Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Special #2: Reports from the Enban Summer Festival. Day 1, #2: Takahiro Hirama (平間貴大)

Who: 平間貴大 (Takahiro Hirama)
Well?

Ever since I moved to Tokyo, I've seen Hirama-kun making trouble wherever he goes. Frying the transistors of the Fender amp at Enban,  injecting drum machine presets into delicate improvised textures at Grid 605 (that was during his drum machine phase), throwing stones at a pile of tapes as Madoka Kono made sophisticated casette player drones, somehow failing to play his own CD from a CD player at the release party for said CD, frustrating the audience with misdirection in a prepared guitar performance where he merely turned the amp of an on. I could go on.

And yet his constant inventiveness means that occasionally, he turns out an absolute gem of a performance which a less frustrating artist could probably never realize. His standout show to my mind was when he brought a sheet of glass, a wedge, a handheld plastic fan and a pack of cotton buds to Enban. He proceeded to balance the glass sheet on the wedge, taped the fan beneath the glass and then threw the cotton buds one by one on to the glass. At first nothing happened, but the laws of probability dictated that one side of the glass would eventually accumulate more cotton buds than the other. When this tipping point was reached, the glass started to rock on the wedge until it hit the fan producing a sharp buzzing noise once each oscillation. In my opinion, the performance  was really a master class in minimal music. The concept was clear, the materials limited, the time was set by the finite number of cotton buds in the pack. And yet the sound produced was complex.

Lately, Hirama has been turning more to computerised sound sources. His performance at the Enban summer festival on Saturday consisted of running the word "no" through the Google translate speech generator for a number of different languages. The 6th floor lounge of O-nest was filled with layers of synthesized voices, coming in and out of phase as the successive "no"s, "non"s, "nein"s, etc, were translated. It was definitely one of his more musical performances.

This youtube link from a recording of a performance at the now defunct loopline is  fairly representative of his style, but there are a number of clips of Hirama on line, some of them dealing with his involvement in the New Methodist Art Group (no relation to the Christian denomination).

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Special #2: Reports from the Enban Summer Festival. Day 1, #1: MARK

Who: MARK
What: Harrowing songs from Tokyo's most horrible vocal cords
Well?

Let's get the sexist bullshit out of the way. There's nothing "cute" about MARK. She's a relatively unfetching Tokyo gal, singing horribly and at length about life and love. Also, despite my limited Japanese ability, I get the feeling that her lyrics are sometimes incoherent. There's no possibility of attaching some "cute Japanese girl doing noise" fetish to her.

(Honestly, I feel shitty even bringing up issues of gender and attractiveness when writing about music, but it's *a thing*, especially when so many of the fans of weird Japanese music are white men, so I can't help but feel it's worth noting that MARK exists outside that world.)

I distinctly remember the first time I heard MARK's voice, in a music store/venue in Ochanomizu. I didn't realize that the shows on the second floor were piped through to the first floor music store P.A. I'm ashamed to admit my superficial reaction now, but as I heard the decidedly non-dulcet tones of her voice come on after a series of unremarkable J-indies tracks, I felt like I'd discovered some unknown  "outsider" music from Japan's past, and I went to ask the staff what CD they were playing. As it turned out, there was no CD and the music was very much in the present being performed on the second floor by a 20-something girl with the stage name MARK. At that performance, she had a backing duo on keyboard and bass, who seemed to be snickering at her as she hacked her way through lengthy original ballads.

MARK's performance in the 6th floor lounge for the Enban summer festival was a solo one, but the sense that people were snickering remained, with some incredulous audience members clearly catching MARK for the first time, and unsure of how to react.

MARK's music faces the same objections that all "outsider" music (Taguchi-san chose to use the word "cult" to describe her in the Festival notes) faces - the charge that she is in some sense "putting it on", that she's singing terribly on purpose to attract attention. Personally, I don't think it matters one way or another. To me Mark's ear-hurting vocals and generally unseductive music suggest the human fear of being unlovable and not entirely blameless for being unlovable.

I should point out that this is just my spin on MARK. She clearly had admirers and friends among the audience at the summer festival (heck, I'm one of the former) and I wouldn't want to leave the reader with the impression that she's some abused joke of the Tokyo scene. Given the fact that she's a competent guitarist and pianist as well, it's clear that she knows what she's doing to the music when she throws her vocals into the mix. However calculated it may be, I still find something brave about her willingness to present such an ugly sound to an audience which largely had no idea what to expect.

Special #2: Reports from the Enban summer festival (Acid Mother's Tennis Coats and Nisennenmondai)

What: Enban summer festival
Who: Acts from Tokyo, Kansai and beyond with a link to Enban
Where: Shibuya's O-nest: 5th and 6th floors
Well?

I'm not much of a summer festival guy. Somehow I don't think I'll ever make it to Fuji Rock (particularly if My Bloody Valentine's triumphant return couldn't drag me there a few years ago.) Even a day trip to Summer Sonic seems like too much work, and Loud Park's focus on New and Hair metal this year leaves me cold.

About the only summer festival I do regularly make it to is the Enban Jamboree - recently renamed "Enban Summer Festival" (did Taguchi-san finally catch on to the Boy Scout connotations of "jamboree"?)

The word "eclectic" may be overused, but any festival which includes psych legends Acid Mother's Temple (playing with The Tennis Coats!) along with unknown trouble-makers like Takahiro Hirama (平間貴大) deserves to be labelled so. I saw a bunch of compelling odd ball acts over the two days of the festival, particularly in the 6th floor lounge. For these relatively unknown bands, I'll do separate entries in the next day or two.

This blog is meant to focus on Tokyo music which has received little or no mention outside of Japan, but I can't resist briefly commenting here on two of the big acts who played the last day of the festival. Firstly, Nisennenmondai played a stunning set on Sunday night. It's the first time I've seen them using synthesizer instead of guitar, and I was surprised to find that I liked it better than their traditional guitar/bass/drums sound. Of course the rhythm section is still the same, so the sound is unmistakably nisennenmondai, but the substitution of synth for guitar arguably drags them even closer to a krautrock sound. After a long break from seeing them live, I was struck anew by their admirable economy of sound. The bass and drums lock tight in simple, poweful patterns which usually mutate gradually, but sometimes turn on a dime. Layered on top is the sound of a small synthesizer (perhaps merely a keyboard with some particularly choice patches) run through a single effect pedal producing a spectrum of sounds from twinkly arpeggios to all out drone. The crowd couldn't get enough of them, particularly as they only played two songs (albeit longform ones.)

The  other big act to catch my attention was the unholy amalgam of Acid Mother's Temple and Tennis Coats whoch was dubbed "Acid Mother's Tennis Coats" for the night. Anyone who thought that Tennis Coats might prove a calming influence on the Acid Mothers was soon proven wrong. The performance was as ridiculously overblown as Nisennenmondai's was restrained. Tennis Coats allowed themselves to be absorbed into the Acid Mother's Temple sound, putting up little fight as their melodies were dissolved by reverb, and their song structures eroded by Makoto Kawabata's psych guitar attack. The sound was hardly the point though as the performance grew wilder towards the end. Clothes were shed (Mitsuru Tabata's "Jazz Belly" was on full display, as he traipsed  through the 6th floor lounge in his undies straight after the show), and Kawabata's guitar was set on fire (admittedly only the showy, methylated spirits kind of fire), smashed to pieces and flung into the audience.

On another day, I might have groaned at their self-indulgent excess, but it all seemed appropriate on a Sunday night in Tokyo in the sweltering summer heat.