Japan Live Presents, Volume 1

I organized a music event in Tokyo and, without intending to, seemed to have transported the spirit of an American gig into a Japanese club. It wasn’t like a normal Japanese show, where even punk audiences have been known to be as quiet and well behaved as those at a classical concert. My guys were there to party. A gang of gaijin inebriates took over the rear area next to the bar and held shouted conversations about every subject under the sun, except about the music that was playing in front of them. The Japanese closest to them were annoyed about the ruckus but also looked resigned to the fact that that’s just the way foreigners are. And several of the foreigners, for their part, told me later that they loved the music, and I took their word for it.

I wanted to make the event on Saturday night, the first installment of Japan Live Presents (produced together with Philipp Potz), freer and more relaxed than a typical Japanese show, and I think I succeeded. Guests could move in and out of the show at a bar called The Baron, so they could step out to the streets of Nishi-Azabu and Roppongi if they wanted during the gig and come back later. In Japanese events, you usually can’t get back in once you leave. Parents brought their children and sat together in front of the stage—something you don’t see that often at Tokyo gigs. And if people wanted to talk rather than listen raptly to the music, that was fine too.

But music was the key ingredient of the event, and while maybe I shouldn’t sing the praise of the bands too much considering I invited them all myself, still I have to say all their performances were dazzling. If I was there as a regular member of the audience I would have loved the evening too. After all, the three groups, Three Berry Icecream, Yunn & Yuyake Lamp and 4 Bonjour’s Parties, are among my favorite bands. And I’m also a big fan of DJ Kamaage, who spun records between sets.

Three Berry Icecream, the musical unit of former Bridge member Mayumi Ikemizu, played first. At gigs Ikemizu invites friends to perform, and these pals are also great, veteran musicians—at Japan Live Presents the six-person band included the leader of Little Lounge Little Twinkle, the keyboardist for Orangenoise Shortcut and the violist who once played in Rocky Chack’s Mori-No-Orchestra. Three Berry Icecream, as the name suggests, plays sweet, happy pop songs, but their orchestration is solid and imaginative—I especially liked the duets between the accordion and viola, which sounded like something out of a Paris street scene.



Yunn & Yuyake Lamp

Next up was Yunn & Yuyake Lamp, which is composed of three of the four members of the defunct Orange Plankton, a favorite band of mine that I’ve written about more than almost any group in these pages. Tonight the band had invited along a flutist and a pianist, allowing the vocalist Yunn to focus on singing rather than also playing the piano. This was as I desired—Yunn is a good pianist, but she really shines when she stands facing the crowd as a singer, crouching, jumping and dancing to create with her body the visuals to the words she’s singing.

At first after Yunn & Yuyake Lamp was formed they played all new songs, as if to emphasize they are a different entity from Orange Plankton, but recently they’ve become more comfortable looking back at their old days, and have been playing Orange Plankton tunes at shows. They did two at Saturday’s show, including “Mebuki”, the elemental, stirring finale to the album Wakusei Note. I was also surprised and delighted to see in the audience Yuki, the former pianist of Orange Plankton.


The last band, 4 Bonjour’s Parties, was the most popular with the foreigners in the audience, based on comments I got from several people during the show. And I could see how their long, mellow, chamber music-like post-rock compositions would probably be most in tune with the preferences of certain segments of mature, hip music fans. 4 Bonjour’s is a remarkable group—they have seven members, each of whom play several instruments—even the drummer sometimes switches instruments and plays the sax! The small stage wouldn’t fit them all so that some instruments, like the xylophone (!), had to be placed outside of the stage. The band is working on their first album and it would seem worth it for these guys to tour abroad when that’s done, though carrying all those instruments with them would no doubt be a logistical nightmare.

***

All through the first two acts or so I had a stomachache, brought on in part from downing two ice-cold pints of beer on an empty stomach, but also probably a result of nervousness as the organizer. Still, it was a lovely feeling to be able to introduce a few of my favorite Japanese bands to people that had never heard of them, and I want to do it again.

My Little Airport's Naughty Album Covers

My Little Airport is a great Hong Kong indie band I've discovered recently. But rather than talk about their music (which is minimalistic and 80's New Wave-sounding), I'd like to bring your attention to the covers of their two albums. They are pretty naughty.

The cover of their first album, the ok thing to do on sunday afternoon is to toddle in the zoo, features two girls in school uniforms of pure white blouses and aqua skirts. The girl on the right is rubbing her cheek against her friend's with eyes closed dreamily. Her friend's expression is somewhere between blissful and about-to-burst-out-laughing.



The back-cover shows the two in a near-embrace, with faces close enough to be in a kiss.

This is a sort of scene I seldom saw in my school-days, and if it's a common thing in Hong Kong, well, I wish I grew up there rather than where I did...

Meanwhile, on the cover of My Little Airport's second album because i was too nervous at that time are a couple lying on a bed, looking smilingly into each other's eyes. The girl is lightly-dressed, which isn't surprising considering Hong Kong's heat and humidity. The guy, however, isn't wearing a shirt. What are these two kids up to??



When you flip the CD over to the backside, you see the room where the bed is, with a desk and on top of it a computer, whose monitor shows a picture of...


What IS that a picture of?! A guy looks to be helping a girl remove a piece of her clothing...

The funny thing is My Little Airport's songs themselves aren't scandalous or naughty, though there is one song on the second album called "i don't know how to download good av like iris does" (AV standing for adult video).

