Posted in Announcements on February 6, 2009 by tokyology
Some of you have emailed to point out that Japan Onchi has not been updated for some time. To which we can only say: don’t blame us, blame The Device.
The Device has cured us of all our old social embarrassment! Whereas before we shunned communal singing we are now first among the organisers. It did not seem possible when the package arrived from Rakuten that this mere object (AKA The Deonchifier, The Deonchillator, The Magic Beak, or simply The Device) could instill a degree of musical competence in the owner and there was much doubt remaining to be conquered when we first settled down on our nest feathers and hesitantly began to honk through it.
Within hours The Device had us giving pitch-perfect renditions of the superb musical works hatched by Japan’s entertainment industry. Now we drum our fingers in perfect time along to tastefully-arranged hymns to consumer anxiety tumbling like petals from the pouty lips of J-divas who, EXACTLY LIKE US, cannot wait for the day when ALL musical needs are catered for by Starbucks.
Musical agitators, put away your abused instruments! Disband, Maher Shalal Hash Baz! We need no longer conceal our inferiority by making a convoluted case for non-perfect music. The Device has at last made it possible for all of us to hitch our wagon to that solid mass of folk who possess what is known as ‘good taste’. All hail The Device!
Once upon a time there were women in Japanese entertainment. And there were men who quite liked those women to wear revealing costumes while they sang. And lo, those women did wear revealing costumes while they sang. And they did tilt their heads to one side coquettishly while lip-synching. And of course they couldn’t quite dance in time to the music but the music was secondary and hardly mattered anyway for these women were wholesome and they were good. This situation carried on for some time, a little longer than in most other countries.
Such was the tragic lot of women in the Japanese music industry until the end of the ’70s when growing female economic independence and new musical styles provided the impetus for women to disobey their music industry fathers by producing music of their own. Of course, this being Japan, the acceptance of women as musicians rather than as mere idols proceeded somewhat differently. Stage costumes didn’t disappear, they became homemade and frequently avant-garde. Instead of righteous anger, knowingly dopey vocal styles and lyrical subjects parodied the excesses of the idol phenomenon: the same tendencies exhibited by the excellent, uninhibited all-girl bands which have today become something of a Japanese speciality.
But in order for women to bring about these changes, there had to be pioneers. And lo, there were pioneers but they were few. In fact, they were Phew, Jun Togawa and the Non-Band, led by Non (Noriko Hosaka). The standout track on the Non-Band’s eponymous 1982 debut, Duncan Dancin’ is a slithery, seductive invitation to the no-wave dancefloor: proto-OOIOO tribalism and squirts of sax through which wriggle Non’s peculiar interpretations of the vocalist’s role.
The band reformed in the early 00’s to reclaim some of their dues and Non keeps a blog of their activities here. Yet still so little is known about the Non-Band that it was necessary for one writer to produce an extraordinarily convoluted introduction tying them in to the broader picture of female empowerment in Japan. And the people surely saw that it was convoluted but I hope they did not mind too much.
At Doddodo’s feet a multinational mix of designer types in Graniph T’s have been coerced into some kind of creative-class cakewalk, their usual laconic selves surrendered to an orgy of unselfconscious geek-jacking and spinal fibrillation. Tokyo’s most dead have arisen to dance, albeit not yet in any coordinated fashion. The woman responsible clings to her mixer throne by her feet and fires another button to let rip one more salvo of bastard noise before resuming her exhortations to the dancefloor to chant her name in adulation one more time: DODDODO DOKKOISHO DODDODO!
One-woman noise factory Doddodo has been attracting attention of late. Musician and blogger Momus has incorporated her into his Matsuri-kei class of female shamanism that leads from the Slits’ Japanese-language version of Earthbeat to the cosmic jungle boogie of OOIOO, while Japan-based free music label Tada Music described a Doddodo performance last year like so: “Grindcore, breakcore, noize… whatever you want to label it, the sound this frail street urchin wrenches from the speakers, her braille fingers searching, twitching across her long-suffering hardware, is at its most useful when raising the dead.”
Born Namin Haku, Doddodo is an Osaka native and a regular visitor to Tokyo’s subterranean deathtraps – sorry, live houses – where she pummels audiences with the duel earhammers of bastard noise and Kansai dialect. Throw in some make-up tips borrowed from the Yamanba (Japanese mountain hags) and you have an international star in the ascendancy. There’s just one thing troubling us though. As much as we like to be yelled at and undergo enforced audience participation, is it not possible that Doddodo is actually quite, you know, a tad bit, well, annoying? Someone had to say it.
Indeed, could it not be said that Doddodo shares uncanny behavioural traits with another famous boor, Liam Gallagher? All I have is evidence:
Liam: totemic figurehead for peat bog-dwelling, anti-social British ‘lad’ culture Doddodo: totemic figurehead for mountain-dwelling, anti-social Japanese ‘hag’ culture
Liam: expresses cultural affiliation at extremities of body (hair: mod-revival ‘Weller cut’/feet: Adidas Samba trainers) Doddodo: expresses cultural affiliation at extremities of body (hair: teen delinquent ’spiky dango’ hairstyle/feet: toilet slippers)
Liam: disregard for formalist conventions of music performance (hands folded behind back) Doddodo: disregard for formalist conventions of music performance (legs folded beneath body)
Liam: mad-for-it, jingoistic fervour for musical second city (Manchester) Doddodo: mad-for-it, jingoistic fervour for musical second city (Osaka)
Liam: berates audiences and interviewers in tangy proletarian dialect (Mancunian) Doddodo: berates audiences and interviewers in tangy proletarian dialect (Kansai-ben)
Liam: adversarial relationship with capital city (Londoners all ’softies’, Oasis Vs. Blur, see: Britpop Culture Wars) Doddodo: adversarial relationship with capital city (Tokyoites all uptight, need Doddodo’s help to dance)
Liam: a witless John Lennon Doddodo: a foul-mouthed Yoko Ono?
Now, will someone with Photoshop and time on their hands care to produce the necessary Two Virgins mock-up and link to it below?
Throughout musical history, many things have been appropriated for the purposes of rhythm. Bluesmen heard it in the passing of trains, early rockers in the sexualised throb of the automobile. German electronic pioneers set their pulses to a Computer World, while heavy industry has forged a backing beat for countless scoundrels.
One thing that hasn’t been utilised very often for its rhythmic potential – except for perhaps the heart-stopping breaks in the most outlandish girl group melodramas – is the heart, the body’s own metronome. Fuyuki Claude Yamakawa is to the human heart what Hendrix was to the guitar, i.e. he does things with it that make people sort of gasp.
London-born, Tokyo-resident Yamakawa uses an electronic stethoscope to amplify the sound of his heartbeat which he then controls by modulating his breathing. The breathing technique is one he learned from Khoomei throat-singing, of which he is also a world-renowned performer (winner of the Avant-garde Award at the 4th International Khoomei Festival in the Tuvan Republic). Yamakawa’s heartbeat is also rigged to electric lightbulbs which glow brightly and dim suddenly, just in case the sound of a man stopping his own heart isn’t already terrifying enough for you.
According to a Washington Post review: “As a few bare light bulbs – synced to the beating of his heart – pulsed like a ritual fire, the effect was powerful and deeply strange, like a shamanistic ritual from the 23rd century. And at the climax, when Yamakawa drew his breath in and stopped his heart, creating a sudden, horrifying silence, the impact was devastating – as if we’d all just stepped off a cliff.”
Here’s Yamakawa in performance with Atsushiro Ito of Optrum (profiled here before) for, of all things, a commercial. Now that’s one major Japanese electronics maker with its marketing finger on the pulse. Your move, Japanese consumer.
