.

In other words, you can't get any information about this band other than from their music. It's like they want to be the Thomas Pynchon or Salinger of J-pop. But is that even possible? Can a rock band succeed without publicizing their image or personalities at all?

I have no idea what's behind this secrecy. Do they just not like to be in the public gaze? Or are there personal reasons why they can't be seen? I hope it's not some sort of marketing gimmick worked out with their managers, because that would be eminently lame.

The thing is, they do perform live once in a while, so they aren't keeping themselves completely invisible. I read, though, that the female singer stands motionless on stage during the whole show, and only moves to bend down to get her bottle of water. Phew...glad I found that out in advance, otherwise I might've ended up suffering through a 'performance'...

All of this is strange because Soutaiseiriron's music IS good, a lot of people I know are getting into them, and being more forthcoming about their persona would seem to be a beneficial thing at this point in their career. Indeed, Hi-Fi Anatomia, their first album, is filled with catchy, if ordinary-sounding pop tunes, but two things help them stand out: the female singer's vocal style and their whacky lyrics.

A Japanese commentator I read put it well when he described the singing style as 'low blood pressure J-pop'—for the most part the vocalist sounds laid-back, like she's not trying too hard, but at the same time it's a strangely coquettish voice, quietly emotional and pleasantly musical.

And then there are the lyrics—it's like various types of otaku splashed their fantasies and daydreams against the music sheets. “Jigoku Sensei” is a Japanese schoolgirl (Nabokov's) Lolita story in pop song format; “Fushigi Descartes” has to do with supernatural phenomena, with the main line saying, “Even if you're a ghost that's OK with me/ If you're a ghost that would be even better/ If I were a ghost wouldn't that be OK with you?”; the song “Shikaku Kakumei (Square Revolution)” describes a guy from the 25th century running away from the Time-Space Police and meeting a girl from the 22nd century; “Renaissance” is about, um, mathematics.

It all makes me want to know more about these guys. Now, they're faceless.

What's strange is that the only one photo I found of this band is in the English part of the internet, and while a google image search does turn up links to a few Japanese sites, when you try to open those images they're all removed. Does that mean the web-masters were asked to take them down? I'm curious what will happen if I publish that one known picture of them on this site, and so I've borrowed that photo from another web page, and will let you know if there's any response...

Quinka, With A Yawn At Rain On The Roof

2009-03-29T05:24:00.000-07:00

I almost got lost for a second time in a row going to a cafe called Rain On The Roof in Sangenjyaya because, well, the place IS a challenge to find. It's in a narrow alley and there's a tiny sign in front of the entrance that you wouldn't see if you weren't looking for it. But this is at least an interesting neighborhood to get lost in. It's filled with little dining bars that have only a few seats each, places looking like time's stopped in the 1960's, where the 'mama' mixes scotch and water for long-time regulars and that you'd feel strange about dropping by unless you yourself are a regular or are introduced by someone who is. In a side-street off of Route 246 is an old movie theater, Sangenjyaya Central Theater, with big signs in Showa-era font and, its most distinctive feature, on the facade a kappa couple, the male kappa blue and the female kappa pink (kappa are human-like creatures that live in ponds, and drag children into the water and drown them. Watch out for them if traveling with little kids near ponds...).

Rain On The Roof, named after a Lovin' Spoonful song, is a cafe on the 2nd floor of an old building with great wooden ceiling with beams. It has comfy sofas and smells of curry rice, which is supposed to be good. The cafe appears to have been created by a company called Renovation Planning, which transforms old stores and homes into cafes. Here's an up-close picture of the ceiling:

I was there to see an event called 'Waikiki-philia and Cafe Rock', the fifth installment of an event organized every couple of months or by the band Elekibass. It ran from 2:30 in the afternoon to 8:40 in the evening, though I only stayed during the daytime part of the event. The standout act for me was Quinka, With a Yawn, the unit of the female vocalist/keyboardist Michiko Aoki and whoever else she invites to perform together. At this show her side-kick was guitarist Taisuke Takata of Plectrum. I'm a big fan of Quinka—the Quinka album Field Recordings was my favorite CD of 2008—but I'd forgotten until this Sangenjyaya show what a good performer Aoki is. Her singing is unhurried, natural, and she has a way of creating musical space by staying silent and then coming in with her voice, a quirky, normal-person voice that nevertheless has a lot of presence. Quinka played all covers: The Stone Roses' “Ten Storey Love Song”, Unicorn's “Jitensha Dorobou (Bicycle Thief)”, Spitz's “J'taime” and the La's “There She Goes” (a very popular tune in the Tokyo indie pop scene), as well as, a cover of sorts, a song called “Thank You” that she wrote together with her husband Harco for their two-person unit Harqua. Plectrum's Takata teased her, saying she's cheating on Harco by performing the song with him, and she replied that he's also being untrue to his just-married wife by doing this duet, but, joking aside, it was a truly beautiful tune performed by two talented musicians that made me a bit tearful. Harqua...I better check them out.

Round Table Featuring Nino's 'Secret' Live

2009-03-21T19:46:00.000-07:00

I hadn't realized this until last night, but the pop band Round Table is a somewhat different entity from the group known as Round Table Featuring Nino. The latter merely adds the female singer Nino to the former, but the two release albums on different labels (Featuring Nino is on Victor Entertainment, while indie Happiness Records is Round Table's label), and Featuring Nino is also a big producer of anime soundtrack songs, something that Round Table itself is, as far as I know, not that big on. In addition, whereas Round Table plays live fairly frequently, mostly in Shimokitazawa, Nino almost never does—in fact, I found out later that the Round Table Featuring Nino show last night was only the second gig ever since Nino joined the group in 2002 (Round Table proper has been around since 1997).

The show was at the Daikanyama Unit, and it was supposed to be a 'secret', free gig—it wasn't listed on the club's schedule or the band's website, and you got tickets by sending in an e-mail to the Round Table website or something. I'm not sure how the process worked exactly because, Japan Live being a Major Player in the Tokyo music scene these days, I was invited to the show...well, no, joking, I just knew someone who could get me into the gig as a guest. The guests had their own section on one side of the floor, divided by a fence, that you got into by flashing your guest pass at the staff and walking a narrow space between the main floor and PA booth.

It was a queer experience watching the show from the segregated 'guest' section. On the other side of the fence, the floor was jam-packed, mostly with people that appeared to be male anime fans; the guest section wasn't crowded, and was mostly musician friends of Round Table, both male and female. And we had a nice view of the stage, something that the main floor guys could only get if they lined up before the show to secure a good spot. But it was they that were really having a great time, despite being herded into a tight, hot, sweat-stinking space—many of them must have been Nino fans for years, seeing her live the first time, finally, so they were excited. I read later on 2 Channel that some of those fans came from places far from Tokyo, a major domestic trip just to see an hour-and-a-half gig, but it was probably worth it for them, because they characterized it with the otaku adjective kami—a 'divine' performance. And they were a super-enthusiastic crowd too, clapping en masse, singing along to the sweet pop ballads, and during the applause before the encore, one of the guys shouted 'so-----re [a call before starting something]', and then, spontaneously, everyone started shouting 'En-core! En-core! En-core!' together. It blew my mind.

For us in the guest section, on the other hand, this was just another free gig thrown by friends, and while the guests must have had fun and enjoyed the music, you felt this sort of social pressure to not go too crazy, to limit yourselves to polite applause, while being free to offer whispered commentary about the show from the point of view of a fellow musician insider.

Nino was good looking, with long, brown, 'shaggy' hair and angular facial features. She didn't exactly take full control of the stage—this was only her second gig, after all—but she did have presence, helped by the audience's overwhelming support and approval of everything she did. The voice was soft and high, and the performance solid, benefitting from the skilled musicians of Round Table. They played about a dozen songs, including for the encore Nino's first hit, “Let Me Be With You”. The gig didn't knock me out like previous Round Table shows, but it was a pleasant affair, especially viewed from the comfortable confines of the VIP section, where we could rattle our jewelry rather than clap along.

***

Bringing me rapidly down to earth after the gig was the Unit's authoritarian policy of not allowing audience members to stand outside of the club for even a single second to wait for friends to emerge. Supercilious staffers shouted at people to move along, like sheepdogs yapping at their herd. I know the Unit isn't alone in doing this, and I know there are reasons for it—they're afraid that if they let people loiter, they might make noise and annoy the neighbors—but while understanding that, couldn't they be, perhaps, nice about asking people to disperse, rather than acting dictatorially like they have some god-given right to chase people away from a public space? I mean, maybe it's just a job for them, but couldn't they handle things in a way that doesn't immediately dispel the magic of the show?

The Name Is The Lady Spade Party

2009-03-15T07:26:00.000-07:00

It's hard to beat the Lady Spade.

They dance. They're babes. Their act is like something out of TV re-runs of 60's and 70's spy shows, the jet-set female star laughing theatrically after she completes another impossible mission.

The music is mid-20th century retro—jazzy soundtracks, kayoukyoku, French pop. The big, long-haired, goatee-ed, sunglassed DJ, SLF, also plays the role of an old Japanese cabaret MC, with just the right tongue-in-cheek formal mannerism and winking deference to the performers. Ruby, the Lady Spade's singer, is scripted as the free-spirited prima donna, so never speaks formal Japanese—'arigato' after songs rather than the standard 'arigatogozaimashita'—and she has her four adoring dancers fetch her water when she's thirsty.

I didn't realize until I listened to their debut album, Dial “S” For The Lady Spade (whose release party they held at the Chelsea Hotel in Shibuya), that Ruby wasn't just a singer and dancer, but the super-heroine you call when the problem was serious—the last planetary force field breached, for example—and she would laugh and help out if the project sounded interesting, for a fee. She's a Winston Wolf for global crises. Ruby's also a great driver—she compliments a gaijin-accented guy as being the “world's second best driver”, but on her days off, like any normal girl, she likes to have her admirers buy her things in Ginza and take her out to dinner in Aoyama.

How could I resist any of this???

The Chelsea Hotel event was more like a revue than a regular live house gig, with day-glo-wigged girls in faux-school uniforms and burlesque dancers wandering the floors one second and then performing on stage the next moment. We came out of the two-hour party exhilarated, revived, with a fresh view of the possibilities of entertainment and how it brightens up a dinky basement bar.

***

Several piko piko pop guys, as well as Patrick of chipple.net, were in the audience.

***

The fliers they handed out at the show were great—colorful and well-designed, including several advertising burlesque dance lessons (!). Here are some of them.

Kanariya's First Live, At Red Cloth

2009-03-12T07:38:00.000-07:00

Three members of the splendid Tokyo band Vasallo Crab 75 have gotten together for a side-project called Kanariya, and they did their first gig at the Red Cloth on Wednesday. They are one of those groups that successful musicians form when they want to try something different from the main act, experiment, go back to the roots, etc. In Kanariya's case, the new thing is old rock: they only did a few songs, but it was a varied set, one tune sounding like primordial 70's punk, another being jazz rock, the finale something that reminded me of Tommy-era Who. I can picture them digging through each others' record collections, jamming those LP-inspired tunes together, and then, deciding, one day—hey, why don't we just make this into a new band?

VC75 are great. Their shows are spectacles that are attracting devoted fans who dance, melodic explosions of funk, pop and occasional electric Bach violin solos. They're playing the O-Crest on March 27 with Pop Chocolat and Chub Du. But I can see how musically-hungry guys would want to try something like Kanariya, to go down a few strange alleys, and share what they've found with a new crowd. At the Red Cloth the audience was sparse. But maybe that's part of the bargain—they're really starting anew, debuting as nobodies, with a sound they hope people will like and find to be fresh. I did.

***

'Kanariya' sounds like the Japanese word for canary, but the spelling is slightly different from the standard word, which wouldn't have the Y in it. I didn't think to ask them what the name meant, but when I googled it the first entry I found what maybe pointed to an answer. It contained an old Japanese children's tune called 'Kanariya' (an archaic spelling?), and the lyrics sounded like something that could inspire a band name. It goes something like:

The canary that's forgotten its song
Should we abandon it in the hills behind?
No, no, that wouldn't do

The canary that's forgotten its song
Should we bury it in the shrub in the back?
No, no, that wouldn't do

The canary that's forgotten its song
Should we hit it with a whip of willow?
No, no, that would be cruel

The canary that's forgotten its song
Put on an ivory boat, with a silver paddle
And floated in a moonlit sea
Will remember its song.

Maybe? Maybe I'll ask them next time.

Abandoned School Rock, Cramped Cafe Pop

2009-03-05T05:46:00.000-08:00

Nostalgia for school days, a quest for more musical performance space, novelty, and Japan's shrinking population seem to be behind an interesting upcoming music festival: Haikou Fes 2009, to be held in an abandoned elementary school in Shinjuku.

I read about it in Mixi's Neo-Underground community, whose members have been long searching for new places to organize rock shows, anywhere other than the tired 'live houses' where bands usually do gigs (and where most have to pay to play). The idea of using retired schoolhouses—called 'haikou' in Japanese—as music festival venues had come up during the initial, fevered discussions in the Mixi group. It looks like that idea at least came to fruition—a first Haikou festival was held last year, and a follow-up event is happening on May 6.

The venue is the former site of Shinjuku Ward Yodobashi #3 Elementary School, which has been converted into an entertainment facility by a performers' organization called Geidankyo. Scheduled to perform are notable musicians including Keiichi Sokabe, Kicell, Harco, and Nisennenmondai (as well as a group called Motallica).

The background to why this event is taking place is that there are lots of deserted, unused school buildings in Japan. As the population here gets older and shrinks in size, there aren't enough kids to fill all the schools. Why not use these haikous for some other purpose, rather than simply let them rot and crumble? That thought has led to events like Haikou Fes at ex-Yodobashi #3 School.

So, if you're into the idea of boogie-ing in the science lab, rocking out in the principal's office or making some noise on top of a teacher lectern, this may be your thing. Personally, I'm not too sure about it—for one thing, the tickets, at 3,200 yen advanced and 4,000 yen at the door, aren't cheap. That's more than for a usual live house gig. Does it cost that much money to rent the school and pay the bands? Also, I get this vague, uneasy feeling that though the festival will aim to project a free, anything-goes vibe, in reality it will be tightly controlled—but I don't have much basis for this speculation. In any case, it will probably be a good photo op.

UPDATE (Mar. 7): The organizer of this event sent me a nice note to say thanks for your interest in the event, that the ticket price is the lowest possible and not profitable, and that the atmosphere of the event will be yurui—loose, relaxed, fun.

I respect the fact that the person cares enough about the event to want to clarify those points.

Thank you. I'm going.

***

Meanwhile, speaking about festivals, there's a mini one at the Rain on the roof cafe in Sangenjyaya on March 22, featuring several bands including the Waffles, Elekibass and Quinka, with a Yawn, whose album Field Recordings was my favorite Japanese album of 2008. This looks worth going to, though considering that the Rain on the roof is a fairly small venue (I saw Frenesi there) and the bands are relatively popular, it could make for an event where lots of people are cramped into a 'comfortable' cafe space... The good thing is you can go in and out of the cafe if you want to get fresh air. The 'cafe festival' runs from 2 in the afternoon to 9 at night.