I like these album covers but I have to confess I don't know how to read them. Are they a joke? Or are they meant to provoke? Or does the band see something romatic or aesthetically pleasing in these photos, enough that they wanted to make them their covers?

My confusion is compounded by my perception that the Chinese are relatively conservative when it comes to public discussion of sexual matters. But maybe my perception is out-dated, and/or it doesn't apply to independent artists working in a big, modern city like Hong Kong. (Though I'm guessing the 'good adult videos' that Iris downloads in the song mentioned above are Japanese rather than Greater Chinese in origin...)

Yunn & Yuyake Lamp + Comedian + Actors

Most Tokyo live music shows feature only music acts, but some are more multi-disciplinary. Yunn & Yuyake Lamp’s event on August 30 was a good example of the latter.

In addition to several pop groups, Yunn invited a standup comedian, put on a spoken word act by two actors, and had friends sell their artwork on the side.

The comedian, who goes by the stage name Collagen Haigo Man, was living proof that it’s never easy to make it in show business: his main subject was how unsuccessful he’s been and how he’s watched his comedic contemporaries earn fame and become fixtures on TV. But, in fact, he was very good, with the smooth spoken delivery of a rakugo-ka, traditional comedians who are some of the best speakers of the Japanese language. The day after this event he left for a Japanese tour, with the first stop being…a show in someone’s living room in Yamanashi Prefecture.

The spoken word act featured an actor and actress talking about a boy and a girl growing up together, falling in love but then the young love being cut short by the death of the girl, while a video screen behind them flashed various images of childhood and summer. The act was a bit on the sentimental side, but the actress was a true tall Japanese feminine specimen of beauty (I just found out googling that she plays the role of a ‘different-dimension physicist’ in Ultraman Mebius—cool!).

I think Yunn & Yuyake Lamp’s basic stance is to welcome all sorts of musicians, artists and creative types into their fold, rather than carve out clique-like boundaries on the types of music and arts they will tolerate, and this night was a reflection of that. Their own show, as usual, was also deeply satisfying. Just to remind you that Yunn & Yuyake Lamp will be one of the three groups playing on September 23 at the Japan Live Presents show, which is sure to be a blast, so you should try to make it!

Mark Your Calendars: Sep. 23 Japan Live Presents!

Tokyo residents: Mark your calendars for a music event produced by Japan Live, on Saturday, September 23--Japan Live Presents Volume 1!

Featured will be three fantastic Tokyo pop groups:

4 bonjour's parties, a seven-person ensemble that plays chamber-music-like indie pop influenced by Glasgow indie music, post-rock and electronica;

Yunn and Yuyake Lamp, the mellow piano pop group led by the Chara-esque vocalist Yunn, formerly of the quartet Orange Plankton (which sadly split up earlier this year);

And last but not least, Three Berry Icecream, the sunny neo-acoustic musical unit of Mayumi Ikemizu, who has played in influential guitar pop bands like Bridge, Daffodil-19 and the Bachelors.

This will be an evening for true music lovers: these groups create gorgeous tunes using everything from accordion to clarinet, flute, trombone, viola and glockenspiel, in addition to the usual guitars, bass and drums.

The event will be at the Nishiazabu Baron, a bar-restaurant that serves home-brewed beer and delightful tapas. Show starts at 7PM, doors open at 6:30 PM, and cover charge is 2,500 yen, or 2,000 yen if you reserve tickets with me--please send an e-mail to gonglinjian at yahoo dot com with your name, number of tickets desired, and, if possible, which band you most want to see.

Visitors to Japan: If, by coincidence, you are visiting Tokyo on September 23, and want to see some live music, come by to The Baron, which is about a ten minute walk from Roppongi station. In fact we will let you in at a discount price if you can provide evidence you are a genuine visitor by showing us a recent Japan tourist visa stamp in your passport!

I hope to see you there to celebrate autumn equinox with some good music.

My Rightround.com "Inside Tokyo" Column

I've started writing a monthly column about Japan's pop music scene for the San Francisco-based indie music info website rightround.com, and the first installment, about a road trip to see an advantage Lucy show in Nagoya, is now up, here. It's an interesting new website, bringing together blogs about the music scenes of Montreal, Sydney, San Francisco, Austin, Tokyo (that's me) and a lot of other subjects. Take a look!

Watusi Zombie, Ruins Alone, Panic Smile

What’s the difference between mainstream and avant-garde music?

That’s a question I’ve been thinking about recently, especially after I saw a show called “Chika-teki Ongaku (Underground Music)” at the Shinjuku Red Cloth.

‘Mainstream’ and ‘avant-garde’ are relative terms. Something that was out-there one day might become ordinary the next. For example, at a certain point in the 70’s, progressive rock, which was once avant-garde, became mainstream. But then, in reaction to the excessively technically demanding nature of prog, punk arose, and its simple, aggressive beat was the new avant-garde. Until it too became mainstream, and prog-like music once again seemed radical and new.

Whether a type of music is mainstream or avant-garde isn’t decided by how it sounds—technically complex music could be mainstream, while simple 50’s-type rock might become radical. In Japan, Spangle call Lilli line, which makes music that is beautiful and unlike anything you’ve ever heard on Top 40 radio, has just got one of its songs featured in a shampoo commercial.

