"Master Donut"

I love so many things about this tiny flier, the size of a name card, that I picked up at a club somewhere in Tokyo.

First off, there are all the funny characters: it's not clear why the girl in ponytails and the guy holding a single look surprised, but in the case of the guy on the bottom left, there's no mystery--I'd be pretty terrified too if I woke up to find a black demon banzai-ing over my bed.

Then, there's the fact that the band performing is called Mountain Mocha Kilimanjaro.

And that the event itself is called MasterDonut. Why? The backside of the flier explains that this is a "cult party" where DJs spin only 7-inch funk, soul and jazz records, Mountain Mocha Kilimanjaro plays, and--oh here it is--during the event donuts are provided free of charge, and audience members can eat as much as they please.

Wacky Tokyo!

***

I also got my hands on a flier advertising a gig by a band called Soshiki Bo-ryoku Yochien (組織暴力幼稚園) , or, Institutional Violence Kindergarten. They are playing with a group named Very Ape, which describes itself as a 'hentai, cross-dressing, deafening-noise alternative rock band'. I think I should go to this show (at the Ikebukuro Shuto/Chop on July 8)...

2 Cool Stories On J-Music Making It Abroad

Stumbled across two great articles on a subject I should probably be more interested in: how Japanese bands might hope to sell better abroad, especially in the U.S.

One’s a Japan Times feature called “The D.I.Y. route to rock stardom” by David Hickey, one of the guys behind Japanese underground music site badbee.net.

The other is a blog post called “Missionary Position” by Ian, the creator of the music review site Clear and Refreshing.

The first thing to note about the Japan Times story is that it has a sidebar article talking about Fanime Con in San Jose that leads with:

‘A grand collision of two Japanese subcultures—anime and Japanese indie music,’ was one blogger’s take on Fanime Con 2006…

Three guesses on who that ‘blogger’ is…

The lead article looks in depth at the fact that while other Japanese pop culture exports like anime and manga are selling well in the U.S., Japanese pop music, with very few exceptions, is getting hardly any play at all. Some musicians are trying to break into the U.S. music market on their own, the article says, by networking through MySpace and other message boards and by crashing U.S. industry festivals like South By Southwest. But big-time success has eluded the Japanese musicians because they just don’t yet have the connections and PR know-how that U.S. bands do, the story concludes. It's an interesting read.

Ian’s blog post, meanwhile, is a penetrating look at the current state of Japan’s indie music scene, warts and all. Here’s his description of his disillusionment at finding out that the band Afrirampo wasn’t quite as out-of-this-world different as they first seemed:

When I first saw them, they were like a riot of colour through the sometimes rather staid and technically-obsessed Tokyo noise circuit, but as the other pieces of the Osaka scene jigzaw puzzle fell into piece around them, what had seemed like a radical inversion of muso orthodoxy became more of a generic repetition of a locally prevalant wackiness-at-all-costs, performance-over-content motif. The wildness and discarding if inhibition wasn't something magical, beamed in from Mars to save us all; it was in fact a strictly enforced code of conduct, without which it would be nigh impossible for any Osaka band to get noticed.

In his view the major problem with Japanese indie musicians is that they are splintered into strict musical cliques. That means bands don’t communicate enough with musicians with different styles, preventing them from cross-pollinating and making music with crossover appeal, which is essential if they are to make it outside of Japan. “A lot of responsibility lies with the Japanese bands to make a mental leap outside their self-defined boundaries,” he writes.

(By the way, the geeky Japanophile that Ian describes in his post shares uncomfortably many traits with me: they “pass their days [in Japan] in a kind of happy stupor”, he says. Check. They go to anime conventions, he says. Check. ((Though I went to this year's Famine for the music rather than anime.)) They are dedicated fans who are friendly with band members. Check. They write for keikaku.net. Sort of ((I contribute interviews)). They hang around blogs. Check. Hmmm.)

For Japanese bands wanting to make it big overseas, I’d add that the language barrier is a big obstacle. There are, of course, fans that don’t understand a word of Japanese but still love J-Pop. I myself like songs in Korean and Cantonese, two languages I don’t speak. But the sad truth is that for many, lyrics in Japanese or any other language they don’t understand are a turn-off. Japanese bands could do songs in English, and many do. But then there’s the problem of pronunciation—it’s often hard to understand what is being sung. Plus, because English isn’t these singers’ native language, it's harder for them to sing with emotion. In Japan you don’t find a lot of bands like The Cardigans that aren't native speakers but have flawless English.

With anime, what leaves the biggest impression is the art, so that it doesn’t matter that much if the voice-overs sound strange or there are subtitles. And on top of that, Japanese anime has its own distinct style, whereas, for the most part, Japanese pop music imitates music from Europe and North America.

Maybe eventually more Japanese musicians will appear that sing like native English speakers and have their own style that appeals to foreigners. Or, maybe, there will be a revolution in global pop sensibility that will make Japanese music so cool that kids will want to buy it even if their knowledge of the Japanese language is limited to ‘sushi’ and ‘karaoke’. I won’t be holding my breath.

The thing is, I just don’t get that excited about how many CDs Japanese bands are selling, because I’m not in a band and don’t run a record label, and I like the music for the music and not for its popularity. If a band is good, it doesn’t matter to me whether they sell out multiple nights at the Budokan or they only get a few people to come to some tiny café on the Inokashira Line. Having said that, it is a good thing if more Japanese bands are traveling abroad, creating MySpace pages, offering MP3 samples on their web pages, and doing other things to make themselves more accessible to audiences outside of Japan, because, as I hope it is clear to regular readers, I do want people to know about good Japanese bands.

Strawberry TV Show Meets Advantage Lucy

Last week was a good week for advantage Lucy fans—they did two shows within a few days of each other. Of course, I went to both.

The more interesting gig was the one on Saturday at the Shimokitazawa Que, featuring two groups from Seoul: Strawberry TV Show and Mongoose. Strawberry TV Show was especially wonderful. They are a seven-musician group that plays jazzy R&B and consists of guitar, bass, drums, keyboard and three dancing chorus girls, who, along with the woman on keyboards, wore matching, bright, polka-dotted summer dresses. The chorus trio was the chief attraction: they were pretty, looked like they were having fun, and their singing voices melted together pleasantly as if they were meant for each other, like strawberries and vanilla ice cream.

But after the show I had drinks with Strawberry TV Show and the other bands and found out that maybe the Que show wasn’t as fun for them as they made it look. In fact, it was probably nerve-racking. The problem was a familiar one in Tokyo: club audiences are often pretty subdued, not cheering much and clapping only quietly. To the Korean musicians, the low-key response must have felt like they weren’t going over well. I knew from going to shows in Seoul that an unknown band from abroad gets a much louder, more welcoming response from the audience. But in truth, that was just the Tokyo crowd being their usual selves, and the Japanese musicians tried to tell them that but I’m not sure if they were believed.