Hoover's Ooover At Basement Bar

2009-02-24T05:43:00.000-08:00

I'm wondering why I wasn't that impressed with Hoover's Ooover when I saw them live a few years ago. Writing about them in one of my early posts I said the band didn't connect well with the audience. Was that really the case? Or was there something in me that got in my way of enjoying them?

The reason I'm thinking about this is I saw the quartet on Sunday at the Basement Bar, and they were brilliant, a delight to watch, and they got the crowd going (well...relatively so. Except for a pogo-ing threesome in the center of the floor, the audience was a fairly subdued one. When one of the hoppers bumped into a guy next to him, the guy clearly looked annoyed).

They're one girl and three guys, the men in gangster black dress shirts and ties. The girl, vocalist Masami Iwasawa, was also in a black jacket but with a white blouse, and wore three red glass stones, one in a hairpin, another in her jacket pocket, and the last a ring. Her hair was medium-short and light brown, and I was surprised to see later several girls with the same look, it being unclear to me whether that was in homage to her or was the fashion of this scene.

Masami was a lefty who played a white left-handed guitar. Though the three guys were very skilled, she was obviously the center of the band, the one who writes all the songs. At the end of song phrases, she'd whip her neck and torso back to move away from the mike and swing with her guitar. She has a small face with little features, but her singing voice is a little deeper than you'd expect to come out of a face like that. It's a distinct voice that sounds earthy, maybe even muddy, if mud shined and could make you drunk. She can, at times, run through lyrics rapid fire, but it seems that that's just an extra vocal flourish that she does sometimes rather than the main attraction.

Between their hard-driving 50's-sounding rock and pop numbers, when the band talked they were almost incongruously laid-back and a bit silly. At one point, the bass Abe-san said how he bought a new digital TV because his old analog one broke down, but he didn't discover the malfunction until he saw a movie that was supposed to feature a yellow car, but the one on the screen was red. When he figured out his TV no longer displayed yellow, he says he went out to buy a sheet of yellow plastic to paste on to the screen. That didn't do the trick; it just made everything look dark yellow. So he bought the new TV. And so on.

Then, mellow talk done, they'd jump into their great songs, whose words sound like what a girl thinks, deep down, but rendered poetically. The only thing more I could have wished for was that they play one of my favorite songs of 2008, “An Overlap Between Literature and Real Life”, which I wrote about in a previous post.

This is a great band. Why didn't I think that back in 2004? One thing is that Hoover's Ooover was a different group back then—except for Masami, all the members have changed over the years. Maybe was that the way the band used to be? Maybe they became more confident? Maybe it was just a bad night for them? Or for me? Mysteries.

Sexy, Retro 'Lady Spade' At O-Nest

2009-02-18T05:48:00.000-08:00

Lady Spade dance to 'sexy and cute spy music'.

Lady Spade sing 'retro Japanese cabaret style'.

Lady Spade put on 'dramatic and cinematic entertainment shows'.

Lady Spade look like girls imitating 60's Japanese idols who were imitating Motown stars.

They go-go severely in see-through skirts.

They are serious, flirtatious, funny, retro, and out of this world.

They are jet-set superstars-in-the-making.

They stop mid-dance-pose to let worshipping fans photograph.

The Lady Spade are planning world conquest at their secret underwater HQ.

***

This was a dancing, outgoing crowd at the O-Nest. Twenty-something fans of techno and pico pico pop, they were a different breed from the usual introverted live house music nerds. Which is what I am, but it was still good to see young guys who are different, who don't see anything strange about expressing their excitement, and who smile at strangers, even foreigners.

DJ-ing between band sets was Yuppa of Hazel Nuts Chocolate. What a high it must be being Yuppa. An illustrator, who's also released two wonderful albums, Bewitched and Cute. A fashionable girl who, on the side, spins funky records as a DJ. Apparently living fully the life of the Tokyo young (though of course it must have its share of boredoms and burdens). Guys gathered around to dance and see her DJ selections. On the mike she asked everyone to buy the DJ drinks, and the guys brought her beer, cocktails on ice, tequila shots, lining them up in front of the turntables, and she went through them all.

One thing I like about this scene is the people seem into exploring older music. The Lady Spade and their old spy movie-sounding tunes and kayoukyoku. Also at the event was Motocompo, a duo in day-glo stripe fashion who play sing, guitar and keyboard 80's new wave-sounding tunes. And I found a flier of a unit called Salome Lips who describe themselves as a 'Heisei kayou band' influenced by 60's and 70's kayoukyoku, mood kayou and movie music (Heisei being the era of the current Emperor's reign, started 1989). Maybe from a somewhat different scene, but Asakusa Jinta also makes brilliant music that borrows from streetcorner brass bands and other 19th and early 20th century sounds. There's a wealth of beautiful, surprising music out there. Musicians and music fans ought to pay them a visit.

***

Salome Lips' flier, by the way, contained an interesting reference. It was an advertisement for a record of theirs to be released in March, called Theme of the Atami Hihoukan. The flier somewhat artlessly translates 'hihoukan' as 'sex museum', though it literally means 'museum of hidden treasures'. And what are these concealed precious things? The treasured parts of men's and women's anatomy that don't normally see the day of light. The flier says these 'treasure museums' were built in the late-70's and early-80's in various onsen spa towns. The Atami museum mentioned still exists, and this being 2009, has its own website, which contains a layout of the displays, including: whale reproductive organs, 'figures' showing the '48 positions', ukiyo-e prints, among other things. Piped in the background in the museum is mysterious mood music that the flier says is hard to get out of your head once you listen to it. Salome Lips, in their record, are doing an “unprecedented, shocking” cover of this music, according to the flier. OK, they've piqued my interest!

Lucymin* Field Report 2009-02-08

2009-02-09T05:58:00.000-08:00

At the Que on Sunday night, after a show by a mellifluous male singer Takamori Yuuki and the joke-loving power pop quartet Stainless, advantage Lucy came on, the third and final act of the evening, and, at the risk of sounding a bit mad, I was totally swept into the performance from the first few acoustic guitar chords by Ishizaka-san. The song was 'Chikyu', earth, the first song I ever heard by this guitar pop group many years ago, in a compilation album called Killermont Street 2001. I remember being drawn into the song because of the bittersweet chords, played on an acoustic guitar with a sparkling sound, the interesting background noise of children at a playground, but mostly, the singing—a clear female voice, not that of an exceptionally skilled vocalist, but it had a free feel, seeming to be guided solely by the overflowing emotions of the singer, Aiko. A few more CD purchases, and I was smitten—the birth of a Lucy maniac. So, because it was my first, but also just because it's a classic, I've always gotten a thrill listening to 'Chikyu' played live.

Tonight's rendition, though, was something else. The five-person ensemble—vocalist Aiko, guitarist Ishizaka, plus another guitar, bass and drums—has seemed to have really come together after many months of making music together. Someone wrote on Mixi that when the musicians' eyes met while they played, causing them to smile, the person became tearful—I know how the guy feels. A band can be such a beautiful thing. A fog machine pumped throughout their show, and during 'Chikyu' the overhead lights turned dark blue while the spotlights faded, transforming them into what I imagined as dark sculptures in some marine kingdom.