There are some sorts of music, however, that will probably always be stuck in the avant-garde corner of the musical world. Cecil Taylor, for instance.

What was interesting about the Red Cloth event was it bought together four groups that could be labeled ‘avant-garde’ or ‘underground’—Panic Smile, Watusi Zombie, Ruins Alone, and Core of Bells—but some of them seemed permanently avant-garde while others appeared to at least have a shot at the mainstream (if they wished it in the first place).

An example of the latter was the trio Watusi Zombie. They are weirdoes in some ways—the singer covers the mike with a plastic Buddha mask, they have two guitars but no bass, and for the finale they always toss the drum set from the stage into the audience section, and finish the gig literally surrounded by fans. But they play straightforward, fast, hypnotically repetitive punk rock, to which the fans head-bang. Maybe their quirks will one day become the added ingredients that will make them palatable to a mainstream audience that has suddenly developed adventurous tastes. Who knows—they did play at the Fuji Rock Festival last year…

Ruins Alone, on the other hand, I can’t see becoming mainstream in a hundred years. It is the unit of Tatsuya Yoshida, drummer of the experimental duo Ruins, which has been around since 1985. I remember I owned one of their CDs in college and a friend went through all my disks and said, 'I like your CD collection, except that band called the Ruins—I hate them!' They are, indeed, a group people usually love or hate—chaotically-structured, fast-moving, bass and drum musical passages, and yelps and wails. I liked them but not enough to buy more than one of their albums.

When I found out recently though that Yoshida is still playing as Ruins Alone, I became interested in seeing him live. I’m glad I did.

Yoshida took a long while to set up for the solo act, placing the drums at the front-center of the stage and putting all the mikes in the house around him. He seemed one of those bearded, middle-aged Japanese men who keep their feelings to themselves. But he became a different person once he said, ‘Hi, I’m Ruins Alone,’ and pounded the drums to start the set. His drumming was violent, animalistic, hyperactive and relentless, like an endless videotape loop of a cheetah going after its prey.


Ruins Alone

Somewhere between Ruins Alone and Watusi Zombie in terms of the possibility of going mainstream was the quartet Panic Smile. Ian of Clear and Refreshing told me that Panic Smile is a seminal band in the Fukuoka underground scene, spawning a number of like-minded bands and imitators (I’m stitching this together based on hazy memories of a drunken evening, so the details of what Ian said may not be exactly accurate…), and I’d been wanting to see them. They were good. First off, there’s diversity in their band member composition: the drummer is a girl, the bassist is a really big guy and the guitarist is a foreigner. They’re all good musicians, especially the guitarist, who blow-torches through solos. But they’re a little too different so it’s hard to imagine a day when their post-punk sonic experimentations will be played on commercial radio. Though, one never knows.

The Brilliant Dolly's Pillbox Of Taiwan

While I was in Taipei for the Formoz festival, I bought a bunch of CDs of local musicians. I mostly chose the disks by their covers, figuring that musicians with good taste in CD covers must also have good taste in music. Although I haven’t gone through all the CDs yet, that reasoning of mine turned out to be true for one of the disks I bought—how are you today? by a quartet called Dolly’s Pillbox.

Actually, Dolly’s Pillbox’s music betrayed my expectations: the cover is a bright, pastel-colored illustration of a big white rabbit shedding blue droplets of tears, making me think this is a group that plays cute, toyshop pop, maybe like Japan’s Hazel Nuts Chocolate. But in reality, the only possibly ‘cute’ part of this 5-song mini-album is vocalist Cathy’s girlish singing voice, and even that often has a subtly weary quality—the rest of their music is solid indie rock/shoegazer, with streams of super-catchy melodies, sudden waterfalls of surprise chord changes and gurgling rapids of guitar solos. They’re like Galaxie 500, the Taiwanese Girl Band edition. (Dolly’s Pillbox are three girls and one guy.) All five songs on the album are top-rate, and you can listen to most on their MySpace page.

By coincidence after buying their CD I met their singer Cathy, because she was part of the advantage Lucy entourage guiding the band around Taipei during the music festival. I hadn’t listened to the CD yet so I had no idea that this down-to-earth girl was a brilliant creator of music (she also writes all the lyrics and drew the rabbit illustrations for the album—she seems to be a rabbit fanatic). Now I wish I could have seen Cathy’s band at Formoz, and I also wish I could be at eight places at once so I could be at Dolly’s Pillbox’s next show in Taipei while carrying on with everything else in my life.

Supersnazz & VooDoo Hawaiians At NHK-FM

I have mixed feeling about NHK, Japan’s public television station.

On the one hand, it does great documentaries, history programs, and the like. Only on NHK can one find former sumo great Konishiki dressed up as a red ogre, singing and playing the ukulele for kids.



And its fang-baring monster mascot, Domo-kun, is the definition of cool.



But there are also reasons to dislike NHK. For example, it dispatches a gang of semi-thugs to collect your NHK bills, which you are required by Japanese law to pay, though there’s no penalty for not doing so, other than having to put up with the NHK collectors (if you lie and tell them you won’t pay because you don’t own a TV, they’ll ask to see your living room). NHK then uses your money to build lavish recreation facilities for its staffers.

Last night, though, my scale of feelings about NHK tipped to one side, the ‘NHK is cool’ side, because of one thing: their FM station was going to feature a live performance of great garage rockers Supersnazz and VooDoo Hawaiians, and invited fans to watch the gigs for free. Of course I headed to Shibuya to watch the radio recording—Supersnazz is one of my current favorite bands, and I’d also heard about and have wanted to see the VooDoo Hawaiians.