When I chatted with Strawberry TV Show they asked me what I thought of their performance, and when I replied “Cute!”, I gathered from their expressions that wasn’t the best answer. Maybe I should have said something about the music, which I did like enough I was ready to buy their albums and was disappointed to hear that the first CD wasn’t coming out until August at the earliest. Still, I stand by my view that this is a cute band—one of the cutest I’ve ever seen.


Strawberry TV Show

***

During advantage Lucy’s set at the Que, in front of me in the audience was a girl who kept on explaining to two guys she was with that Lucy was exceptionally good that night, which I found annoying, because I’ve been to most of their shows recently and I know that they’ve been playing at a consistently high level and the Que show was certainly no fluke. In their laid-back way, they’ve been intense these last few months. Guitarist Ishizaka-san said they are aiming to release an EP in August, and it does feel like a new work is around the corner (it’s certainly not years away).

At both the Que show and the O-Nest gig earlier in the week, they played a new song called “Late Show”, a lovely, quiet tune that starts out sounding bossa nova (they say they are working on lots of quiet songs now). At the Que show one of the Strawberry TV Show girls joined them in singing “Nanaramia”, a relatively obscure song from the album Station, a song that’s like a simple kid who doesn’t stand out in the schoolyard of advantage Lucy’s collected works, but it’s still a beautiful tune that shone in a different way when sung as a Korean-Japanese duet.

***

For the record, Vasallo Crab 75 and Condor 44 also played at the O-Nest show, and Gomes The Hitman and Mongoose performed too at the Que. They were all great, good enough I can write a post longer than this about each if I had the time.


advantage Lucy with Strawberry TV Show girls

A Store Called Janis

A long time ago, before iTunes and MP3s, before even CDs were invented, in the Era of LPs, there were record rental stores in Japanese cities where kids borrowed LPs to take home and tape. In Tokyo in the 90’s, one of those stores, called Janis, helped create a music scene.

Janis was one of the few (the only?) stores in Tokyo that stocked LPs by bands like the Smiths, Aztec Camera, Prefab Sprout and other New Wave and neo-acoustic artists. Guys like Keigo Oyamada and Kenji Ozawa, who formed the influential band Flipper’s Guitar and helped launch the Shibuya-kei scene in the 90’s, devoured Janis’ Ochanomizu store catalogue. They also left notes on comment cards on albums explaining what the music was like and whether it was good. These notes were the guiding lights for aspiring Tokyo musicians in the 1990’s trying to get a full view of all the good, new music coming out of Europe and North America at the time.

One of the kids who frequented Janis was Yoshiharu Ishizaka, advantage Lucy’s guitarist and composer of its music. He said he bicycled down to Ochanomizu from Adachi ward, a one-hour trip, to rent records at Janis. Then, after going home and taping a record, he sometimes took ANOTHER trip to Ochanomizu to return one record and borrow another, listening on a Walkman to the just-recorded album on the way and back.

Can you imagine, all those hours of bicycling to get one metal tape of a rock album? It’s hard to in these days of instant music acquisition through the Internet. But still, I can understand that willingness to spend hours to find a new work by some musician, who, to you, is the most mysterious, coolest, most perfect musician there ever was.

Another friend of mine, DJ Kamaage, also rented records at Janis, but not at the Flipper’s Guitar hang-out Ochanomizu shop, and instead at one in Ikebukuro. There, there weren’t all the Flipper notes to help make renting decisions, so DJ Kamaage said he picked records based on how the covers looked, thinking that if the album art was classy, so must be the music (a reasoning I believe has an element of truth to it). The end result was that many customers at the Ochanomizu store developed a musical taste in line with Flipper’s Guitar’s, whereas the tastes of the regulars of other stores were more varied.

***

Janis still exists, but as a CD rental store. The above entry is based on a conversation I had over drinks, and I never personally went to any of the Janis’s, so I’m not sure if I got it completely right, and would appreciate it if you would let me know if there are any things to add or correct.

CHAT IN SAN JOSE 3: Miami

Miami's Ai Kajiya (PHOTO CREDIT: DAVID CIRONE / JAPANFILES.COM)

At the Fanime anime convention in San Jose, California I talked to a few of the Japanese rock bands that put on shows there (story here). I asked them all the same set of questions because I thought it would be fun to see how the answers would turn out differently.

The third and final group I interviewed was the two-girl electric pop/rap unit Miami. Ai Kobayashi and Ai Kajiya create music that sounds both contemporary (they rap over digital samples) and retro (Kajiya plays the violin and some of their melodies sound early-20th century). The two Ai’s that make up Miami are a duo to watch.

JAPAN LIVE: What was your first impression of the U.S.?

KOBAYASHI: The American audience was the greatest! Everyone’s expressions were dazzling. We really had fun.

KAJIYA: I felt the same way. Their power to have fun was tremendous, and we were able to do a very fun show too.

JAPAN LIVE: How would you describe Miami’s music?

KOBAYASHI: Music genre-wise, it’s electric pop. Our sound and everything else have a free feel.

JAPAN LIVE: Are there any American bands or musicians that have influenced you?

KOBAYASHI: I like the Beastie Boys. But I guess that’s about it. To tell you the truth, I’m not much of an expert on music, and I haven’t listened to all that much. If we’re talking about America, the Beastie Boys are clearly my favorite.

KAJIYA: None, in my case.

JAPAN LIVE: How did you come up with the name “Miami”?

KOBAYASHI: It’s just something that we thought up. We’ve never been to Miami in the U.S. and it wasn’t named after that. Japanese girls often have names that start with Ma, Mi, Mu, Me, Mo, and those names have a round, soft image. “Miami” has a round, cute feel to it.

JAPAN LIVE: Anything else you want to say?

KOBAYASHI: Well, the main thing is, thanks so much for listening to us and watching us. We will remember this fondly, and we want to meet all of you again.

KAJIYA: We were welcomed warmly, and so we were able to do the best live we could. We wouldn’t be doing this if not for people like you, and we want to work hard and have fun together with all of you.

***

You can listen to samples of Miami's songs on their MySpace page, and their music is available in MP3 form at JapanFiles.com.


Miami's Ai Kobayashi (PHOTO CREDIT: DAVID CIRONE / JAPANFILES.COM)

CHAT IN SAN JOSE 2: Swinging Popsicle

From left to right: bassist Hironobu Hirata, vocalist Mineko Fujishima and guitarist Osamu Shimada of Swinging Popsicle

On the sidelines of the Fanime animation convention (story here), I interviewed a few of the Japanese bands that flew across the Pacific to play there. I asked all the bands the same questions because I thought it might be fun to see the different ways they answered.