The band are nice, charming, good-looking guys in person, but at times the stage beautifies them, so they are radiant. I think it reflects that they're living fully, ecstatically, for a short moment in that little space. After they played the rest of the evening's set—Hello Again, Weekend Wonder, Shiroi Asa, Memai, Shumatsu, and a new song written for that night, called February—I could've stopped by to chat, but this time I didn't, wanting to keep in my head for just a little while longer the image of them, a few yards away but in some different place, on the stage.

***

I didn't take any pictures, but here are good photos from another night.

***

*A Lucymin is a true advantage Lucy fan (it's a play on words—Lucy plus 'shimin', citizen). If you own all of their regularly available music, or have been to more of their shows than you can remember right away, or if you just really, really like their music, I think you can call yourself a Lucymin.

10 Favorite Japanese CDs Of 2008

2009-01-28T04:53:00.000-08:00

#10. Murmur
The Afternoon of the Marble Design

Japanese guitar pop is alive and well!

That's the conclusion I reach when listening to this lovely album by Murmur, the unit of a girl named Mai Tsuyutani. Mai grew up listening to bands like advantage Lucy, and her sound owes a lot to those great predecessors—the jangly, 60's influenced guitar sounds, the energetic rhythms—but she creates something different, helped by her feathery-light, spring-clear vocals.

#9. Asakusa Jinta
Singles

Continuing to create rousing new music inspired by old, jazzy Japanese music is the awesome Asakusa Jinta. The sextet didn't release an album last year, but instead put together a series of limited release single CDs that highlighted their overflowing energy and restless variety. The best of the lot is the intense “Tokyo-Sabaku De Jidanda”, a four-and-a-half minute rock explosion of hyperactive drums, demon-possessed horns and guitars, and a heavy, martial bass line. This is one of Japan's best bands now.

#8. Hoover's Ooover
Timer

I never really got Hoover's Ooover, until I listened to this mini-album, and even more specifically, the third track, “An Overlap Between Literature and Real Life” (as one might translate the Japanese title). I was converted. I proceeded to abuse my iPod listening to the quartet. It's a straightforward rockabilly tune with dexterous guitars and drums, but what really knocked me out were the words, sung lightly and conquettishly by vocalist Masami Iwasawa. It's about the escapades of a girl mixed up about love who wakes up “in a room like I've never seen before”, and feels she's degenerating, thinking of herself as useless like “stockings that don't match”. She's a flirt too: one part of the song goes, “Every year, the same lover—is it ok if it's not?/Loving only one person at a time—not necessarily so”—the qualifications purred. Forget all those boring songs about love and hope—this tune sounds much more real!

#7. Lantern Parade
Togisumasou

Who is this innovator, who writes beautiful tunes that sample existing genres but sound new? Lantern Parade's previous album, which was also released by Keiichi Sokabe's indie label Rose Records, was like hip hop with a Japanese art school flavor. In Togisumasou (which means 'sharpen your senses'), Tamihiro Shimizu, who is Lantern Parade, abandons rap for the most part, and instead chants repeated lines over samples of R&B and techno. That this sounds great reveals the peculiar talent of this unit.

#6. Perfume
Game

This Hiroshima-dialect-speaking, lip-sync-dancing trio took over Japan last year, becoming a household name and filling up the airwaves. It wasn't all hype, as Game proves. Yasutaka Nakata of Capsule certainly helped them a lot, producing them and writing all their music and lyrics. But Perfume breathed life into Nakata's first-rate material. These three are talented, maybe not necessarily foremost as musicians, but certainly as performers, with skills, charm and magnetism.

#5. Capsule
More! More! More!

Is it a coincidence the way that Capsule has been changing as Yasutaka Nakata spends ever more time working with Perfume, who become ever more popular? Capsule seems to have become the project where he makes the music he wants, without worrying (as much) about commercial success. And the music style of his choice is Daft Punk-like techno, so different from the Shibuya-kei pop the duo started out playing.

Capsule's previous album, Flash Back, was where the two first immersed themselves into techno, and I didn't get it—it seemed dry and artificial—but this follow-up works. Overall it's more melodic than Flash Back, and the luscious tune “Pleasure ground” compares with some of their best past material. (I think Nakata would make 99.9% of Capsule fans happier if he uses vocalist Toshiko Koshijima more in songs...) But maybe this just shows I'm finally getting accustomed to Capsule's techno transformation, and another stab at Flash Back would be rewarding.

Let me add that I always appreciate Capsule's high sense of style: this CD is beautifully designed, with bright, day-glow colors on black, and Nakata and Koshijima in their space alien sunglasses.

#4. Risette
Risette

My neo-acoustic fan friends tell me that while this album is good, Risette's past works were even better. Maybe that is so, but I have little way to find out—their previous albums are out of print, and the used market prices are exorbitant: one of their CDs was on offer for $250!

In any case, I'm happy with this in-print, ordinarily-priced album, my first exposure to the Risette sound: over ringing double guitars, the female vocals of Yu Tokiwa, who has one of the most distinct high voices I've heard—she sings like she's reacting with pleasant surprise to the voice that just came out of her throat. It's an unusual, but effective combination of sounds.

#3. Spangle call Lilli line
Isolation and Purple

To mark their tenth anniversary as a band, Spangle call Lilli line released not one, but two albums, and they're very different in character. The one I like more is the first, Isolation, which marks a departure from their former meandering post-rock: the sound now is almost classical, with a grand piano as a constant accompaniment to Kana Otsubo's soft vocals. The feeling of musical adventure is exhilarating.

I haven't listened as much to Purple, which sounded on the first few listens as more like old SCLL, though commenter Kozu said he likes this one better and that it ranks as one of their best. I ought to revisit it.

#2. advantage Lucy
Shiroi Asa EP and Sept papillons ont pris leur envol
(Japanese title: Tobitatta Nanatou no Choutachi
English translation: Seven Butterflies Ascended)

Every time advantage Lucy releases something new, all my time gets spent listening to the duo, in a happy mania. In 2008 I had a couple of such opportunities—a three-song EP and a collection of rare tracks came out.

Sept papillons, the rarities album, gives a home to the guitar pop group's scattered gems—songs in compilations, TV commercials, and out-of-print singles, like “Winny Sunny Friday”, “Weekend Wonder” and “Photograph”. Some Lucy fanatics may quibble that they already own most of the songs, but as their peer I'd counter that it's a good thing to have all these songs together in one place, where new people may discover them, and besides some of the re-mixes are masterly, especially that for “Photograph”.

Shiroi Asa shows us that Lucy are still superior artisans of singles (and the disk has a great white lyrics sheet whose letters were punched out, so if you hold it up to a light the letters shine—unfortunately, it was a limited edition CD and is already sold out). The mellowly-sung but emotional title track, in particular has been growing on me—one of those sublime Lucy lyrics that talks about the future while looking back with feeling at the past.

#1. Quinka, With A Yawn
Field Recordings

I love the concept of Field Recordings: a group of friends go up to the hills in Nagano, to record an album in the great outdoors and create something different from a regular studio-crafted record. But lovely idea or not, this wouldn't be my favorite album of the year if it didn't work. It does.

Field Recordings is simple and spare, yet at the same time, so inventive—the way the group combines acoustic guitar, piano, electric organ, fiddle, banjo, a toy box full of little percussion pieces, and the sounds of nature, birds, insects, a flowing river. A pop album, the group also tries out styles like country and folk. The melodies are gorgeous, and sung in relaxed happiness by Michiko Aoki, who is Quinka. “Rosemary”, in which she sings accompanied by an organ and unplugged guitar is one of the prettiest songs I listened to last year.