The NHK headquarters in Shibuya is a gray, government-ministry-like building complex, but the security was surprisingly lax—despite my being a sketchy gaijin, when I told the guard I was headed for ‘Studio 505’, he let me through with no questions asked and no IDs shown. The studio was a professional one with uneven, puzzle-like walls for acoustics, and was designed to hold many more than the several dozen people that showed up for Supersnazz and the VooDoo Hawaiians.

Before the first show, a staffer in a purple T-shirt got on the stage and said: “Can we practice applauding? There are a bit fewer audience members than usual tonight, so could each of you clap about two persons’ worth?” We proceeded to practice clapping for a minute or so.

When Supersnazz started, though, the clapping and cheering were entirely spontaneous. The band told jokes between songs.

“Since I’m going to be on NHK, I decided to wear a morning suit today,” the guitarist told a radio audience, who wouldn’t see he actually had on a shapeless gray long-sleeved shirt.

“Oh, well, we’re wearing yukata,” the two girls in the band said, and proceeded to compliment each other’s imaginary summer kimono (singer Spike was in reality wearing a navy blue summer dress with a plum blossom design, and bassist Tomoko had on a black X T-shirt).

They also did a new song about Ichiro, and when Tomoko was introducing the number by talking about the Seattle Mariners, she called someone involved with the team a ‘kichigai’, meaning a nutter, and definitely not a word that could be broadcast on public radio. So she started over with the introduction, but then one of the fans yelled out “Kichigai!”, and she ended up doing the intro for a third time.

***


VooDoo Hawaiians, in contrast to Supersnazz, hardly said anything between songs, and focused on their music, which was hard rock with long jams at the end of each song. The female vocalist looked like a classic Japanese doll, only with red-violet hair and wearing a bright red dress that said Pepsi-Cola. The other members, all guys, were hollow-cheeked, cigarette-stained rocker types, and the lead guitarist clearly had a Keith Richards thing going.

Mysteriously, the fans that showed up to see VooDoo Hawaiians were almost all un-flashy ladies in their twenties—I couldn’t work out why their music appealed to this demographic group in particular. The band rocked enough that I thought they should be embraced by a much wider audience.

***

All in all, it was a fun change of pace to see bands in a radio studio, but there wasn’t the booze and atmosphere of a live house, and I also sensed that going to see a band play at a radio event is more of a thing for hardcore fans to do (partly because you have to go through hoops to make it to the event, including sending a letter to NHK to get on the guest list), and though I’ve fallen hard for Supersnazz, maybe I’m not quite that hardcore yet, so I sorta stood out. Still, it was worth it—for one thing, because of the awesome acoustics, I was able to hear all of Supersnazz’s instruments crystal-clear and was able to appreciate more fully what great musicians they are. And I got to see VooDoo Hawaiians, who I’ll be checking out more in the future.

CDs Of Note: Spaghetti Vabune, The Caraway

Two great Japanese ‘guitar pop’* albums just came out:

One is Guitar Pop Grand Prix by Spaghetti Vabune. This strangely named sextet from Kobe has been growing in popularity, and I’ve been a fan of their ultra-catchy pop for a while. But their latest album took me by surprise: while their debut effort Summer Vacation, Sunset Vehicle was good, this second album of theirs marks a quantum leap in artistry. It’s my favorite Japanese album so far this year.

Opening with an anthemic declaration of their musical loyalties, ‘this is guitar pop!’ (‘this, is, guitar, pop, and you love I love guitar pop’, the song goes), the album runs through one after another bright and upbeat tunes that stick in the mind. Spaghetti Vabune songs are instantly recognizable because of their girl-guy twin vocals: neither is in any way an accomplished vocalist, but that’s part of the charm of this band. The female singer Chee’s style in particular is distinct, a warbling, nasal voice that seems to come out of the corners of her mouth—it’s probably an acquired taste, but one that you get hooked on once you do acquire it. Overall, the album is more bass-heavy than the lighter debut album, and the songs are lined up in a more focused way, to progressively jam up the listener’s voltage. The only shortcoming I can think of is that Spaghetti Vabune’s songs don’t have much variety: they’re all fast, energetic, sunny pop songs. But maybe that’s the Spaghetti Vabune sound, and moving away from it will make them a different band.

I also like Guitar Pop Grand Prix for its colorful art and design, all created by singer Chee, and for the fact that the lyric sheet includes chords, in case you want to play the songs yourself.


***

The other nice album is the self-titled debut CD of the Caraway, the trio led by Swinging Popsicle guitarist Osamu Shimada. Shimada is a connoisseur of American and European indie pop and rock, but his biggest love is the Beach Boys, which he says he listens to every day. And, indeed, this album from perennially overcast Tokyo is California sunny in sound, every tune joyful (Shimada plays for several bands, but he always seems to be having the most fun when performing for the Caraway). Shimada sings in all the songs but one, ‘Dislike You’, in which keyboardist Miyuki Yoshida does lead vocals, and it’s a good change of pace. Shimada says the band will be featuring her singing more in the future, something that will make their sound richer.