An outlandish girls’ circus is stalking Tokyo. Visitors to last month’s Yasukuni Shrine Festival will have seen it. It has also left the capital on several occasions, venturing as far as the northern wasteland of Hokkaido. I will attempt to describe its main features and suggest the possible implications for today’s youth movement.
Deliciousweets are a musical theatre group of seven women with one Heidi Chaamar as unofficial ringleader. They exist to satirise the housewife model of Japanese femininity and its counterpart, the feminine ideal embodied in Japanese entertainment’s conveyor belt production of anodyne idols and their inevitable sexworker progeny to service men whose own wives’ sexuality has been terminated at marriage. Unsurprisingly, Deliciousweets reject this system in favour of licentious free expression. In order to escape the attention of the authorities, they camouflage their protest in a ’swinging sixties’ aesthetic that makes it appear relatively harmless or even fun, as this piece of propaganda illustrates:
Deliciousweets formed around ten years ago as a fashion and dance group and then gradually added music to their act until they became more like a regular band that does between-song skits lampooning the inane jingles of soap commercials and the frothy eroticism of Japanese light entertainment. In 2006 the band released an album on the excellent Sazanami label. This year saw the formation of the band’s own label and the release of a follow-up entitled Nana-iro Hazamu Makkurai Sekai, or A Pitch-Dark World Cheered Up By Seven Colours, which they describe in the following polemic:
Our second album is a thing of rare beauty, deep meaning and profound human traits! Leaving aside the small things in life, we light up the pitch-dark world with our seven colours, each individually forming the spirit of the whole sky. Things that the eye can’t see are made visible and time passes too merrily. Is it a fairytale or a vision? No, it’s definitely for real.
Get ready to be bewildered! In our paralysing musical performances, our wild singing voices go straight for the heart and our high-pitched shriek goes dashing about the place! This incredible wonder will cause a sensitive person like yourself to surrender! A most unconventional collection of songs is now on sale!
Deliciousweets adhere strictly to a musical style known as natsumero or ‘nostalgic melodies’ that stir up memories of the golden Showa era, itself a historic fiction maintained by immersing the eyes and ears in Terayama Shuji movies and Group Sounds. Natsumero’s retro keening would be pretty tiresome were it not enlivened here by another core Deliciousweets concept: that of harenchi, meaning infamous or wanton and usually applied mock-disparagingly to the fallen heroines of Showa-era exploitation movies. ‘Harenchi Cabaret’ is one way of describing a typical Deliciousweets performance. The band itself prefers ‘Coquette Show’:
Deliciousweets don’t just scour Terayama movies for fashion tips: the band is thoroughly versed in the core ’60s/’70s doctrines of Feminism, Marxism and Situationism – values that finally arrived in music ten years later than in most other artforms with the ’spontaneous’ coming of punk. But since faithful adherence to pre-punk aesthetic values prohibits them from playing their own music, the women of Deliciousweets have taken into their employ a harem of four male musicians who labour under the separate name of Girls Alley Paralysed Hips.
It is the ‘Hips’ sacred duty to generate the psychedelic fuzz and organ licks that let loose the Deliciousweets’ harenchi-ness onstage, where the gender dynamic is clearly one of role-reversal. As punishment for their rock forefathers’ collective misdeeds, the men are confined to fixed positions at the rear of the stage like an electrified gospel choir. Teasing the guys about their over-consumption of shochu and subsequent incapacitation forms part of the girls’ act for the ‘Hips secondary function is to be witless dupes of the girls’ emasculating prowess, as their name makes clear. Confronted by a ‘girls alley’ (vagina), their ‘hips’ (asses) become ‘paralysed’ (paralysed) leaving them incapable of performing the thrusting maneuvers historically enjoyed by male rock musicians. That promiscuity will henceforth be an exclusively female privilege is at the forefront of Deliciousweets’ revolutionary agenda.