One of the bands I talked to was the trio Swinging Popsicle. If you are a J-Pop fan and have never listened to Swinging Popsicle, you’re missing out. They are a band that consistently makes some of the brightest, catchiest, most melodious pop songs in Japan. As their guitarist Osamu Shimada says, Swinging Popsicle is a group that “plays beautiful melodies, and treasures good melodies”.

JAPAN LIVE: What was your first impression of the U.S.?

SHIMADA: It's the first time in my life to come here, and I feel that while everything in Tokyo is cramped, here the roads are wide and there’s a lot of space.

HIRATA: The climate is very pleasant, everyone is kind, and there’s all this space. It’s a lovely place like I imagined it to be.

JAPAN LIVE: What was it like playing for an American audience?

FUJISHIMA: This is different from a normal music festival and the people that have come to see us are those that already love Japanese culture, so the atmosphere is warm, and it’s easy to perform. If we came here and no one knew who we were we would have been very nervous, and worried about how the audience would respond, but we knew there were people here who had listened to our songs on MP3s, so even compared with when we play in Japan we haven’t been nervous at all.

JAPAN LIVE: How would you describe Swinging Popsicle’s music?

SHIMADA: I think we’re a band that plays beautiful melodies, and treasures good melodies.

HIRATA: Yesterday an American guy asked me what were the words that came after “I just want to kiss you” in the song “I Just Want To Kiss You”, and when I said, “if I was there baby”, he said, ‘ohhh!’ And the fact that he asked me that means he probably wants to sing along, and really relates to the song. I’m happy that people feel close to our songs, and I’d like them to love our songs even more.

FUJISHIMA: We’re not a loud band, so if people want to go wild our music might not do the trick. I'd be happy if people enjoy our music for what it is.

JAPAN LIVE: Are there any American bands or musicians that have influenced you?

FUJISHIMA: A lot!

SHIMADA: I listen to the Beach Boys the most—I was listening to them just now. I listen to them every day.

FUJISHIMA: I listen to Laura Nyro a lot, and on the West Coast I often listen to A&M stuff, and I like soft rock. I've really been into Chicago post-rock music recently too. When I started out I really liked Madonna. American music has truly influenced me.

HIRATA: What got me into music and led me to take up an instrument was L.A. metal, which was popular when I was in intermediate school. Now I like music with beautiful melodies by people like, well, he’s a huge, but Burt Bacharach.

JAPAN LIVE: Anything else you want to say?

HIRATA: I want to come here again. I truly loved playing for all the people that came here and met me.

FUJISHIMA: I think if it were this festival, everyone would accept us next year too. If it were other festivals I’d feel nervous. I visited Los Angeles and San Francisco about ten years ago on a regular sightseeing trip, but compared to then, this time around everyone was nice and good things kept on happening to me.

SHIMADA: Everyone was warm, and easy to become friends with.

***

Swinging Popsicle's music is available in various places, including Amazon, CD Japan, and as MP3s in JapanFiles.com.

Some cool person has also uploaded a video recording of Swinging Popsicle playing at Fanime, here. It's not exactly a professional video, but you still get a feel for what they are like live (despite what Mineko says in the interview, you can really go wild listening to them live!).

CHAT IN SAN JOSE: Poplar

From left to right: Mai, Wadagaki and Shino of Poplar

I chatted with a few of the Japanese bands that performed at the Fanime convention in San Jose (story here), and asked them all the same questions.

The first band I talked to was Poplar, a trio that plays a unique style of music that might be described as experimental/retro-Japanese/hip-hop. They were also the most visually arresting group of the six Japanese bands that made it to San Jose: Mai, the female singer, always wore a yukata (a summer kimono), while Shino, the guitarist, kept his face hidden behind a red Mexican wrestler’s mask, never revealing his true identity.

JAPAN LIVE: What was your first impression of the U.S.?

WADAGAKI: What I felt right when I got here was that the sky is very big, and everything around me was of a larger scale than back in Japan. I felt big too.

JAPAN LIVE: What was it like playing for an American audience?

MAI: The way people responded to us was very direct. They didn’t hold back, and that was great.

JAPAN LIVE: How would you describe Poplar’s music?

SHINO: Back in Japan, people often tell us our music isn’t like anything they’ve listened to before. We ourselves have trouble explaining it. But it’s music that regular people can enjoy: Mai [sings] melodies, I do aggressive guitar parts, and we have both male and female vocals. You need to listen to our music to know what I’m talking about, but we frequently use Japanese scales, so there’s a lot of Japanese melodies.

JAPAN LIVE: Are there any American bands or musicians that have influenced you?

MAI: Yes, many. What got me into music in the first place is Hanson, but from there I listened to hip-hop, R&B, rock, and I used to listen to Red Hot Chili Peppers, melocore, pop…American music has really influenced me.

JAPAN LIVE: Anything else you want to say?

MAI: Listen to Poplar!

SHINO: If people get excited about us, we will be invited again, and we do want to come here again, so please listen to our CD.

***

Poplar's MP3s can be sampled and bought at JapanFiles.com, where they are currently topping the in-house charts!

Teenline & The Garage Rockers At The Shelter

The Shelter is a tiny, dark, dusty-looking basement of a rock club in Shimokitazawa that puts on some of the best shows in Tokyo. I went there to see a new group called Teenline.

Teenline's a band formed by bassist Chiharu after the split-up late last year of the group she was in, the great garage rock girl trio the Clicks. She got together with three guys from bands Mirwelts and Supersnazz, while the Clicks’ guitarist and drummer started their own group called Newbie.

These ex-Clicks girls are a part of a Tokyo music scene I’ve only recently started to get into, a garage rocker punk scene. Its supporters aren’t pure punkers—you never see mohawks and there isn’t much slam-dancing at shows. But they aren’t conventional Shimokitazawa rock musicians either—they have their own influences, which seem to center on 60’s to 80’s American and British rock and punk.

Like their idols, they act working class, whether or not they really are. Their drink of choice, for example, is happo-shu, the poor-man’s Japanese beer (equivalent, I guess, to malt liquor in the U.S.). I’ve never understood why people drink happo-shu. It’s about 100 yen (about US$1) cheaper than regular beer, and the first gulp tastes pretty much like beer. But then, there’s the aftertaste…it makes it abundantly clear you are drinking something different, a phony beer that tastes vaguely vegetal. Is the 100-yen difference really worth it? If you just want to get drunk, can’t you just knock back some cheap shochu? Not according to the garage rockers, who happily dive into the wannabe beer.

In fact, when I turned the corner that leads to the Shelter, I saw a loitering gang going through cans of happo-shu before the start of the event. Down the stairs in the club there was almost no one in the audience, but right before the music started the Happo-shu Proletarians came down, so that in the end there was a decent crowd.


High Vox

Teenline had invited three bands, High Vox, Beehive and Havenot’s, and all of them followed the same musical formula: loud repetitious passages of guitar power and barre chords, tight rhythm parts and passionate vocals, punctuated by guitar solos about three-quarter of the way into songs. It reminded me of grunge when grunge was a new thing, before it became huge. This was music you’ve heard before; these guys weren’t trying to create a new chapter in musical history. But what they lacked in innovation, they made up for in overflowing, captivating energy: their music makes you move.

In front of me in the audience was a group of well-perfumed ladies wearing silky, pleated skirts, and one of them, who was apparently a friend of one of the bands, showed the others how to do the “devil’s horns” hand sign, and all of them proceeded to stick out their pinkies, index fingers and thumbs in a studious manner.

They had come to see the second band, Beehive, which was led by an eye shadow-wearing glam singer who kept on calling out “Hello, TOKYO!” to the Shelter audience and otherwise acted like an arena rocker facing tens of thousands of fans, rather than tens of club-goers. A fun band.


Beehive

The most popular, and best group of the night was the Havenot’s, a trio that crashed non-stop through fast, short, intense hard rock tunes.

Teenline went last, and their show was less absorbing than the three that went before them, probably because they had less experience. Still, they seemed promising. Chiharu was the one girl in the quartet, and her three guy partners seemed to give it more rock ‘n’ roll horsepower than the Clicks had, though at the expense of the Clicks’ cuteness.


Havenot's

Japan Live Radio Updated; Rock 'n' Roll!!!

I've updated Japan Live Radio's playlist. This time the focus is on rock and punk groups like Art-School, Eastern Youth, Guitar Wolf, Triceratops, Noodles and Moga The 5 Yen, though there's also a regular serving of the usuals: Spangle call Lilli line, advantage Lucy, and my current faves including Supersnazz and Myuury. Rock on!

Anime Fans Meet J-Rockers In San Jose

Definitely not for the first time, I found myself last week watching a rock show with a crowd of people that were younger than me and dressed differently. But no one in the whole city dressed like these guys. There were chubby masterless Samurais, carrying cardboard swords the height of two adult males. There were Lolita maids in black lace, and schoolgirls in primary-colored school uniforms that don’t exist in real life. There was a whole battalion of galactic officers in sky-blue uniforms with gold sashes. And hundreds others like them.


I had come to San Jose, California, as a participant in Fanime, a convention that brought together thousands of anime fans for a few days of costume wearing, video watching, and animation merchandise buying. But I myself wasn’t there because of anime—my knowledge of Japanese animation ended around the original Gundam. Rather, I had flown from Tokyo because I found out that Swinging Popsicle and five other Japanese rock groups were going to be performing at the convention, and I wanted to see how that would turn out.

What it ended up being was a grand collision of two Japanese subcultures, anime and J-indie, that didn’t have much in common other than that they were both from Japan and were popular with the young. Probably not one of the twenty or so musicians from Japan were active fans of anime: seeing all the cosplaying youth, a member of Swinging Popsicle asked, how come no one is dressed up as Doraemon, or Atom (Astro Boy in the U.S.)? And if the anime fans had their choice, they probably would have preferred to watch a heavily-made-up, big-haired visual-kei group rather than these understated indie rockers.

In spite of that, the shows were a success, no doubt much to the relief of Steve Laity, the guy behind JapanFiles.com, who brought the bands over from Japan for Fanime (whose organizers were looking for a form of Japanese music entertainment at the convention that was a bit more affordable than some big-name visual-kei band).

Two of the three shows were held in a depressing, fluorescent bulb-lit meeting room of the sort usually used for a business presentation. The sound was lousy. But the room was packed both days, and the crowd was a squealing, head-banging, devil-horn waving mass of enthusiasm. In fact, for once, it made me a bit proud of my fellow Americans. Listening to these bands for the very first time, these young anime-worshipping fans, with little exception, appeared to intuitively grasp the structure of songs, knew where the songs would climax, and where they should let out their rock ‘n’ roll roars and screams. Rock music was in their blood. “You are the greatest audience in the world!” bassist Hironobu Hirata of Swinging Popsicle said at the end of one of their shows, and I think he meant it (and he got even more cheers for that remark).

Of the six bands that played at Fanime, Swinging Popsicle seemed to be the only ones who had at least a few previous fans. With their crisp, heartfelt performances at the convention, they made new fans of their melodic, sometimes jazzy pop music. All 80 of their CDs they brought with them to the U.S. sold out by the second night. And whenever they walked through the convention floor, new fans, some in Lolita uniforms, rushed over for autographs and photos together.


Swinging Popsicle

I liked the five other bands too, comprising Mothercoat, Goofy Style, Up Hold, Miami and Poplar, but the last two I thought were especially interesting. Miami was a two girl electro-pop unit, with one of the girls playing classical violin, and were like an underground Puffy or Halcali. At the big Civic Auditorium show on Saturday night, the girl who doesn’t play violin caused much consternation among the auditorium staff by whacking the crash cymbals of the drum set with her mike, and standing up unsteadily on a table to play her sampler (the photo at the top).

Poplar was a trio that featured: a rapping Japanese guy; a girl in a kimono who wailed melodically; and a guy in a bright red Mexican wrestler’s mask who did guitar solos. Their songs used traditional Japanese scales, lending them an exotic Asian feel.

Surprisingly, the most popular of the six bands turned out to be Mothercoat, one of the more eccentric acts I’ve seen in Tokyo (its vocalist stumbles around on stage as if in a straitjacket). I guess it was their virtuoso instrumental playing and wild stage antics: at the Civic Auditorium show, the singer jumped off the stage at one point, and was chased by a couple of over-protective staffers as he ran a lap around the audience. At the end of that show, a long line formed to get autographs from him, a sight one would never see back in Tokyo, because, well, they aren’t THAT popular over here.



***

I flew across the Pacific Ocean to take part in Fanime, but I exchanged very few words with its actual anime-loving participants, and I figured there was probably little common ground between us. I couldn’t see myself getting into the mildly Lolita-erotic, offbeat humorous, brightly colored world of contemporary anime. The cosplayers, in particular, were true weirdos, in the way that Trekkies at conventions are weirdos. Still, I felt sympathy for them. Every once in a while, outside of the convention center, where a constant stream of costumed anime fans walked between their hotels and the convention, there would be some redneck in a passing car, who would yell out a quick insult to the anime fans, as rednecks do. It was the same sort of epithets hurled at punk rockers in an earlier era, or at any group of people who have tried something new and different. Maybe there was going to be some great new thing to come out of this scene, and in the meantime, the convention was a place for like-minded people to meet and party day and night (which they did). At least I knew that many of these guys have good taste in music.

Compilation Albums (LOVE Them)

When Japanese indie record labels like K.O.G.A. and Blue Badge release compilation albums, I grab them right away. I LOVE compilation albums; they are a big part of my music diet.

The albums themselves are often a mixed bag—some songs are good, but others aren’t and are destined to be fast-forwarded over every time after the first listen. Still, I listen to these albums because they are where I most often find the brilliant band I knew nothing about and seemingly came out of nowhere, but plays that one dazzling, rocking song that makes me want to know everything about them and go to all their shows.

It is after all by listening to a compilation called Killermont Street 2001 a few years ago that I made my happiest Japanese musical discovery to date—the discovery of a group called advantage Lucy, who contributed a song named “Chikyu (faraway version)” to the album (a side-note: any true Lucy fan should try to get a hold of this album because it contains a beautiful, mellow version of “Chikyu” that must be listened to, with a recording in the background of European kids playing in a park somewhere, giving the song a dreamy feel).

Listening to compilation albums is also a way to see a snapshot portrait of a musical era and some of the bands that were active at the time, and recently, by buying a couple of albums that include early songs by advantage Lucy, I’ve been able to better understand the mid-90’s Japanese guitar pop/neo-acoustic scene.

The two albums I bought through Yahoo’s auction site were Splash Dive Cream Cone Compilation Vol. 0 and Pop Jingu Vol. 1. I’d been looking for the two CDs for a while, because both contain songs by advantage Lucy (called Lucy Van Pelt at the time), but both were out of stock. As someone who wants to listen to every single recorded version of all Lucy songs (and advantage Lucy is one of those cool, creative groups that make a new version of a song each time they contribute it to a compilation), I was excited to see those two albums offered on auction (though I later found out that I can also buy both on Amazon Japan’s used CD market—how easy things are in the Internet Age!).

An added joy to listening to these albums came from the fact that I was able to discover some great old bands. Both Splash Dive and Pop Jingu, for example, included songs by two bands I didn’t know about but I truly dug, Peatmos and Kactus. I looked up Kactus on the Net, and found out that the group disbanded a number of years ago, and an American member of the band went home. I’m not sure what became of Peatmos, a band featuring a female vocalist with an unforced, ethereal voice, and a crunchy acoustic guitar sound.



Splash Dive, which shows a somewhat homoerotic photo of a pool scene on its front cover (and a, um, COLORFUL photo on its back cover, shown above), includes other interesting stuff. One is a song by “Guitar Bader” which I assume is a misspelled rendering of Guitar Vader. It also has a song by “Cymbals” called “Happy Time”, but I’m not sure as to whether this is a song by THE Cymbals, since it is more hard rock than the pop of early Cymbals, features a male singer rather than Toki Asako, and the album itself came out in 1997, which means it preceded THE Cymbals’ debut album, released in 1998.

Meanwhile, Pop Jingu, with an out-of-focus picture of a forlorn-looking retriever on its cover, includes one very remarkable song: “Color Is Navy”, by Maples. Why remarkable? Because “Maples” was the name of the one-person unit of advantage Lucy singer Aiko, in which Aiko sang and played the guitar alone. As far as I know this is the only recording of Maples. It’s good—simpler and sleepier-sounding than Lucy songs. The album also contains songs by bands like 800 Cherries and Color Filter.

The two albums were both released nearly a decade ago, in 1997, but they still sound fresh. The type of music recorded in them may have fallen out of fashion to some extent in Japan, though there are still die-hard fans and bands that play for them. I like this music because it isn’t pretentious, can be played by just about any group of people with guitars, but the end product is often surprisingly gorgeous and memorable. I’m waiting for more Splash Dive’s and Pop Jingu’s.

Supersnazz, 5.6.7.8's, Mad3

Friday night in Kabuki-cho, Shinjuku—Dodging the African sex-club touts and weaving through the weekend crowd-thronged alleys, I made my way to the Loft, to see the 5.6.7.8’s, Supersnazz, and Mad3. It had been a while since I was last at the Shinjuku Loft, the king of Japanese live houses, not the biggest, but still the country’s preeminent venue, where even Southern All-Stars, the Toyota Motor Corp. of Japanese pop bands, once played.

I went to the show because I wanted to see the 5.6.7.8’s, a female trio whose biggest claim to fame is that one of their songs was used in Kill Bill. ‘Supersnazz’ also sounded familiar, and I wanted to see what they were like.

At the loft, there were more foreigners than just about any Tokyo gig I’ve been to—I guessed that was because of the 5.6.7.8’s Kill Bill fame as well as the fact that all three groups were fairly well known abroad. There were also dozens of Japanese rebel Brit-punkers, all wearing the same clothes—Ivy caps were the headgear of choice, and many had big chains hanging out from their pockets, connected to their wallets so they don’t get lost in the mosh pit.

The 5.6.7.8’s went first. They affected some in the audience like a pleasurable electric shock: a tiny Japanese girl in front of me screeched every time the band named the next song or played an intro to a song she liked, and she proceeded to hop around maniacally to the music. My reaction to their music wasn’t quite as intense, but I did enjoy it; their tunes were heavily influenced by 50’s rock, rockabilly and surf music (I think I read somewhere the numbers in their name stand for the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, their favorite musical decades).

Supersnazz was next, and this quartet completely knocked me out. A Supersnazz fan was born Friday night: me.

It wasn’t that Supersnazz was playing the sort of music I’d never heard of before; in fact, their 80’s-sounding garage pop-punk was eminently familiar. They played music that’s formulaic, but it’s a formula that I never get bored of no matter how many bands I listen to going over similar territory. It’s the hamburger of music: the ingredients may be more or less the same but there’s still the good and the bad, and when it’s really good, you get a craving for it from time to time, for all time. Two recent favorite bands of mine, the Kitchen Gorilla and myuuRy, also are these kinds of bands.

The group consists of two orange-haired girls, the singer and the bassist, and two black-haired guys, the guitarist and drummer. The singer, ‘Spike’, looks like a Japanese Chrissie Hynde with a Steven Tyler-like mouth. She bops around on stage, belting out garage punk, while between the song parts the guitar guy RIPS out solos. I found out later this band has been around since 1990. True veterans—I went out and bought a CD of theirs right away, Invisible Party, the first of many of theirs I think I will buy, and this show is also likely to be the first of many that I’m likely to see.

When the final band, Mad3, started playing, the front section of the crowd turned into a wild mosh disaster zone, and the spectacle was entertaining enough, and the band was good enough, that I considered staying for the whole set, but I decided to take off after a few songs, back through the grime and bright lights of Shinjuku on a weekend night. (Check out an insane photo of theirs here. And here's a good photo of Supersnazz.)

Japan Live Radio Updated; Thoughts

I’ve been adding about a dozen songs at a time to Japan Live Radio’s playlist, and taking out a dozen tunes at the same time, and now the playlist contains completely different music from when I started.