I’m listed in the ‘thanks’ list of this album, by the way, partly because, for reasons I won’t get into, I provided the band with a childhood photo of myself…

*Guitar Pop is a hard-to-define musical genre that I haven’t seen mentioned much outside of Japan. Think the Cardigans and Smiths.

Japan Live Radio Updated: Mellow

Japan Live Radio has been updated, this time featuring lots of mellow songs by artists such as Kuki Kodan, Nikaido Kazumi (thanks for the recommendation David!), Cibo Matto (thanks for the recommendation Justin!) and Frenesi (though I also managed to fit in the garage rock of Supersnazz, the Clicks and Teeny Frahoop...).

One thing to note: although I describe the station as 'the best of Japanese indies music', I also play music from Korea, Hong Kong and elsewhere from time to time, and feature major label music that I like. I note this because this time I included Aoi Teshima's 'Teruu No Uta', a big hit from the animation movie Gedo Senki's soundtrack. There's nothing remotely 'independent' about the producers of this song, but it fits the mellow theme well, and the 19-year-old Teshima's vocals are fragile and lovely, like a song heard from faraway in a grand open space like the Mongolian steppe.

By the way, for reasons I'm not aware of, the number of people listening to the radio has shot up in the past few weeks. I'm talking a three-fold rise... A lot of the listeners are from Japan and big groups of them seem to tune in at the same time. I'm wondering whether there's something wrong with Live 365's listener tracking system, but then again, maybe it's something more interesting, like a class full of schoolkids with computers all listening to the radio at once, for example...

Frequently Asked Questions

I think it’s about time for a Frequently Asked Questions post.


Q. Who are you?
A. I’m an American guy from LA who has spent more than a dozen years in Japan. I have a full-time job in Tokyo.

...

Can we leave it at that?

Q. How do you afford to go to so many shows?
A. I work.

Q. I will be going to Japan. Can you recommend some shows for me to see?
A. This is the question I get the most from readers, and I usually make the same recommendations.

First, go to Tokyo Gig Guide, which has a good schedule of shows and directions to all the major live houses. Pia has a more extensive schedule, but it’s in Japanese.

The live houses I often go to include the Que, Shelter and Club 251 in Shimokitazawa, O-Nest in Shibuya, and the Red Cloth and Loft in Shinjuku. Check their listings.

If you have any specific Japanese bands you like, try their websites too, because they might just be playing while you are in town.

Q. My band wants to play in Japan. How can we do it?
A. Not easily—I’ve written about this before, here.

Networking might do the trick. A suggestion: if there’s a Japanese band you like, offer to help them come to your hometown and do gigs there. Then, they will probably return the favor when you say you want to go to Japan.

Or, if you live in a big city where Japanese bands go on tour, chat them up after shows (buying their merchandise will help) and become friends with them.

You can try sending clubs your demos and press packs, but don’t expect miracles. Writing them in Japanese will also help, because this is, after all, Japan.

Q. Can I send you my CDs, MP3’s, etc.?
A. Yes, of course!

But if you mean, can I review and write about them in Japan Live, no, probably not. I write (mostly) about Japanese music, and only about music I like.

Q. Can you recommend some good Japanese bands and musicians?
A. The ones I write about in Japan Live are all good. The ones listed on the left, in the section “Bands-“, are among my favorites.

Check out the music I play in Japan Live Radio too—those are all musicians I like.


That’s about it for now. Feel free to write me anyway even if this answers your questions, though, because I always like getting e-mails.

advantage Lucy & Three Berry At Formoz Festival

Loo-shee.

'Lucy'.

That’s what everyone calls advantage Lucy for short.

When the Japanese say it, it sounds like ‘Loo-shee’. Friends of the Japanese band also say ‘Lucy’ when they are talking about its two members, singer Aiko and guitarist Yoshiharu Ishizaka, like, ‘Lucy is staying at that hotel.’

I followed Lucy and another Japanese unit called Three Berry Icecream to Taipei to see them play at the Formoz music festival. For a long time I’ve wanted to visit Taiwan anyway, and thought this would be a good opportunity.

Taipei was hot and the sunlight strong, and many shopping streets had arcades to avoid it. Walking in town, sometimes out of nowhere came the smell of burning incense and herbal medicine. At temples and shrines, people bowed holding lit incense above their heads and tossed red crescent-shaped tablets to the ground to tell their fortune. It seemed to me that traditions lived on in Taiwan that had largely died out in mainland China because of the communists.

The festival was in a big children’s recreation park filled with ponds and pavilions and Chinese-style houses. Once the sun went down, bands from Taiwan, Japan and elsewhere performed at stages named after natural elements—wind, fire, stone, etc.

I saw a Taiwanese band called 悲情土台客 (which I guess means something like ‘the sadness of the Taiwanese’?). They were an interesting bunch: the guitarists all had little flags on their guitars, and they had up banners in Chinese characters. They did songs that sounded like canto-pop, and the singer told jokes between numbers in Taiwanese, which of course I didn’t understand. Someone told me later that they aren’t a full-time band but rather a gathering of various well-known musicians.

