Note: this is the latest in an occasional series of round-ups of interesting Japanese music. You can read the previous editions here and here.
Green Milk from the Planet Orange – ThirdSelf-released (Bandcamp)
This trio rock more ballistically than you’d think possible for a band who perform their gigs sitting down. GMFTPO’s first full-length since reforming in 2016 contains just three tracks, the longest of which runs to just over 20 minutes and feels like being Mad Max strapped to the front of that car in Fury Road. It sounds like it was all cut in single takes, and honestly doesn’t give you much you won’t get from watching them live – but with hard-prog-space-rock of this calibre, what more do you need?
Self-released
It’s easy to hear where this Sapporo trio are coming from, namely West Berlin circa 1982. Gotou’s debut album includes a shout-out to Malaria! in the credits, and a cover of the band’s “Your Turn to Run.” That track is a highlight during a set of über-dour No Wave: all brittle, monomaniac basslines, scrapes and shards of guitar, and a vocalist who sounds like she’s singing an octave below her natural range. It’s kind of great, and as I write this the band have already announced they’re going on hiatus (natch).
Akuphone (Bandcamp)
The Akuphone label crafts a cohesive compilation from a sketchy concept. With just seven tracks by female artists, two of them based in Germany, I’m not sure Seitō “exposes the richness of the contemporary Japanese underground music scene.” Still, it works. A sepulchral mood prevails, from Kiki Hitomi’s abstracted dub to Keiko Higuchi’s Diamanda Galas-esque vocal babble, while the shamisen-driven post-punk dirge of Kuunatic’s “Dewbow” is a standout.
HardEnough
Rima Kato – Sing-Song
Flau (Bandcamp)
A beguiling miniature, this clocks in at just 19 minutes yet feels perfectly formed. Working mostly with guitar and Casiotone, Kato crafts delicate musical outfits for a series of nursery rhymes from the eponymous 19th century book by Christina Rossetti. The choice of source material – plus the fact that it’s sung in halting English – would normally be enough to trigger my gag reflex. But, with a deftness that’s oh-so-Flau, Sing-Song lands just on the right side of twee.
Mountain/Full Edition – No Matter Where You Come From, You Are Not a Stranger Here
Natural Science (Bandcamp)
I interviewed this Kansai-based collective for The Wire over the summer, and probably never would have heard of them otherwise. While Mountain/Full Edition’s live performances tend towards shaggy art-gallery happenings, founder member Kentaro Imai takes charge here, channeling the group’s contradictory impulses into tracks that range from ’90s dance-inspired agitprop to guileless psych redolent of early Animal Collective.
Tuff Beats
A welcome return for this Ainu vocal group, still making some of the most hypnotic, achingly lovely music out there. Mikemike Nociw ditches the fusion settings of 2012’s Mottoite Hissorine in favour of a stripped-back intimacy that servesm better. The quartet don’t need studio technology to get their effects: the moiré patterns they create on tracks like “Hem Howa” or “Herutunturutun” sound like they’re being run through a delay unit. In its own low-key way, it’s extraordinary stuff.
Call And Response Records (Bandcamp)
Full disclosure: these guys are friends of mine, but no caveats required when I say Ouroboros is the punchiest, most enjoyable thing they’ve done to date. Slimmed down to a trio yet sounding heavier than they did when they had a bassist, Looprider switch between drone-metal burners and full-on (head)bangers, with hints of Boris, