Makino Takuma

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.

Japan Onchi featured in this month’s Japanzine

The Japan Onchi blog is dusted with praise in an article titled Best of the Web 2008 in the March issue of Japanzine. Quote:

Here at the JZ office, we get a lot of the lowdown on the underground from Japan Onchi (japonchi.wordpress.com), a seemingly one-man blogging operation that aims to right the wrongs we’ve all suffered at the hands of J-Pop. Good job he’s doing too, with plenty of info on Japanzine faves The Boredoms (or whatever they’re called these days) and Tenniscoats, amongst others of their ilk.

The full article is here (scroll down to the category titled, cough, Tragically Hip.) Thanks Japanzine!

Sheherherhers

How, salaryman, would you care to unwind? Do you like bongos? How about girls and beer? Do you like to paint yourself red and get into a heated argument with an electronic percussion pad in a Koenji basement? That’s it office boy, let off that steam! Sure, of course you can headbutt that drum. Whatever takes your mind off work and towards the goofy animistic cult of Sheherherhers:

Tokyo’s Sheherherhers describe themselves as “an enigmatic nine-member collective, a chaotic zoo skilled in jumbled-up music”. They prefer to be photographed wearing animal heads and hanging out of trees. Onstage they spool out semi-improv junk-art music like bug-eyed Martian spiders while frontman TKD iggies his way around the stage in various piques of demonic possession:

But on record Sheherherhers reign in the chaos and lay down some funky gibbon grooves like those which underpin Homage To MacArthur from the band’s first demo CD. The good general’s name is the unlikely callsign for some warm, delightful African rhythms with only the slightest hint of squealing incoherence underneath:

Sheherherhers - Homage To MacArthur

Satoko Fujii & Tatsuya Yoshida

A few years ago, someone very sick indeed had the idea of taking Japan’s premier avant-jazz pianist Satoko Fujii and sitting her on a stool opposite goateed beast of difficult improvisational drumming Tatsuya Yoshida (Ruins, Akaten, a million more). We only mention this because today’s previous outfit Mouse On The Keys has started the day off on a fine drums vs. piano note.

The association started when Yoshida, a titan of the Japanese underground, picked up sticks in the free-jazz/avant-rock fusion group The Satoko Fujii Quartet in 2001. Life as a performing duo began with a show at the Victoriaville Festival in Quebec in 2002, which led to the release of the live album Toh-kichi the same year. The album Erans followed on the Tzadik label in 2004 and sounds like this:

Satoko Fujii & Tatsuya Yoshida - Snyguilp

This is very outré musical jousting indeed: drummer Yoshida seems to be trying to lead throughout much of Erans, requiring Fujii to play kissychase with some manic key rattling. While this kind of music may serve little function other than to soundtrack cartoon mice as they chase each other up and down the stairs and whack each other with rubber mallets, all God’s creatures deserve their soundtrack.

Of her drummer, Fujii says: “His approach of improvisation is very different from jazz musicians. He is a great improviser and it is big fun to play with him because his way to approach music is totally different from me and I am inspired many times. He strongly pushes things without any hesitation. Many improvisers use different colors so the music will not have ‘extreme color’, but Yoshida uses the exact same color so the music has strong garish color with a sharp shape.”

We say: “Prash! Klang! Tin-Kan-Tinkle! Galumf! The solo and other works of both Yoshida and Fujii are also highly recommended.”

Mouse On The Keys

Hey, who hasn’t looked at someone holding a guitar and not prolapsed into fits of giddy laughter? Happens to me outside Shinjuku Station almost every day. The guitar is the most preposterous instrument ever invented. Look at it! Whether playing standing up or sitting down, it just doesn’t look right. Of course, the guitar has long been normalised as a tool of youthful expression by sheer exposure, almost erasing its inherent absurdity. But here, on these humble pages, I confer special attention on bands that have gone post-guitar: like the modern Boredoms, these bands are obviously onto something.

One such outfit is Tokyo’s brilliant, still-mysterious nu-jazz duo Mouse On The Keys, who opt not to jerk an electrified phallus around in their audience’s faces but make music with a drumkit and a piano that still, in the conventional parlance of arena car parks the world over, rocks.

This mouse tale can be traced back to 2006 when drummer Akira Kawasaki, a founding member of Tokyo down-tempo outfit Nine Days Wonder, got together with pianist Atsushi Kiyoda to make minimal phase piano music with a galloping rock beat. Inspired by British post-minimalist composers Steve Martland and Graham Fitkin, Mouse On The Keys issued their debut mini-album Sezession late last year on Toe’s Machu Picchu Industrias label.

Sezession is four tracks of pure instrumental scintillation. Every Japanese who has heard this has only had two words to describe it: “Kakko ii!” (”Cool!”). Faced with the insurmountable difficulty of choosing just one track, I’ll ignore the obvious lead-off number and instead give you Toccatina: a rollicking tussle between jazzy and post-hardcore impulses with Hununhum’s saxophonist guesting to boot.

Mouse On The Keys - Toccatina

Phew

Back in our very first post on January 4th we speculated where a marginally hip Japanese kid would have been on the same day in 1980. The answer was in the studios of Nihon Terebi to see the brilliant Plastics introduce the New Wave template to Japanese Pops. But what if, instead of being merely marginally hip, you were 100% avant hip to the bone: what would entice you then? Along with a select few others in the know, you might have been jammed into a tiny performance space to see this. The band is Japan’s first No Wave act Aunt Sally and the singer with the nihilism to spare is Phew:

Phew (real name a closely-guarded music industry secret, apparently) started out with Aunt Sally in the Kansai area in the late ’70s but is best known for some incredible solo recordings from the early ’80s. The subterranean howl of that first band may have seen her tagged as the Japanese Patti Smith but a more expansive sweep of Phew’s recording career would suggest she’s followed the path of a Nico: moving through an impeccable cast of collaborators while always fogging everything she touches with her, uh, let’s just say distinctive depressive aura. Phew’s vowel sounds are peculiar, even in Japanese, and she quickly exchanged the blunt ranting of Aunt Sally for a stuffy-nosed singing style that sounds not unlike Nico’s English.

Phew made her solo bow in 1980 with the single Shūkyoku (Finale), a bizarre electronic experiment done with Ryūichi Sakamoto. It made enough of an impression outside Japan for Phew to travel to Germany the following year and record her debut album with two members of Can, Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit, and Krautrock über-producer Conny Plank:

Now, anyone with even a vague knowledge of electronic and industrial music history is probably already alert to the fact that the Japanese Nico teaming up with Can and the producer behind Kraftwerk, Neu!, Harmonia and DAF among others to record an album in 1981 is a recipe for hair-raising brilliance. And that’s exactly what Phew turned out to be: thirty extraordinary minutes of ice-cold machine funk like sample track Signal, a corrosive robo-disco anxiety trip about the movements of people and cars:

Phew - Signal

This month’s issue of Japanese culture bible Studio Voice heralds Phew as the third best Japanese alternative album of all time in a list that seems otherwise geared towards shifting copies of underselling albums released in the past year. If the writers of Studio Voice were seeking historical moments of real avant greatness to lend weight to recent alternative offerings, they couldn’t have chosen better than this.

Phew’s vocals have subsequently been sought out for collaborations with ex-members of DAF and Einstürzende Neubauten, Anton Fier, Bill Laswell, Otomo Yoshihide and the Boredoms’ Seiichi Yamamoto - making her probably the most well-connected living Japanese musician, even if she’s far from being the most famous. A fuller discography is available at the ever-informative Improvised Music From Japan site here.

Delving into Phew’s previous activities also brings one eventually to the band Novo Tono. A kind of mid-90s Japanese noise supergroup including Phew and members of the Boredoms and Ground Zero, Novo Tono released only one album, entitled Panorama Paradise, in 1996. Like Phew’s debut, this one’s definitely worth seeking out. The eclectic cast of participants does make for an extremely schizophrenic listen: the demented mishmash of music concrete, noise flips and delicate folk pickings having virtually no precedent in music except perhaps the Brazilian psychedelic band Os Mutantes. Here’s one of the prettier, more together moments:

Novo Tono - Sasaekirenai Kurasa

Hununhum

Another band for whom information is hard to come by, the mysterious Hununhum are a marginal collective made up of ex-members of various post-hardcore and screamo concerns, most notably Kulara. Recent live shows in the Tokyo area have acquired legendary status and inevitable comparisons to early Boredoms with their punishing tribal workouts and freeform structures leading to ecstatic payoffs.

In lieu of anything as conventional as a band description on their MySpace, this promotional video for interested AOR makes it clear what Hununhum will do to get a record deal:

We can only guess at the significance of the name. Because they’re un-hummable? Because they’re symmetry freaks? Because they wanted a near-palindrome that would look great on psychedelic posters of the late ’60s? Oh wait, another Hununhum site has surfaced. This one has a nice photo diary from last June’s Geshi Festival in Yoyogi Park and a flyer that pegs the band’s sound perfectly as “Tropacadelic Pascoalcore”. Which is a compact way of saying they take elements of Tropicalia, psychedelia, genius Brazilian folk-instrumentalist Hermeto Pascoal and their own hardcore origins, wrap them up in one big cone and smoke it like this:

Hununhum are fairly active in the Tokyo area. The best place to see them is at Super Deluxe where they played a Tropicadelic Dance Party with Jebiotto! last October and supported Mike Watt’s Brother’s Sister’s Daughter (not his niece, that’s just the terrible name of the band) last Friday. A bootleg is doing the rounds online but any studio recording will have to wait until some essential rewiring work is completed in the ceiling.

Ni-Hao!

Three girls meet in Kyoto while studying music and Chinese. Showing an early fondness for primary colours, they rename themselves Green Leo, Red Ariko and Blue Yukari and shop for colour-coordinated ’70s sportswear accordingly. They release a clutch of EPs of jumpin’ good music for spazzy parties called Red and Blue on Seiichi Yamamoto’s Ummo Records, which are eventually gathered together on the Tzadik compilation Keep On Jumpin’. Another mini-album entitled New-Hao! follows in 2006 in which the trio abandon their bass-bass-drums set-up for a keyboard-driven disco direction. Despite receiving limited airplay owing to their risqué, sexually liberated lyrics and thoroughly onchi contrapuntal rhythms, the trio are endlessly sampled by unimaginative disc jockeys across the globe.

Damn! It seems we’ve done it again: utterly confused ’70s disco queens Musique with Kansai area alternative queens Ni-Hao! who actually look like this:

Ni-Hao! produce the kind of multi-part vocal gymnastics and booty-shaking bass-rock that either delights or irritates depending on your margin of tolerance towards exuberant Japanese child-women. An all-action trio bestowed with the kind of rhythmical telepathy that usually only elementary school girls can muster, they make music as maddeningly catchy as this, a pop remake of their old favourite Look At That (Peach):

Japan Onchi finally broke its Ni-Hao! live hymen last Summer in a grungy basement in Shibuya whose name we have conveniently forgotten. To our surprise drummer Green Leo was absent, although Red Ariko kindly gave us a compensatory 33% discount on the door. The remaining two members made up for her absence by ripping though an irrepressible version of the Jackson Five’s ABC aided by a male roadie on drums who possessed the spirit, if not the waistline, of Ni-Hao!. In fact, unbeknown to us at the time, drummer Leo had just officially handed in her green jersey of resignation, leaving only bassists Ariko and Yukari, also of Limited Express (Has Gone?).

Although they don’t appear to have updated their official website for around two years, Ariko and Yukari have been blogging furiously since August last year. In her 2008 New Year message, Ariko admits that the previous year has been one of enormous change: the departure of Leo and the arrival of an unexpected new member, Yukari’s newborn son who entered into the world just last week!

You may, if you wish, follow the course of Yukari’s pregnancy and childbirth online in minute detail and know everything about the band’s daily life in Ni-Hao!’s blog. Everything, that is, bar the reason for Leo’s departure and whether or not Ni-Hao! have plans to record again.