Other than them, I wasn’t able to spend much time seeing the many local groups at the festival, for various reasons, and that was my only regret about this Taiwan trip. I really only saw advantage Lucy and Three Berry Icecream…maybe next year.



advantage Lucy rehearsing

Three Berry and advantage Lucy both played at the Electric stage, which was next to a pond where carp swam. It was also next to the bigger Wind stage, where all the top acts performed, and because it directly faced Electric, at times it was a battle of noise between the stages. Three Berry plays gentle, semi-acoustic pop and was competing with the Taiwanese rock band 1976 next door; it lost the battle. During Three Berry’s first few songs, 1976’s hard rock was always in the background, and you had to make an effort to distinguish Three Berry’s accordion, glockenspiel, viola, bossa nova guitar and piano sounds. But the audience did and liked what they heard, and the 1976 set ended about midway into the gig so the second half was quiet, and the happy crowd asked for an encore.


Three Berry Icecream

I had heard there are advantage Lucy fans in Taiwan, and at Formoz I saw them for myself: the crowd roared when the band went on stage around ten in the evening, cheered again when the band played a few warm-up notes, thinking the show had begun, roared when singer Aiko hit the stage, and cranked up their cheering to maximum volume when the performance finally began with the song “Red Bicycle”. During some of the songs, incredibly, the Taiwanese crowd sang along to advantage Lucy’s Japanese songs, and I did too, utterly moved.


advantage Lucy

The Taiwanese reaction to the Japanese bands was a great thing to see. I’ve lived in China and studied its language, and was happy to see Chinese-speaking people discover and enjoy Japanese bands. Another thing was that for historical reasons and other reasons, the Chinese and Japanese haven’t gotten along, and it seemed like something that gives hope to see they could at least dig each other’s music.

After a wonderful set, Aiko and Ishizaka sat down at a table and started autographing CDs for fans. A lengthy line formed of fans who waited to get autographs, shake hands and take pictures together. The two must have been there for an hour or more, after a long day and a performance. This was amazing for me because I had heard that Aiko wasn’t in the best physical shape when she left Tokyo (she wore boots to hot Taipei because she was worried about the air-con) and knew she must be tired. In fact, during their time in Taiwan Lucy spent a lot of time in the hotel and didn’t even hang out much with Three Berry Icecream, who are some of their closest friends. One of the evenings I had dinner with them, but they must have been thoroughly exhausted at that point—at the restaurant the group occupied two tables, with Lucy and the other Japanese at one, and the Taiwanese at another. There was little interaction between the two sides, and it made me a bit uncomfortable to be there, like I was peeking behind the curtains at something I shouldn’t see backstage. But it sounded like at other times there was much more friendliness so that on the final day at the airport, lots of tears were shed.

A thing I missed that I regretted was an “After-Party” show at a club called the Wall the day after the Formoz festival ended. There, Lucy sang their one Chinese song, ‘The Season Of Apricot (杏の季節)’, and the audience apparently sang along in a grand chorus. Damn, damn, wish I could have been there!

Hello Again, Supersnazz (At The Shelter)

After Supersnazz crashed into my life like a hell-flaming meteor at the Loft, I went out and bought all of the band’s CDs I could find: I got two albums of theirs that are still in print, Invisible Party and Rock-O-Matic, and bought used copies of Diode City, The Barba Rockets Patrol, I Wanna Be Your Love and The Devil Blues Youth. For a few weeks my musical world consisted almost solely of their fast, sweltering girl garage rock. The last time I saw them all of their songs were new to me, but when I caught them at the Shimokitazawa Shelter on Saturday night I knew almost all the tunes and in addition I had invested in them emotional significance (such as, ‘this song I listen to when I need a lift’, etc.).

Supersnazz got its start as a four-girl band in 1990, and in a decade and a half has toured all over Europe and the U.S. and once recorded with Sub Pop. What a terrific group they are. During the Ron Ron Clou set before them, the two current female members, singer Spike and bassist Tomoko, peeked out nervously from the dressing room, checking to see how many were in the audience. They continued to look stiff as they set up on stage. But then when the house lights went down and the show began, suddenly they were different people—rockers who had knocked out audiences hundreds of nights, and were ready to do so again tonight.

The fans raised their plastic cups of beer in a toast to the band, and repeated that during climactic moments in the songs. Spike, the singer, coughed painfully throughout the gig, a result of a bad summer cold, but never stopped shouting out the words to their pop-punk songs. One of those was a great tune called “Shelter” from the album Invisible Party, and listening to it at this cramped, dark club with the same name as the song, I wondered whether that’s what it’s about. Listening to it again at home, it seemed possible, with English lyrics like “I’m shouting/ I’m turning [?]/ I’m headless in the Shelter/ I’m crying/ I’m smiling/ I’m dying in the Shelter/ I just can’t walk on by tonight…”.

They are releasing an album of cover songs in October, and did a few of those, revealing their influences: they covered the Replacements and X, as well as “Brown Sugar” by the Stones (on a related note, the guy guitarist had a tattoo on his biceps saying ‘MC5’).

Odds & Ends

* Spangle call Lilli line, who I've interviewed, is releasing a new album on September 6 called Since. The trio hasn't officially announced this, but music store websites like Tower Records, HMV and CDJapan already list the album.

* Advantage Lucy, who I've also interviewed, is due to release a mini-album in another couple of months. I was somewhat involved in its production so will say nothing more other than that it looks like it will be great (but no surprise there).

* I really like this Live365 Internet radio station called Indie Beginning, which features independent music from Hong Kong . It's the sort of radio station I would have wanted to make if I were in Hong Kong rather than Tokyo. Japan Live Radio has also been updated, by the way, with new music.

* I'm headed to Taipei from Thursday to attend the Formoz Festival there. If anyone knows of any Taiwanese music CDs I should definitely buy while I'm there, please let me know.