Although I’m an utter amateur at this, I’ve had fun. A couple of people have even rated my radio their favorite, which is flattering (and quite undeserved, honestly, considering all the radio stations out there where people put in real work, but more on that later…).

Live 365 is an American system, and being American it’s obsessed with ratings. So, you can rate each radio station you listen to, and you can also give a thumb’s up or down to each song you across.

Seeing how people rate the songs I play on Japan Live Radio has been fascinating, and in some ways mystifying, and even, disconcerting. It made me see why Top 40 radio ends up broadcasting songs like they do: people like flashy, short, easy-to-understand songs with some sort of twist. With some songs I could see why people wouldn’t like them, because they are long, eccentric, raw, etc. etc. But with others, I just couldn’t understand where people are coming from. For example, Judy and Mary’s “Lollipop” was rated pretty low. How could anyone not like “Lollipop”??

I personally like every single song I play on the radio. When a great tune I’d forgotten about comes on my iPod on shuffle mode, I make a note to include it in the radio later on.

Right now, the playlist usually contains about four hours worth of music. I was looking through Live 365’s bulletin board, and I read that hardcore broadcasters often have several playlists of dozen hours or more, and they spend hours each day putting these lists together. Not me…I just wouldn’t have the time. I’m not sure if sometimes people end up listening to the same sequence of music listening to my radio at different times, and if they do, whether that gets them bored. If they do and it does, I’m not sure what to say, except, maybe you ought to also listen to some of the other stations? I’ve found some great stations that play music I would usually never listen to, like salsa, exotica (Tiki lounge music), Bollywood soundtracks, and so on.

The playlist now on the air includes several cool post-Shibuya-kei electro pop acts such as Cubismo Grafico Five, Yukari Fresh and PineAM. I’m not allowed to publish the current playlist, but below is the historic first Japan Live Radio playlist, which was pretty girl pop heavy. If you missed any songs that you wanted to listen to, or you want to listen to a song again, let me know, and I’ll stick it back on the playlist:

FIRST JAPAN LIVE RADIO PLAYLIST

1. advantage Lucy – Splash
2. Spangle call Lilli line – U-Lite
3. MissWonda – Ageha
4. Supercar – Storywriter
5. Qypthone – Something Valuable In me
6. Clammbon – Pan To Mitsu Meshiagare
7. Swinging Popsicle – Something New
8. Plectrum – Don’t Tell Me A Lie
9. The Automatics – Secrets
10. The Kitchen Gorilla – Sensation
11. Jimmy Pops – Ballroom Riot
12. Mix Market – Going My Way
13. Teeny Frahoop – She Is Baby Panda
14. Lucy Van Pelt – Christina
15. Lost In Found – Radio 24
16. Cymbals – Do You Believe In Magic
17. Tornado Tatsumaki – Atom
18. 4 Bonjour’s Parties – Il Cortile Grigio
19. Gomes The Hitman – Tokyo Gozen Sanji
20. Hartfield – Strangers When We Meet
21. Plectrum – Cherry Boy 1994
22. Orange Plankton – Mizuumi
23. Swinging Popsicle – Satetsu No Tou
24. The Automatics – Yesterday’s Children
25. The Clicks – Magic Of White
26. Teeny Frahoop – Inside Of Theatre
27. The Kitchen Gorilla – O.K.
28. Orange Plankton – Atama No Uchu
29. Hartfield – 16 Lovers’ Rain
30. Misswonda – Arabesque
31. Spangle call Lilli line – sss-urp
32. Tornado Tatsumaki – Best Tight Tricolor
33. Comeback My Daughters – Seasons And Silence
34. Contrary Parade – Happy End
35. Gomes The Hitman – Te To Te, Kage To Kage
36. Orange Plankton - Yofukesugi

Plectrum+Las Vegas+Round Table

It’s not often that I enjoy, from beginning to end, a Tokyo rock show featuring more than one band. Oftentimes, only one group is good, and the rest are passable or worse. If a band I don’t know about turns out to be brilliant, it feels like a minor miracle, but that doesn’t happen very much. And neither is it a frequent occurrence for every band on a bill to be great. But that was the happy situation at the Shimokitazawa Club Que on Friday night, in a show featuring the groups Plectrum, Round Table and Las Vegas.

The thing these three bands share is plentiful experience. Plectrum is celebrating its tenth year as a band. Las Vegas is a unit created by a member of Great3, which has been around even longer than Plectrum. I’m not sure how many years Round Table has been in existence, but I guess it’s about a decade too.

All those years make a difference. First off, if they weren’t good they probably would have fallen away from the scene long ago. And as the years pile up, so does their experience. A performance by a veteran band simply feels different, from the opening few seconds of the gig: it’s tighter, and it draws the audience in more, and immediately.

Rock fans (and the music press and record labels) tend to spend a lot of time looking for the Next Big Thing, which is fine, as long as one keeps in mind that the Previous Big Thing and Big Thing Before That are not only good, but may actually be better because of their experience.

Having written all that, I have to say that Round Table’s show surprised me—I knew they were good, but either I’d forgotten, or didn’t fully realize before, just HOW good they are. A duo consisting of Katsutoshi Kitagawa, the guitar guy, and Rieko Ito, the keyboard girl, they brought along a rhythm section and a guy on the congos, and did a show that was about as funky as I’ve ever seen in a Tokyo pop show. It was obvious they were having a blast—Ito wrinkled her brows in the way that musicians do when they are focused completely on keeping a perfect jam going.

Next up was Las Vegas, who was a regular rock band the last time I saw them couple of years ago but appeared to have become a DJ/trance/club music act, and they set up their equipment to the side of the audience rather than on the stage. I don’t know much about DJ music, but it seemed like they were trying interesting new things and I enjoyed it, even if their 40 minute set only consisted of two ‘songs’.

And then there was Plectrum. These guys are a perfect illustration of what I mean when I say a veteran group’s gig feels different right from the start. There’s intensity, even if they don’t begin loudly or fast. They are also all fabulous musicians: lead guitarist Akira Fujita and bassist Manabu Chigasaki both play as supporting musicians for major acts; Mikiya Tatsui, the drummer, has an explosive style, and likes to show off his moves on stage. But Plectrum wouldn’t be Plectrum without its lead vocalist Taisuke Takata, who is pictured above. A natural entertainer, he has an unerring ability to get the crowd giggling with little jokes between songs, but then turn around and deliver musical performances of true passion. After the show, Takata told me that he writes one song a day, humming the melody into his mobile phone—songs are like diary entries for him.

These three bands are all worth seeing if they ever come your way.

Advantage Lucy In Niigata

I went to Niigata over the weekend to see advantage Lucy.