Leo, meanwhile, has reverted to being plain old Reo. While we can’t shed light on the reason behind her departure from Ni-Hao!, we did pick up a homemade CD-R recently of her as-yet unsigned new band ULTRA Jr, formed with Limited Express guitarist JJ and old-school Japanese punk Hide on bass. Second track Red Bicycle manages to capture the best of both Limited Express and Ni-Hao!’s frenetic attack on your refusal to dance:

ULTRA Jr - Red Bicycle

Sekiri

Ah, the dependable world of Japanese girl punk, where girls never become women and half of all songs expound on the subject of food. Sure, there’s a ray of pop excellence running from Shonen Knife’s three-chord dayglo rumpus to Ni-Hao!’s three-girl math rock chops but, for the most part, Japanese girl punk can never escape from its counterpart: the Western male fan for whom the non-threatening disposition of the music fits his image of the non-threatening disposition of the Japanese female. Let’s rake over these brightly painted Pebbles once and for all and see what scurries out from underneath:

Meet Sekiri. Hissing and crawling out of Kyoto in 1985, these four girls were a minor scandal in Japan during the late 1980s. Their name meant dysentery for a start. Song titles were less about vegetables than about sex: Yumemiru Omanko (The Dreaming Vagina) and FUCK Shiyou (Let’s Fuck) being prime examples. Their songs also extended to filthy updates on old classics by the likes of the Finger Five and Pink Lady.

Pictured here on the cover of Sekiri No Monogatari, or Story of Sekiri, a best-of compilation released in 1989, the band somehow manage to pull off the Ramones grime-meets-Ronettes sass look to perfection, despite the photographer’s unusual decision to put them in a horsedrawn carriage. Isn’t that New York in the background? Surely there must have been a needle-strewn alley just yards from where this shot was taken…

Style and attitude are present in abundance, but you still wouldn’t hold out much hope for Sekiri’s music. That would be a mistake, though, because Sekiri were quite something. Their music really needs to be listened to in the context of the time it was made, when it would have sounded like a radical roar in Japan. Sekiri songs tended to be one or two minute squalls of brutalist sludge with sudden shifts in tempo that suggest the violent mood swings of a pouty sukeban teenage girl delinquent. Headgirl Miyu’s singing, meanwhile, could be better described as sarcastic ranting:

Sekiri - Dynamite Kid

Included on a CD giveaway with an old copy of Indies Issue, Dynamite Kid is minimal proto-grunge circa 1986: the aural equivalent of having nunchucks tightened around your throat by a chain-smoking all teen girl biker gang behind the pachinko parlour. Now that’s not what people come to Japan for, is it?

There’s a full Sekiri discography in Japanese here while YouTube, of course, never fails to turn up at least one clip of interest:

Things to love about this TV appearance from May ‘89 include: how monumentally disinterested Sekiri seem in being on this show; how the presenters appear to have trouble believing Sekiri are Japanese; the sublime ridiculousness of the ’80s in general; Sekiri’s live performance and the obligatory post-song analysis by the panel in which the Visual-kei goth dude wearing black eye make-up and lipstick comments that “It wasn’t bad at all but I still thought it was a little dark.”

Jebiotto!

To attempt to describe Jebiotto! is to fumble hopelessly with loose musical ends. Just like the music, in fact. Their charm-point seems to be the rickety imprecision of their Casiotone meanderings through early ’80s no wave territory. A bassline that weaves and strolls in no particular hurry and synth shrieks that could strip paint together open up a musical vista for JJ Madca’s ‘impressionistic’ vocals, the overall effect recalling the dissonant warblings of The Raincoats given a dose of Malaria! with, crucially, an elastic pop nous holding things together.

This is one of those rare occasions we’ll feature a band despite being unable to actually play or show you any of their music. Hopefully, there’ll be a fuller post about Jebiotto! when we see them perform live at the end of February. They don’t seem to have ever released a record bar a couple of fantastic tracks on their MySpace. Yes, aural initiation into Jebiotto’s outre world is just a mouseclick for Murdoch away! In the meantime, here’s a translation of the short biography on the band’s homepage:

Jebiotto! are a rock band whose activities centre around Koenji venue 20000 Volt. Taking influences from various bands of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, they were originally formed by keyboard player Tsutsumi AKA Tutti with the help of Ryo Yoshida of Aura. However, in 2003 the pair went their separate ways. In 2004, the band reformed with a line-up of Tutti on keyboards and guitar and Madoka AKA JJ Madca handling vocals and Casiotone, plus drummer Morioka. A bass player, Hakase, joined the following year but will depart in 2008, leaving a vacancy. The band describe themselves as making a funya to shite gyarin to shita saundo: a sound that while harsh and clanging is also soft and limp.

Go to Jebiotto!’s MySpace, listen to Air Bear and that final sentence should start to radiate with intense meaning.