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