A bullet train took me to the city on the coast of the Sea of Japan, about two hours from Tokyo. It’s famous for three things—rice, sake and fish, and during my stay I had a lot of those three, the holy trinity of Japanese cuisine.

In recent months Niigata has also been in the news as the place where several Japanese people were kidnapped and taken to North Korea a few decades ago (Pyongyang only recently admitted to the abductions). Friends jestingly warned me that if I went to the beach I should watch out for kidnappers from the sea—but walking on the sand next to the dark blue-green sea, my thoughts were more on what fish would come out of the ocean and end up on my dinner plate that night.

Food was on my mind a lot in Niigata. What I ate there felt like the archetype of Japanese food. For example, one night I had flatfish that had been dried for a day to bring out umami, the fifth taste of savoriness, then salted and broiled. Another day I had a Niigata specialty called noppe, a cold stew of diced vegetables and meat that is served at weddings and other celebrations. The food was all made with ingredients that were in season, following a monthly calendar of what fish or vegetable is good when, and prepared in a way that makes flavors like saltiness and umami come out, but not to excess.

I ate happily, but I also ate because there wasn’t much else to do. Niigata is a flat city without any obvious major tourist attractions. A millennium ago, this whole area was either under seawater or swamps—it was filled later to make rice paddies. One interesting district, the ‘old town’, looked like something out of a 1960’s-era Japanese movie, with narrow alleys between square, dark wooden homes.




Extension58


***

The club where advantage Lucy played, called Junk Box Mini, was in the old town. The Tokyo pop band was the last group in a four-band set, and performing before them was a good Niigata-based band called Extension58, who are old friends of advantage Lucy.

For advantage Lucy it was the first time to play Niigata in eight years, which meant that the last time they were there they were still called Lucy Van Pelt, hadn’t signed yet with Toshiba EMI, and included as members Takayuki Fukumura and Kaname Banba. They played a lot of old songs, maybe in memory of the show eight years ago, and support guitarist Taisuke Takata used one of Fukumura’s old guitars. They also did one brand-new song that didn’t even have a name yet, but was beautiful and super-catchy—making simple and catchy tunes like that must be one of the most difficult things a songwriter can do, but this band does it consistently.

Standing in the back of a crowd of about 100 enthusiastic fans, what struck me most about advantage Lucy’s show was vocalist Aiko’s voice. It’s light and delicate, yet the voice isn’t quiet, and it projects. There’s a distinct joy in listening to that voice singing at shows, and it makes me think, I'm in the right place.

***

I spent a bit of time with the band after the show and on the road back to Tokyo, and ate more food. With them, everything was magnified: if, say, raw crab sashimi was tasty, it wasn’t just good, it was always THE BEST THING THEY’VE EVER TASTED. They are also very ordinary Japanese kids in some ways, staying up until dawn playing card games, and then excitedly buying sweets and toys in gift shops the next day. At times like those it’s sometimes hard to see the emotional depth that lead to their creating their brilliant songs, but it’s doubtless submerged somewhere inside, to come out when needed.

U.S.-Bound Swinging Popsicle At 440

I wasn’t well-versed in the complex ritual of claiming a reserved ticket and getting into the club at Shimokitazawa’s 440, so even though I got there right at the opening time at 7PM last night to see Swinging Popsicle, I was very much at the end of the line.

Apparently, if you’ve reserved a ticket, you’re supposed to go to the club at 6 in the evening, to be issued a numbered ticket. Then, at 7PM, the staff lets people in according to the alphabetical letters and the numbers on those tickets: “All A’s and all B’s up to 20 can now enter”, etc. It was very meticulously done in a distinctly Japanese way. If you hadn’t gotten a number at 6 though, your place was at the tail end of the queue. And, in the looking glass world that Japan sometimes is, if you were on the guest list, you were allowed into the club at the very end, even after all the clueless ticket reservers like me who hadn’t showed up at 6 to take a number (the reason being that paid customers should get in before people on the guest list, who are seeing the show for free—whereas, in the U.S. and elsewhere, wouldn’t people on the guest list go in first?). So, my friends Steve Laity and Yaeri, who were both on the list, had to wait until the last minute to enter the club.

This all matters because the 440 is a café club, which means you watch events seated at a table and the earlier you get in, the better your seat is. If you get in too late, on the other hand, you may end up watching the show standing uncomfortably between various café furniture, feeling on your back the unhappy stare of a sitting customer whose view you are blocking… Fortunately, Steve and I found open space on steps right next to the stage, and we ended up with an up-close view of the Swinging Popsicle performance.

I’ve written several times before about Swinging Popsicle gigs, so I’ll keep this simple: the trio is always a joy to watch, three veteran musicians who pump out sweet and spirited pop songs with expertise, and last night’s show was no exception. I’ve described singer Mineko Fujishima as a soul diva in a petite Japanese woman’s body, and that was true. She said later she was nervous during the gig because it was the band’s first in a few months, but it didn’t show at all. You can listen to song samples of theirs here.

Swinging Popsicle is headed to San Jose, California in late-May to play at an anime convention called Fanime, along with the Japanese bands Guitar Vader, Miami, Goofy Style, Poplar and Up Hold. If you are in the Bay Area and are interested in the music (or if you are somewhere else and wouldn’t mind traveling to listen to some Japanese music), I highly recommend going. I, for one, am traveling from Tokyo to attend the event—maybe if you are there, I’ll see you.

The band also said they will be performing with advantage Lucy on July 16, once again at the 440.

Yes!

Yes!!

Advantage Lucy and Swinging Popsicle are two of my favorite Japanese groups.

Next time, though, I’ll know to get my number at 6PM.

The Caraway & Ex-Bridges At The Shelter

Guitarist Osamu Shimada had a fever of 38.2 degrees Celsius (101 degrees Fahrenheit) when he hit the stage of the Shimokitazawa Shelter with his band the Caraway, but you wouldn’t have known it if you were at his show. It was a performance that made me suddenly remember the things that drew me into Tokyo’s indie pop scene a few years ago: guitar sounds as bright as a sunny Southern California day, melodies as catchy as those of the first album you ever bought, and as much energy as your first all-night party with friends.

Shimada is also the lead guitarist of pop trio Swinging Popsicle, and listening to the way he crunched out precise and color-filled Caraway guitar solos in spite of his fever, I saw one big reason why the great Swinging Popscle has remained popular a decade after exploding on to the scene—its super guitarist. Shimada's other band, the Caraway, is due to release its first album in June. Can’t wait!


The Caraway

***

Long before either Swinging Popsicle or the Caraway was formed, in the early-1990’s, there was a neo-acoustic group called Bridge, whose music still influences Japanese bands, and whose members have continued with music, most notably the singer Hideki Kaji. At the Shelter show two bands featuring former-Bridge members played: Three Berry Icecream, of whom I wrote about recently, and Chicago Bass, which includes Mami Otomo, Bridge’s former singer. Both were good.