What do Deliciousweets mean for the confused limbo of today’s youth movement? Are they a comment upon or a symptom of the current pathetic state of resistance that forces nonconformists to retreat to the past in search of challengeable values and the means to attack them? Let’s listen to some music in search of answers. From the recent album, the hauntingly onchi slow number Imo Koro Musume, a Kafkaesque parable of a girl forced to endure life as a potato, with the humble vegetable possibly serving as metaphor for a dreary fate as a Japanese mother-wife:
A rare early number included on the first Wild Sazanami Beat compilation, My First Date sets out a girl’s itinerary of expectations for a first romantic encounter. Note how the song’s mood of quaint upbeat innocence is delivered tongue-in cheek. Tea and a movie she will go for, but a guerrilla-filmed tryst in a manga cafe in exchange for twenty thousand yen is not on this girl’s agenda. Or is it?
We round off with a curio: Harenchi Gakuen No Tēma (Theme from ‘School of Infamy’, the spin-off movie of a popular erotic manga series) is a rollicking ’60s sexploitation number by a little-known beat singer called Kajiki Sō and features probably the first use of the H-word in Japanese pops.
Auranoisazzzz are the Tokyo duo of Tomoko Mouri and Yuko Uesu. They are very possibly the world’s only harp-playing 8bit electronica outfit. In addition to beatifically strumming their classical instruments onstage, Tomoko and Yuko surround themselves with a kaleidoscope of retro toys and noise machines. While I will resist clichés of white-robed angels playing God’s own music, Auranoisazzzz probably will take you straight to heaven if your idea of paradise consists of being reduced to 24 pixels and running and jumping around a platform landscape in search of colourful eggs to gobble. Here’s an animated video for Hooohmrun! directed by Kana Kitahana, followed by a download of the same song from Auranoisazzzz’s debut album Paper Puppet on Clay Records.
For the uninitiated, 8bit is a musical subculture founded on the belief that obsolete technology of limited capacity is more human and hence expressive than the latest version. It’s essentially an update of the old guitars vs. synthesisers schism for kids born into an age when electronic music was already the norm. The comfort the performers derive from reproducing the sounds of fondly-remembered video games prefigures both rock’s endless quest to reassert its roots and its eternal refusal to grow up, making 8bit a quintessentially conservative form.
8bit first appeared in Japan at the dawn of the twenty-first century, when the new era was heralded by Fan Club Orchestra, a collective who specialised in bleep-bleep versions of retro-futurist hymns like 2001: A Space Odyssey bashed out entirely on customised Gameboys. While 8bit has always been amateur in spirit, more recently attempts have been made to bring it to a wider audience, deliberately coveting the otaku dollar by expanding into merchandise. This has resulted in the mindbogglingly dire YMCK, surely the crudely pixellated nail in the whole 8bit coffin.
However, as most 8bit music is produced out of sheer geekish love with minimal recording overheads, much of it is still made available for free by its creators. With its own peculiar labyrinth of reservations to negotiate, Japan Onchi has been slow to deliver you 8bit artists but there are other fine sites like Creation Centre which do a good job of unearthing talent in the field of Japanese lo-fi analogue electronica. Go to ‘em.
Being in the avant-garde of onchi-ness, short-lived new wave unit the Plastics have appeared here before. But the arrival on YouTube of new footage from an unidentified Japanese TV show in the early ’80s is reason enough to resurrect them.
Minimalist diatribe Copy is scathingly subversive and brilliantly bitter: everything Japanese ‘pops’ are not supposed to be. And here is perhaps the single finest example of frontman Toshi Nakanishi’s reductive assimilation of every perplexed outsider in rock & roll from Buddy Holly to David Byrne.
Ask yourself: is your life is so richly complete that you can’t spare the two minutes and 30 seconds it takes to watch this piece of pop glory? If you do click play, beware: due to the infectious nature of great pop and the tendency of perfect numbers to duplicate all by themselves, 2:30 can swiftly become 5:00, 10:00 and even 20:00…
How about this for a proposal for a band? The aesthetic will be fishing trip chic: plenty of outdoor clothing and stray hooks. The music will be underwater dub comprised of equal parts submarine rumblings and lolloping beats. The singer will eschew conventional singing in favour of cooing and gurgling like an unborn baby swimming in utero or moaning and groaning like a massive mutual whale massage occurring off the coast of Japan. Oh, and said singer will be suffering from an incurable heart defect that will lend a tragic undertow to the whole ill-starred caper.
Allow Japan Onchi to flick its tail and enter more mainstream waters to incorporate Fishmans into its canon of the unusual. Formed in 1987, Fishmans released seven albums that gazed longingly from a distance at life and the universe. They were just becoming deservedly massive when frontman Shinji Sato eventually succumbed to heart failure in 1999.
The song Weather Report, taken from 1997’s Space, Japan, Setagaya, speaks the universal language of euphoric despair like little else before or since in Japanese music. And to think, this from the country that gave you Orange Range! The world is a funny place but Fishmans understood that better that you or I ever could.
It’s rainy season in Japan and that means it’s time to slosh down to Tsutaya and rent for the nth time the cult classic Rokugatsu No Hebi, or A Snake of June. Shinya Tsukamoto’s 2002 film noir is the wettest thing ever. Literally, it never stops raining as married, sexually-frustrated Asuka Kurosawa is drawn into the clutches of a mysterious chubby pervert played by Tsukamoto himself. In the rain. If there only there was an Oscar for Best Wastage of Water, eh, Shinya?
Having already collaborated with Tsukamoto on Testuo and Tokyo Fist, industrial musician and composer Chu Ishikawa was the obvious candidate to soundtrack A Snake of June. The results are predictably as dark and wet as a piss-stain on the Marunouchi Line. Putting to good use his collection of bizarre instruments, Ishikawa, also a member of metal percussion unit Der Eisenrost, creates the perfect sonic accompaniment.
Darkness? It’s all there in the industrial clangs and scrapes. Rain? Check (by comparison, Riders On The Storm is a camel writhing with thirst while coughing up dust on a sand dune.) In short, hunt this one down. And yet, when choosing a standout moment, I have to go with One Summer Day’s mischievous reggae break in the clouds. Did I say it was raining?
As guitarist in both the very avant Yuazawan and the bubblegum pop project Americo, Makino Takuma tries extremely hard to be contradictory. For his first solo album, In The Suburbs, Makino unveils a wonky take on the blues that defies easy description. Here’s monthly culture bible Studio Voice having a go:
“Makino’s abstract musical performance blurs the contours of the blues. While picking out an unexpected sound that reveals the wood and metal comprising the guitar, Makino lifts his head to reveal that his glasses have slipped down. Your heart, which wasn’t prepared for such a punchline, is struck.” Studio Voice
In The Suburbs, released in January on indie label GRID605, has received noteworthy praise, including that of underground scenemaker Otomo Yoshihide:
“Makino’s intelligent, complex tuning seems out of order. My first impression was that someone special had arrived. Before long, a friendship sprouted between us and I began to think of him as less mad. However, listening to his debut album again, I wonder if my first impression wasn’t correct. His very being comes out of his mistuned guitar. His is not the usual pose of madness struck by musicians . It’s the incurable despair found among Japanese youth raised in the suburban towns and the brave resolve that can only emerge from those places.” Otomo Yoshihide
Makino Takuma – New Residential Quarter Rag
The album concludes with a short set of live improv between Makino and Ito Atsuhiro, already profiled here as a member of Optrum. Ito’s axe is the snappy, crackling Optron, a combination of handheld fluorescent striplight and FX pedals that turns him into the Darth Vader of avant-noise. If such collaborations continue, Makino may eventually blur the contours of the blues enough to transform their current Claptonesque shape into something much more radical-palatable than before.