At the start of 2008 when Field Recordings came out I was entranced, but then it slipped mostly out of my mind for months, until it became time to think about my favorites of the year, and then when I listened to it again, suddenly I was enamored.

Laughs & Rock At Hardcore Chocolate

2009-01-11T18:58:00.000-08:00

For the past few years Japan has been going through a comedy boom that has given birth to a slew of comedians as TV personalities, some of them deservedly becoming famous, others not so much so. What the Japanese call 'owarai'—comic entertainment—is pretty different, though, from its Western counterpart. You don't see a lot of one-person standup comedy, and politics usually isn't a major theme. Instead, the dominant owarai style is two-person acts called manzai. These duos deal with myriad subjects in their acts, but the most common seems to be funny or twisted takes on everyday things. One guy acts as the fool, the boke, saying outrageous things, while the partner, the tsukkomi, tries to bring the discussion back down to earth, by correcting what the boke says, expressing disbelief, etc. (a lot of head-slapping is typically involved).

For example, in this video below, there's only one comedian—Jinnai Tomonori, whose biggest claim to fame is he married the ex-Miss Japan celebrity Fujiwara Norika—but it could be said that the zombies play the role of boke, while Jinnai is the tsukkomi:

Sometimes, Japanese comedy can be truly off the wall. Razzy Queen, would certainly be one example.

I saw the transvestite comic trio Razzy Queen, pictured at the top, at the Shinjuku Loft as part of an event called Hardcore Chocolate that mixed rock shows and comedy routines. It's not easy to describe Razzy Queen's act, but here's an attempt: the big, black-faced Razzy Queen, apparently called 'Cherry', takes the stage. Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' comes on. At the moment that Freddie Mercury sings 'mama~', Cherry whips out a package of cheap Mama spaghetti. He takes out the dry noodles, and takes off his frilly green skirt. He sticks the spaghetti between his butt and bikini. Then, at key song moments, Cherry jumps up, and with the force of his butt muscles, breaks the bunch of noodles into two.

In another part of Razzy Queen's act, Cherry strings a long rubber band through his nose holes, and gets a volunteer in the audience to pull and then, after a dramatic count-down, release the cord.

***

I was expecting Hardcore Chocolate to be a punk event, so was surprised to find that the audience was for the most part conservatively dressed, and there were lots of girls too. Owarai seems to be popular with Japanese women.

Probably the most 'normal' act of the night was a hard rock group amusingly named Who the Bitch, comprising two girls on guitar and bass, and a guy drummer. They were a fun, tight band.

The final act was my beloved Asakusa Jinta, whose retro Japanese/punk/horns&explosive ska bass performance was all-out as always. The crowd wasn't as big as usual, though, maybe because Shinjuku isn't their home turf, and the advanced tickets at Y3,000 was a little pricier than usual. (Vocalist/bassist Osho semi-joked that Asakusa, on the east end of Tokyo, is pretty different from Shinjuku, on the west side, that average incomes are lower in his part of town.) Although I don't dive into mosh pits much these days, I found myself missing all the action, like it wasn't a true Asakusa Jinta gig unless the youth all get overexcited at the end and hop and bump into each other. But then, lo and behold, during the final songs a few kids started slam-dancing, restoring normalcy. It's a strange thing that can be annoying when it happens, but you sorta miss it when it doesn't...

NYT On Koenji; Tokyo

2008-12-31T14:10:00.000-08:00

FYI, here's a nice, brief New York Times profile piece on the Koenji music scene. All those tiny yakitori joints and pubs do indeed look worth exploring...

Many years ago I considered living in Koenji but ended up in Sangenjyaya instead, and have stayed close to Shibuya ever since. I sometimes wonder how different my Tokyo experience would have been if I lived in Koenji or some different area. And would it have affected my musical tastes?

Koenji, for example, seems to be a good place for progressive, alternative and experimental music. Punk reigns supreme in Shinjuku. As the label 'Shibuya-kei' indicates, pop and electronica are the thing in Shibuya, as well as guitar pop and neo-acoustic. How much does your environment determine what sort of music you like? But I do think the sound of guitar pop bands like advantage Lucy and Swinging Popsicle would have been irresistible to me no matter where I lived in this city.

As I was pondering this I ran into a passage in the Natsume Soseki novel The Gate where the main character is thinking about the walks he takes in the city on his Sundays off, but he still never feels he's figured out Tokyo: “When he comes to the conclusion that, even though he lives in Tokyo, he's never really seen 'Tokyo', he always feels a strange sadness.” I know the feeling. I've made my way through many neighborhoods of this city (a lot of them as part of my gig-going trips...), but because Tokyo's so big, and ever-changing, it's hard to feel like you ever really know the place.

***

Thanks for reading, and for your support in 2008. I hope you have a happy 2009.

GREAT SONGS: advantage Lucy's "splash"

2008-12-29T16:35:00.000-08:00

Sometimes a song is so good you don't even need to know what the words mean. I love Elis Regina, though I only know a handful of Portugese words. And I'm a fan of Cantonese and Korean pop, with little clue what the tunes are about. But I still sometimes wonder whether others are as carefree about their lack of linguistic knowledge when it comes to Japanese songs—could a person who doesn't know Japanese enjoy J-pop? Happily, a recent comment someone left on Japan Live confirmed that, yes, a person indeed could.

Commenter rifat1984 wrote: "can you please translate [advantage Lucy's] song called SPLASH...i really love that song but i don`t know the meaning of it".

This also delighted me because I'd been thinking about writing about the song in question, advantage Lucy's "splash". The eighth song in Echo Park, the guitar pop duo's most recent album, 'splash' is a beautiful musical work. But what makes it one of my favorites are the words, and I've been wanting to let people know about them.

"Splash" takes place by an ocean, where the waves and the hot sand remind the singer of a lost friend. She wants to share with him a new song she just created ('I want to send to you a melody that was just born'), but he's 'so far'. It's a touching song in itself. But there's more to it. Like other songs in Echo Park, there's the spirit of a person hovering in the background, that infuses the music and lyrics with emotion.

That person is Takayuki Fukumura, the former advantage Lucy guitarist, who passed away while Echo Park was being made (and for whom musical friends each year throw a show that celebrates his life, as I wrote about recently). I've never directly asked them this, but I think that the person the singer looks for, somewhere in the waves, is Fukumura. The spareness of the repeated guitar passages helps highlight Aiko's soft but feeling-filled vocals.

At the same time I've shared the band's sadness about Fukumura, I've also been deeply moved by all the art that they created in memory of this friend of theirs. I feel lucky I was able to witness the band at work, in that emotional but fruitful year and a half between Fukumura's death and the release of Echo Park. "Splash" is one of their gems during the period.

***

I can't find "splash" on the net, but here's a YouTube video of another classic from Echo Park, "To-i Hi (A Distant Day)":

***

And here are the lyrics, with my approximate translation:

Kazashita te wo afurete, taiyou ga koboreochita
(Overflowing from my hands, the sunlight spills)

splash! Kimi to kuchizusanda melody ga mimi wo kusugutta
(splash, I hear a melody we used to sing together to ourselves)

Yosetewakaesu nami no dokokani, kimi no sugata wo sagashite, utau
(I sing, looking for you somewhere in the waves that advance and retreat)

Oshiyoseru hibi, natsukashii iro ni, nagisa wa nijimuyo
(The past comes back to me and colors the sea)

Hadashide yaketa suna wo kette hashiru dokomademo
(I run on and on barefooted, over the burning sand)

splash! Kimi ni umaretateno melody wo todoketai, so far...
(splash, I want to send you a melody that was just born, [but you're] so far..)