Yunn & Yuyake Lamp At Grapefruit Moon

For several years now I’ve felt that Yunn and Yuyake Lamp’s Yumi, formerly of Orange Plankton, is one of the most expressive Japanese singers I’ve ever seen. She transforms the stage into an orchard of sound, growing with her soft voice shoots of unique musical phrases, the stage lights her sunlight. She squeezes out songs with her entire body—her voice makes even those not interested in the sort of gentle piano pop she plays stop and take notice. I always know going to Yumi’s shows that I’ll come away filled with new energy.

But at the same time, sometimes in weeks between shows I have slight doubts: was she really THAT good, as good as I describe, for example, in this post?

Wednesday I saw Yunn and Yuyake Lamp at the Grapefruit Moon in Sangenjyaya, and I immediately knew I wasn’t wrong. I’ve seen hundreds of singers perform in Japan, but very few have her ability to make you visualize what she is singing about and pull you into her world. In one of the first songs of the night, with a tiny wavy gesture of her arms she brought to life the sea, the subject of that song.

The crowd wasn’t big. I saw three or four Chinese characters 正 (‘right’ or ‘proper’) marking the number of fans who came to see the band, meaning that at five strokes per character, fifteen to twenty had come. But it was an interesting cast of characters: there were, among others, a pro wrestler, a TV commercial director, and a young, pretty actress, all in some ways connected to Yumi’s music.

advantage Lucy, Swinging Popsicle, "Mine-Mine"

Aiko and Mineko

At Sunday night's Club 440 show, advantage Lucy singer Aiko said her band has been recording new music day and night so that even now on stage, she wasn't sure whether she was awake or dreaming. She was joking, but for me, there was indeed something almost dream-like about this event: it brought together advantage Lucy and Swinging Popsicle, two of my favorite Japanese groups. It was the first pairing of the two bands in many years, though they've known each other since both got their start about a decade ago. They are both wonderful groups that have stuck it out in Japan's volatile music scene and continued to make good music, creating new fans in Japan and abroad along the way.

Advantage Lucy went first and began by doing two songs unplugged, just Aiko's singing and Yoshiharu Ishizaka's acoustic guitar. That brought out Aiko's striking singing voice, which is delicate but strong and clear, an icicle voice. For the second tune they did a cover of a song from the animation movie Gedo Senki, which I found out is based on the Earthsea fantasy novels that I spent days and nights reading as a child. After that the rest of the band came out and they turned up the volume much louder than usual at a cafe like the 440. They played mostly oldies like "Memai" and "Red Bicycle".

Swinging Popsicle's set featured several new songs, including a gorgeous minor-chord ballad called "Kanashii Shirabe (translated to something like 'A Sad Melody')", and a rocking new number called either "Crash" or "Clash" (you can't tell when it's pronounced in Japanese--I think the former though).

Advantage Lucy's Aiko claimed later that she and Ishizaka-san listened to Swinging Popsicle's set in the dressing room and told each other they need to become skilled musicians like them. And Popsicle was good, rocking the crowd in an almost business-like manner (though, at times, Shimada the guitarist and Hirata the bassist flashed little smiles at each other as they played behind singer Mineko, like two school-kids exchanging jokes behind the teacher's back).

For the encore, the audience got a treat: both Lucy's Aiko and Popsicle's Mineko came on stage for a performance of a rarely-heard unit called Mine-Mine ('Mine' pronounced 'mee-neh'), a reference to the 'Mine' in Mineko's name and Aiko's family name Hiramine. With members of the two great bands on stage, the Mine couple sang a cover of The La's "There She Goes", their voices blending prettily and all the musicians seeming to have maximum fun.

The Caraway & Guitar Pop

The Caraway is a Tokyo pop band led by Osamu Shimada, Swinging Popsicle’s guitarist, and they just released their first album, The Caraway. To celebrate its release they headlined an event at the Shinjuku Motion, also featuring Three Berry Icecream, Orangenoise Shortcut and Sloppy Joe.

What struck me most about this event was how many people showed up. It was sold out. Before the show dozens of people lined up at the grimy stairwell leading up to the club. It’s not a big venue at all, holding around a hundred people at most, and the Caraway and others are fairly popular, so maybe it shouldn’t have come as that much of a surprise that the place was packed. But compared with punk and other currently popular types of music in Japan, the music the Caraway plays, so-called guitar pop, is a genre favored by a small minority: a bit like people who would name Iceland or Belgium their favorite European country. So, as a fan of Japanese guitar pop myself, it came as a pleasant surprise to see the Motion so crowded with fans it took a big effort to move from one end to the other.

Of course, one of the great, distinguishing things about Tokyo is that for almost any sort of musical genre you can think of, somewhere there are musicians who play it for devoted fans. Hip-hop, country, blues, reggae, grindcore, rockabilly, zydeko, bossa nova, krautrock, you name it. People here like to let the music they listen to partly or wholly define who they are. I guess people do that everywhere, but it seems to be taken to a more extreme level in Japan, for reasons I’m not sure why. (On a related note, the other night I went to a bar where a harem of Japanese belly dancers was putting on a show. They danced skillfully, but also in a studious, decidedly non-flirtatious way.) In any case, the result is that there are groups of people who closely follow works by guitar pop bands and try to make it to their gigs.