The evening, in fact, became a Bridge reunion of sorts, because, standing at the back of the tiny club watching the shows was the man himself, Hideki Kaji. I did a double-take when I saw his familiar face in the audience, and many fans went up to chat with him and take photos with him after the show. You have to understand that for many in Japan’s indie pop scene, Kaji is about as big as they get—I imagine there are a good number of people out there who would rather meet him than any number of major label Japanese ‘stars’. I didn't chat him up, though, because I'm not that familiar with his work, not owning any of his solo albums. Maybe next time though...


Chicago Bass

4 Bonjour's Parties, Kitsune No Kai, Juke Joint

Kitsune No Kai

Hanging out at the Shibuya O-Nest on Thursday night watching 4 Bonjour’s Parties and other bands play, the thought came to me that these guys are turning the club into something like a juke joint.

The way folks in the American South go to juke joints to play the blues, the music lovers at the O-Nest were there to unwind and have a good time through music, after a long day. When each band’s set was over, the members streamed back into the audience to see the other groups and to chat with friends. None of them locked themselves up in the dressing room, refusing to mix with the fans.

Though the evening proceeded according to a schedule, and all the bands must have rehearsed beforehand, I didn’t get the sense that everything was scripted, like I sometimes do watching bands who take each show seriously as another small step in their musical careers. Nothing wrong really with the serious bands, except that they lack spontaneity, which, come to think of it, isn’t right at all.

Between songs, the clarinet-playing front man of 4 Bonjour’s Parties talked in squeaky imitation-woman voice for reasons only known to him, causing the other members to giggle. It didn't matter to them that they were on a stage facing several dozen people--they were going to have fun regardless. Their manner might have been annoying if not for the fact that their silliness was followed by their gorgeous, slowly flowing pop music, which sounds classical at times in part because of the wind instruments the members take turns playing (clarinet, flute, trumpet, trombone and sax). You can hear sample songs of theirs here.

I also liked a band called Kitsune No Kai, which means something like ‘party of the foxes’ or ‘meeting of foxes’. They played songs with names like “The Lamb of Finland”. The event program described them as "Japan's Belle and Sebastian", but they also reminded me of Cowboy Junkies and Mazzy Star. These foxes have recently released a series of three CD singles, which I’ll have to listen to.

Also playing was Shugo Tokumaru and a band called toy. Unusually for a show at the O-Nest, many in the audience listened to the shows sitting on the floor. Also unusually, the DJ put on some Bach between two sets.

***

The other day I stumbled upon the website of Yu Hirano, the founder of the rock club Loft, arguably Japan’s most important live house, and in one of his columns he wrote something I agreed with completely. Hirano was talking about the beginnings of the Loft, and how at first he wanted the club to be something more than a place where people pay to watch bands play. Instead, the Loft would be a hang-out where people meet and talk, with tables and food, and live music would just be one ingredient and bands wouldn’t necessarily play every night but only when the Loft felt the bands were good enough.

That wasn’t how the Loft turned out, Hirano admits: to compete with other live houses, the club eventually cleared out the tables to pack more people in, and they started booking bands every night. But his ideal club is still a small place for people to meet and to create something through those meetings, and to accomplish this he says he recently opened a new, smaller live house called the Naked Loft. Again, what I think he is aiming for is a juke joint—a place where people aren’t divided clearly between musicians and listeners, but where the two mix, and make something new, or, at the very least, have fun together.

Yunn & Yuyake Lamp, At Yoyogi Gauss

Yunn and Yuyake Lamp is the piano pop band formerly known as Orange Plankton, minus pianist Yuki. I was a devoted fan of Orange Plankton, but had missed the first couple of shows of Yunn, and finally got an opportunity to see them at a tiny new club called the Yoyogi Gauss.

One of the cool things about Orange Plankton was it had not one, but two girls who took center stage at shows: Yumi, the singer, and Yuki on piano. Watching the two interact musically was always an electric experience. But with Yuki gone, the spotlight was squarely on Yumi, and it revealed what a powerful presence she is, by herself, on stage: I’ve seen hundreds of bands in Tokyo, but in very few are there vocalists whose presence is magnetic like this soft-voiced and petite woman. She seems to breathe in the music around her and exhale it in the form of song.

They played all new songs, which sounded a little more rock compared with Orange Plankton's pop, and in most Yumi played the piano, though I got the sense that she wouldn't mind leaving the confining space of the keyboard and piano stool to dance the expanse of the stage.

The two skilled musicians in the rhythm section, bassist Tsuji and Tamarou on drums, had let their hair grow long enough to tie in ponytails, a new look that reminded me of old Japanese artisans. My non-drug-induced vision was of Tsuji and Tamarou as sculptors of Buddhist statues and Yumi their artistic inspiration, a glowing, golden Idol.

This is band I’ll be following—you can listen to some of Yunn’s song samples here (Yunn is Yumi’s nickname) and a couple of Orange Plankton’s songs are now on the playlist of Japan Live Radio.



***

I went to Yunn’s after-show celebration at a nearby izakaya(a Japanese bistro), and there found out that, by coincidence, four friends of the band, who didn't know each other before meeting each other through Orange Plankton, are from the big northern island of Hokkaido. Like most Hokkaido people, they all have beautifully white skin (you might think the Japanese are homogenous, but they aren’t really—people in Hokkaido look quite different from darker complexioned folks in the southern island of Okinawa, for example). They were also free spirits in that way people from lands with lots of open space are, and they insisted that fish tasted better in Hokkaido than in Tokyo. I like that sort of mild, good-humored regional chauvinism you encounter often in Japan.

Japan Live Radio!

One thing that has long frustrated me in keeping this journal is that I'm writing about all these excellent indie bands that aren't well known outside of Japan (and, sometimes, even here), but I know that many readers abroad don't have a way to listen to their music. Most Japanese indie CDs are either hard to buy outside of Japan, or, simply, unavailable. But, for various reasons, I've been against posting MP3s on the site.

Then, recently, an idea-bulb lit up in my head: why don't I set up an internet radio station and play songs of bands I like? Which is what I've done: http://www.live365.com/stations/japanlive

The first program has a bit more than three hours of music by the pop bands I write a lot about. I won't be a daily radio DJ: my plan is to change the programming every few weeks, and vary the themes a bit every time, and I'll let you know when new programs are up. I'm new at this and am not sure whether the radio will work properly, and know, for one thing, that for technical reasons the sound quality isn't the greatest at the moment. In any case, any feedback you can give me on the radio would be highly appreciated. (And, of course, if you discover some awesome band you didn't know about as a result of Japan Live Radio, defnitely let me know!)