Yosetewakaesu nami no dokokani, kimi no sugata wo sagashite, utau
(I sing, looking for you somewhere in the waves that advance and retreat)

Oshiyoseru hibi, natsukashii iro wa
Kaze ni nami ni toke, subete wo tsutsumuyo
(The past and its colors melt into the wind and waves, and envelop all)

Kazashita te wo afurete, taiyou ga koboreochita
(Overflowing from my hands, the sunlight spills)

Hadashide yaketa suna wo kette hashiru dokomademo
(I run on and on barefooted, over the burning sand)

splash! Todoke tooku toki wo koete
nami no mukou e, sorano kanate e
hikarini sakie, kimi no moto e to, so far...
(splash, arrive, where you are, on the other side of the waves,
at the end of the sky, where light heads, so far...)

Seijin Noborikawa In Amagasaki

2008-12-13T17:55:00.000-08:00

Amagasaki isn't the first destination you'd think of when planning a trip to Japan. Right next to Osaka to the west, it's an industrial town lined with factories and not much else to see. But last weekend, I knew I had to be there. A legend was coming to Amagasaki.

The legend's name is Seijin Noborikawa. Widely regarded as one of the greatest living Okinawan musicians, he is a master of the three-stringed sanshin. On a whim, I bought one of his CDs, and was blown away by his sound: the exotic five-note scales, strummed with fiery precision by Noborikawa, gave me visions of a mystical island of Okinawa of ocean, jungle and dark nights.

But Noborikawa, for various reasons having to do with the history of Okinawa and Japan, doesn't like mainland Japan and so hardly ever comes over here to perform. He's 78-years old too—I wanted to witness his art while I still could. So I boarded the shinkansen to Osaka, got on another train that would take me to Amagasaki, and headed to the municipal culture center.

Outside of the 'Archaic Hall Oct', so named because it's octagonally shaped, a long line of people of all ages had formed, from babies to the elderly, and many had the shorter, wide physique of Okinawans. It was standing room-only by the time I entered the auditorium, but I didn't mind because I'm used to listening to music standing up. I was surprised, though, about how much interest there was in Okinawan music.

The four-hour event mainly featured performances by students of 'Noborikawa-style' sanshin playing. In the first set, for example, about fifty sitting sanshin players, with Noborikawa at the center, plucked Okinawan songs in unison.

Always pleasing the crowd were several tiny kids that played the sanshin, sang, and danced, including two brothers aged one and two who performed the eisaa drum dance.

Tetsu Irei, the Amagasaki-based organizer of the event, also did a sanshin duet with his little grandson, who was a prodigy on the three-stringed instrument. When the two dashed through a lightning-speed, electrifying passage, in any place but Japan the crowd would have been up on its feet in ovation, but here everyone waited politely until the end to applaud. The crowd also laughed when Irei scolded his grandchild for yawning on stage between parts.

***

Noborikawa, the legend, was a tiny man, who cracked jokes (he explained he played sitting down because 'as you get older, little by little you get so you can't get it up') and talked at length in incomprehensible Okinawan dialect. But in spite of his small physical stature, he dominated the stage with the gravity of an old master. Watching Noborikawa play the sanshin without strain, as if it was a natural thing for his body to do, I felt the weight of a long life devoted to the instrument. At one point his disciple Irei said Noborikawa had stopped drinking because he got cancer (he'd been smoking and drinking since he was a little kid in Okinawa), and his doctor told him he'd die if he didn't quit. Hearing that made me glad once again I made it to Amagasaki.

At the end of the event Noborikawa presented awards to students, but warned that he might not be able to read all of the citations because he didn't go to school. And, indeed, he stumbled over some of the kanji. I went out and bought a biography of his, and found out that it's not that there was no school for him to attend, but that there was a school but he skipped classes most of the time so he could practice the sanshin to impress his older friends. Sometimes he went inside Okinawan tombs to practice without being bothered (and no doubt giving a fright to any passersby who heard the sanshin strains from inside the tomb...). He was still a kid during the Battle of Okinawa in WWII, and climbing on top of a tree he was impressed by the sight of the gleaming B-29 bombers flying in for their muderous missions.

When the war ended, the people of the devastated island tried to recreate older, better days, and also express their sorrow, by singing and playing the sanshin. They had to make the instruments themselves out of tin cans and sticks. Later, the islanders found out that cut-up parachutes stolen from the GI's made for sanshin coverings that were almost as good as the traditional snake skin. This is the world in which Noborikawa developed his art. It's like the blues of Okinawa.

***

One final thing: at the event, some of the young performers did a skit recreating the mo-ashibi, the late-night youth get-togethers, up in the hills, that used to be a common thing on the island. They acted the parts of guys and girls sitting together, singing and strumming the sanshin over food and liquor.

The Noborikawa biography I read, however, suggested that these parties weren't quite as innocent as portrayed in this skit. One of the things about these gatherings was that when a guy and a girl took a liking to each other, the two would slip away from the party into the darkness, for a more intimate encounter. Marriages were arranged by parents in those days; at times, as a result of what happened at these parties, when the new wife met her husband she was already carrying a child. That sort of thing scandalized the upright islanders, and good kids weren't supposed to attend mo-ashibi. But Noborikawa couldn't resist the sound of laughter, youthful conversation, song and sanshin notes wafting down from the hills, and so he snuck out of his home to watch. And a sanshin player was born.

***

Here's a YouTube clip of Noborikawa playing a six-stringed sanshin (rokushin?):

***

I found this guy in front of a sushi restaurant in Amagasaki: a Hanshin Tigers-loving sushi chef!

Munekyun Arpeggio 2008

2008-11-28T21:30:00.001-08:00

Every year, on November 26, advantage Lucy, Vasallo Crab 75 and other bands gather together for a musical event called Munekyun Arpeggio, which celebrates the life of Takayuki Fukumura, guitarist and founding member of Lucy and VC75, who passed away on that date in 2003. 'Munekyun' was a favorite word of Fukumura's—it's that feeling you get when a cute or lovely thing bulls-eyes your heart. And the pop arpeggios that he wrote still make people feel munekyun. This year at the Que for the event were Karenin, Swinging Popsicle, and, of course, advantage Lucy and VC75.

All throughout the event there were subtle reminders of Fukumura's life. Advantage Lucy guitarist Yoshiharu Ishizaka played a cheap purple guitar and red amp that Fukumura once used. He played all of Fukumura's arpeggio parts. You could see vocalist Aiko become a little tearful while singing their newest song, “Shiroi Asa”, which she dedicated to him that night, and which contains the line: “Itsumo omotteta yorimo, kimi wa zutto soba ni itanda (much more than I always thought, you were always close by)”. Vasallo Crab 75 performed one of their best songs with a signature arpeggio part of his, “Vicious Circle”, from the album “Breathe”, the last VC75 album that Fukumura took part in. At the end of the show all the musicians got together to play a couple of his songs that they dug up as demo tapes left behind in his house. They joked that, by performing his unreleased songs like this they are making him into some sort of legendary figure, like John Lennon, even though he was a normal, funny guy, who, whenever he ordered ramen would transform the noodle soup into what looked like a failed chemistry experiment, dumping in vinegar, pepper, red ginger and so on until the soup's color was unrecognizable, and that's the way he liked it.

It was one of those rare, miraculous events where every act was excellent: the mellow pop/folk of Karenin (its singer Mike Matuszak also is a member of Tokyo indie pop group Lost in Found); the super-smooth R&B and rock of Swinging Popsicle; the sublime guitar pop of advantage Lucy; and the crowd-moving funk/pop of Vasallo Crab 75. A few times the musicians said they thought Fukumura was there listening to the performance, and I got the feeling that wasn't just a figure of speech but that they meant it.