(“Guitar pop”, by the way, is a term that doesn’t appear to be used much outside of Japan, and I’ve started to wonder whether it’s a Japanese invention. It’s not in wikipedia, for instance, and it’s not listed as a genre in Live 365 radio. As a description of a type of music it’s pretty vague, referring to bright, guitar-centered pop influenced by British New Wave, Swedish pop and indie pop bands.)



I like going to guitar pop shows because the fans tend to be mellow, classy folks not prone to random drunk violence, and I’ve gone to enough events now that it’s like Cheers: everyone knows my name (or, at least, many do). At the Caraway event, when the first group Three Berry Icecream played, the young daughter of the singer called out to her mom between songs, prompting all the petite ladies in the front of the crowd to smile and laugh the way they would do to a little girl who had just ransacked the closet and came out dressed up in a way she imagined adults consider fashionable.

The event, organized by ultracool indie label Bluebadge, was one of those where I thoroughly enjoyed all the bands that played. A happy discovery was Orangenoise Shortcut, a group whose name I’d heard of but otherwise wasn’t familiar with: the audience seemed to like them as much for their joke-filled banter between songs as their upbeat, sunny songs.

During Caraway’s set, I was reminded again what a natural performer guitarist Shimada is: when the band was asked for a second encore, they hadn’t prepared any songs, so Shimada decided to play a new number from their new album called “The Rainy Day”, and performed it exactly the same way they did earlier in the evening, just because it’s a great song and Shimada wanted to do it again. And everyone loved it again.

Ging Nang Boyz Plays... Berkeley??

Here's an amazing account of Japanese bad boy rockers Ging Nang Boyz making a punk rock pilgrimage to Berkeley's 924 Gilman Street (the musical birthplace of bands like Green Day and Operation Ivy) , and then, quite by accident, getting a chance to do an unscheduled mini-gig for a room full of Californians who had no idea who they were.

Keikaku.net's Bob Vielma writes:

Everyone seemed a bit dumbstruck by the unbridled energy of this unknown Japanese band, but that didn't mean they weren't having a hell of a time. Did any of them realize that they were seeing one of Japan's biggest punk bands? This band that could easily sell out a club of hundreds or even thousands was giving their all to a crowd of about sixty.

I wish I could have seen it!

Melt-Banana, The Ignored & Bad-Bee Bad Boys

I’ve been going to Tokyo rock shows for years but somehow never made it to the Jam in Shinjuku, one of the oldest live houses in the city. That changed on Friday, when I went there to catch badbee.net’s event featuring Melt-Banana, Nokemono, Factotums and Falsies on Heat.

The Jam is a small basement club that looks as plain as a shack in a suburban mall. You get there walking down a drab thoroughfare away from the rowdier parts of Shinjuku, going past a Shinto shrine. Once inside, I thought I felt the liquified essence of Rock Bands Past perspiring down the Jam’s walls (or maybe it was just the air-con was down).

The first band up was Falsies on Heat, an all-girl quartet that I thought was good the last time I saw them, but truly rocked this time. Maybe they come to life most in a little, low-staged place like the Jam, where there’s nothing separating them from the audience. Or, maybe I was in a more receptive mood this time. Either way, my opinion of the group went up. They said they were going to take time off from doing shows because the drummer was about to have a baby.

Speaking of being one with the audience, Simon, the singer of the next band Factotums and one of the badbee guys, placed one mike in the audience section and another on the stage, and moved between those two seemingly at random, staggering sometimes into the crowd and singing in their midst. With long hair reaching down to his tattooed shoulder and with drink-hazed eyes, he was every Japanese daughter’s dad’s worst nightmare of a furyou gaijin (‘bad foreigner’). But he sang well, like a 70’s rock star (the band reminded me a bit of the Dictators).



‘Nokemono’ (pronounced ‘no’, ‘kay’, ‘moe’, ‘no’), the name of the third group, means something like ‘the Ignored One’. It was hard to blow them off though at the Jam: their bass and guitarist both played bare-chested, while the singer, wearing shocking-pink full-bodied tights and a green leather (?) cap, shouted at the audience that Nokemono drove 600 kilometers from Kyoto to be at this show, so they better have fun, and went on to try to crowd-surf two times, a difficult undertaking because the crowd density wasn’t quite enough. Badbee.net describes their music as “mental psycho-delic rock ‘n’ roll”.

Melt-Banana, the last band, dashed though their fast, experimental, short (one minute or so) punk songs, and were amazing. I remembered once being bored at an extremely brainy Tokyo indie pop show, and one of the few high points that night was that the club showed a video of a very energetic, rocking group, which turned out to be Melt-Banana. After Melt-Banana’s gig, a friend said that they are one of those bands you don’t expect to be that good because all these foreigners that know little about Japanese music love them, but you go to their shows and it turns out that they are really excellent after all (a somewhat elitist opinion, to be sure). Their female singer, wearing a white, caped pullover, moves the irises of her eyes from one corner to another as she sings, like a Balinese dancer, though I wasn’t sure if that was part of the performance or just a nervous thing.

Japan Live Radio Updated: Pop

Japan Live Radio has been updated, this time with a focus on good pop tunes including those from Hideki Kaji's new album and the debut album of The Caraway, Swinging Popsicle's guitarist's band. I'm also broadcasting a few songs from Fresh Cuts From Japan, japanfiles.com's compilation CD. Check it out.