Miniskirt At The Apple House, Or Hut Of Bells

2008-11-23T23:03:00.001-08:00

After seeing Japanese-German indie pop band Miniskirt for the first time in years last night, I was exploring the Web and unearthed this brilliant video of theirs. I love the part from 0:29 to 0:34 where band leader Edgar is singing at a sloping street of old homes somewhere, and a considerate Japanese lady in the background, seeing that a foreigner is being filmed, immediately moves out of the way to give the camera an undisturbed view. The cut at 0:24 to a cheering audience following footage of one of their shows is also inspired.

Miniskirt's Edgar, universally and affectionately described as a henna gaijin—a weird foreigner—is a film buff. He bought a projector so he could watch his one-movie-a-night on a big screen at home. He also bought a $5,000 Sony video camera to help make videos like 'Read Each Other's Minds', above. When I saw him at the show in Ikebukuro, he was setting up that camera on a tripod to film his show. Seeing me, an old acquaintance, he assigned me to be his band's video cinematographer, a few minutes before the gig was to start. I hadn't touched a video camera for decades, but I think I did OK—the only problem being that I didn't know that you could move the camera up and down in addition to sideways on the tripod, severely curtailing my ability to zoom in on the performers, and also limiting the camera moves to a monotonous left-to-right, and then right-to-left again. The Last Waltz, it was not. But maybe it was fine as a minimalist, indie effort...?

The venue of the event was a new cafe called Ringoya in Ikebukuro, the name sounding like Japanese for 'apple house', but rendered in the kanji as 'the hut of bells'. It was a comfortable cafe, all the guests asked to take off their shoes at the entrance like at a regular Japanese home, and good curry was apparently served, though I didn't try it myself. Its only problem, which it shares with similar venues, is it becomes cramped right away when people start coming in because of all the tables and chairs, and it was packed last night.

Miniskirt's Edgar had come up from Kyoto, where he's now a serious member of the Japanese academia, the other part of his life when he's not busy composing great indie music. Also performing were the duo Loyal We, Lost In Found, 4 Bonjour's Parties, and, from Australia, the Motifs (the wind and vibraphone section of 4BJ pictured below).

Lost In Chinatown

2008-11-22T05:46:00.000-08:00

I was supposed to see Mix Market and a promising young band from Aichi prefecture called SpecialThanks tonight in Yokohama, but I got completely lost on the way to the club near Chinatown and ended up missing it. My Tokyo live house knowledge doesn't extend to Yokohama, and I also have a pathetically underdeveloped sense of direction (for example, after having been there several times, I still managed to get lost on the way to the Basement Bar in Shimokitazawa, with a friend in tow...). The venue, F.A.D., I'd been to a few times before, but my mistake was to take the Tokyu line rather than the more familiar JR; I became disoriented emerging from a strange train station, and the vague, scribbled map I brought along didn't help matters. Soon, I was wandering deep in the belly of the Yokohama Chinatown, realizing for the first how big it was. Making things worse, on this first day of a three-day weekend, a significant chunk of eastern Japanese households appeared to have decided to get Chinese food in Yokohama, and the crowds slowed the search. After doing a few laps of the town and taking in the sights, I concluded that the live house probably won't be found anytime soon, and called it an evening.

It was sad because on the way over to Yokohama I listened to Mix Market's 'Shiawase No Elephant', was reminded what a great song that was, and was hoping it would be performed. SpecialThanks also seemed interesting and I didn't know how often they made it up to Tokyo.

Let this be a lesson for visitors planning to catch a gig in Tokyo (or Yokohama)...The clubs are often in obscure buildings in alleys in the middle of nowhere, and the city is laid out in a chaotic fashion as it is—apparently it was designed to get invading armies lost, something that I have no doubt is historically accurate. You need a good map for the smaller live houses. Study up on Tokyo Gig Guide.

Anyway, does anyone know how to get from the Motomachi/Chinatown station to F.A.D.? Should I have even been walking through Chinatown in the first place??

Duglas, Yeongene, 'Tokyo Bandits', Advantage Lucy At The O-Nest

2008-10-31T21:38:00.001-07:00

Very sadly, I missed advantage Lucy's 'one man' album-release show at the Que on the 24th, but the next night's gig at the O-Nest with the the BMX Bandits' Duglas Stewart, who was visiting from Glasgow, almost made up for it (though, if the world were perfect, I would have preferred to go to both...).

Great bands like advantage Lucy talk to you on stage, through their music. It's not all notes and beats. And we go to shows because we want to have a musical conversation.

In advantage Lucy's case the talk was a relaxed, quiet one, like you have after a big night. It was a short set starting with the somewhat sad song “Shumatsu (weekend)”, about spending weekdays alone and waiting for a weekend meeting (and now that Saturday had arrived, indeed, we got to meet advantage Lucy).

Apple-chomping, professorial-jacket-wearing Duglas' musical conversation might have been about making music into something to be shared rather than exclusive, with an international group of friends. So he brought with him from Seoul Yeongene, the singer and keyboardist of an indie band called Linus' Blanket, and joining him from Tokyo was Taisuke Takata, vocalist and guitarist of Plectrum, two long-distance friends and brilliant musicians.

I was touched by their rendition of 'Sing', the tune made famous by the Carpenters and written by Joe Raposo (who is no longer with us but whose music will live on for a long time, Duglas said), and which I believe I was forced to sing in a chorus in elementary school, but looking at the lyrics now I have to marvel at how simple and beautiful and inclusive the words are. Especially the line, “Don't worry that it's not good enough for anyone else to hear/ just sing, sing a song” should be a rallying call for independent bands everywhere. (Though, having said that, I do think that it usually takes lots of experience and dedication before a band becomes able to 'talk' to the audience, as discussed above.)

The O-Nest was packed and the crowd cheered when popular BMX Bandits were played, sung with plenty of gesticulation by Duglas. It made me giggle a bit, though, that one of the lines in a much-applauded song was something like,'I don't care about fashion, all I want is passion', sung of all places in Shibuya, the nerve center of the Shibuya-Harajuku-Daikanyama Intensive Youth Fashion Production Zone.

At least part of the crowd probably had come specifically to see Yeongene, who's become an even more charming stage performer since I first met her in 2004 in Seoul, this musical prodigy who apparently can play back songs on her piano after just one listen. Duglas obviously adores her—he said he and his bandmate both wanted to write a song for her to sing, after she visited them in Scotland, and so they ended up writing a song together, which Yeongene sang at the O-Nest, a lovely tune. Tall, nonstop-gesturing Duglas and petite, shyly stage acting Yeongene made a fun-to-watch duo.

Spangle call Lilli line's Isolation

2008-10-21T07:17:00.000-07:00

Spangle call Lilli line told me in an interview a few years ago that their next album will be something that challenges the listener and explores new territory. They lived up to what they said.

Heard within the first couple of bars of Isolation, the Japanese post-rock trio's latest album, is a new sound for SCLL—the grand piano. Until now they created their long, flowing songs mostly with the standard rock instruments: electric guitar and bass, synthesizers and drums. In Isolation, SCLL has gone acoustic. And the piano, played by a woman named Keiko Miyazawa, is a constant presence in this album, weaving melodies and accompanying Kana Otsubo's vocals. Another Ms. Miyazawa (sisters?), Hiromi Miyazawa, plays the violin and cello.

Spangle call Lilli line and acoustic mix well. The first song, “Inc.”, which is just the piano and Otsubo's singing, evokes jazz at a hotel lounge somewhere; mixed in is the noise of a bar crowd. Except this is hotel lounge in some parallel universe, where, playing unnoticed at the keyboards is a Blue Note jazz great. “Quiet Song” a few tracks later, is a longish song that slowly builds to a beautiful climax, like all those old tunes in albums like Or and Nanae, but a companion to the crescendo is, again, the piano. Strings are a flourish to the melody of the tune “Short Films”. And so goes the 37 minutes of Isolation, a short album that points to new doors of possibilities for pop.

This isn't actually the first acoustic SCLL. Their only live album, 68scll, featured a string section, which infused their classics like “Nano” and “Super Star” with even more sonic color. The trio's compositions already covered a wide expanse musically; it made sense to add to their depth with more instruments. But even with these new sounds, it's still obvious that what you are listening to is Spangle call Lilli line. At the interview, the band said their sound's true essence is the singing voice of Otsubo, and that indeed identifies the music as SCLL. It's that soft, clear voice that's a constant in SCLL albums, flowing through the jungle of their sound colors.

An unexpected album that adds a new dimension to SCLL, Isolation is my favorite album so far in 2008.

***

To add to the surprises, I've just found out that Spangle call Lilli line isn't done! They're releasing a second album in November, called Purple, and it and Isolation will mark their decade as a band. They said in their website that one of the two albums is supposed to evoke the feel of an old black-and-white movie. I assume that's Isolation. They also say that one album will come as a big surprise to old SCLL fans. I'm assuming again that this also refers to Isolation, but I'm very much looking forward to listening to Purple to find out.

Sukebans Vs Ladies (?) In Halcali Girigiri Surf-Rider

2008-10-16T07:10:00.000-07:00

Commenter san told me about this Halcali video for their song "Girigiri Surf-Rider" and I thought it was the greatest thing and watched it about 50 times in a row, but then when I told a friend about it, she didn't really get it.

So, maybe a few words of explanation are in order. First off, obviously it's a parody of "Beat It". But the gangs are girls rather than guys, and the first ones, seen in the cafe, look like suke-ban, with their long hair and exaggerated school girl uniforms. 'Sukeban' is a combination of 'suke', a derogatory term meaning 'woman', and 'bancho', school toughs.

The group that clashes with the sukeban I thought at first was supposed to represent Ladies, but now I'm not so sure. Ladies are the girl counterparts of the bosozoku, motorcycle gangs, and the ones in the video looked like they were in a biker-like get-up, but when I google imaged 'Ladies', the fashion was different--long, loose, primary-colored coats and pants--so maybe that's not what they are, and they either represent a delinquent subculture I'm not aware of, or the video creator just dressed them up that way to create a vivid contrast to the sukeban that would suggest the two groups aren't the best of friends.

The climactic show-down happens in a container port. First to attack is the biker jacket girl, flinging a couple of darts. The sukeban chief blocks those with her school bag, and you'll note that on the bag is a sticker saying "Namennayo"--don't treat me lightly. This alludes to the Name-neko, kittens in bad kid school uniforms that took the islands of Japan by storm in the early-80's (as seen below).

After a group dance battle, just as the duel between the two gangs' leaders is about to turn serious, Halcali stumble over to save the day. All they need to do is show them the moves to the Girigiri Surf-rider dance, and then peace will reign in this teenage town, with former rivals getting down together. As one YouTube commenter put it: "halicali can stop all conflicts with the power of dance". Go Halcali!

Nikko; Bug Noises; The Divine Warlord

2008-10-06T07:20:00.000-07:00

Do the Japanese have a unique ability to enjoy the singing of autumn insects? It's something people say around this time of the year. I have no idea whether it's true—I'm a connoisseur of these evening insect sounds, but then again I've been in Japan for so many years that I'm definitely 'turning Japanese', and have no idea whether that's normal...But really, I do think there's something haunting and musical about the repeated calls of bell crickets and other insects in autumn nights. As Madame Sei Shonagon said, the evenings are the best part of autumn.

***

I got to thinking about bug noises during a trip to Nikko, where I stayed at an inn that had an outdoor hot spring bath which, in the silence of the night, became something like a concert hall for crickets.

Despite my more than a dozen years in Japan it was my first time in Nikko, in one of those, 'I live in Paris but have never been to the Eiffel Tower', or 'LA's my home but I've never been near the Hollywood Walk of Fame' deals, where a place is such an obvious destination to visit that you assume you will make it there eventually but don't.

In any case, Nikko is famous for the Toshogu, the shrine for Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate. It's a gaudily-decorated, gold-filled building complex, quite unlike the 'wabi sabi' understatement of other major Japanese shrines and temples. At the local bookstore I picked up a book called “The Mystery Of Toshogu” which I read in my free time, and it had some fascinating explanations and theories about the shrine.

One of those was the issue of why Tokugawa Ieyasu, a warlord, was able to be made a 'god' by his descendants and to be enshrined in Nikko. The book said that in Japanese history, it wasn't unusual for someone with exceptional ability to be venerated as a divine being after his death; even the Shinto gods were thought to have started out as humans. One problem is that the word 'god' may be a somewhat misleading way to translate the Japanese term 'kami'—the Japanese word has more the sense of an extraordinary natural phenomenon, rather than an all-powerful creator of the world (and, in fact, big natural things, like mountains, have been worshiped in Japan as 'gods').

Tokugawa, as someone who was able to bring to an end the warring states period (even if on the coattails of his predecessors Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi) and launch an enduring era of peace, was worthy of becoming a god. In fact, he actually put it in his will that he wanted to receive that divine status, choosing to stay in this world, in Nikko, to make sure everything's going fine, rather than taking it easy in the Pure Land Paradise. Which, to the modern reader, seems like quite picky and ambitious directions on how to spend the afterlife...

At Toshogu, there are many sculptures that symbolize the peace that Ieyasu brought about. There are sculptures of the kirin, pictured on the label of the beer of that name, a hooved mythical creature that only appears when a sage is ruling and hides away when a tyrant is on the throne. There's also the baku, a creature with an elephant-like trunk; it eats nightmares, so samurai lords had it illustrated on pillows. It also eats iron, and when there's war and the metal is taken away to make weapons, it goes hungry. It too is, therefore, a symbol of peace. The Youmei gate in Toshogu has sculptures, in addition, showing scenes of children playing—something they could only do in peaceful times.

The book also talks about why Nikko was chosen as the site of Ieyasu's main shrine. To simplify the argument, one significance of Nikko is that it's directly north of Tokyo, the home of the Tokugawa shogun. A northern position was where the protector of people traditionally resided—ancient Chinese and Japanese palaces were on the northern end of towns. A ruler in the north has his back to the northern pole star, which hardly moves in the sky, and lends to him its unmoving stability. In any case, by being enshrined north of Tokyo in Nikko, Ieyasu would be able to look over his descendants as a divide protector.

Ieyasu was actually buried at first in Kunouzan in present-day Shizuoka prefecture, before his remains were moved to Nikko, in line with his will. The book says this is noteworthy because on the diagonal line between Kunouzan and Nikko is Mount Fuji, and 'Fuji' is similar in sound to the Japanese word for 'undying', 'fushi'—the path between Kunouzan and Nikko may have symbolized the passage of Ieyasu from living to divine status. Kunouzan, for its part, might have been chosen because directly west of it (following the path of the sun, an important object of worship in Shinto) is Ieyasu's birthplace, and going further, Kyoto.

Who knows whether this stuff is on the mark, but it's interesting to think about it while seeing the sights of Nikko.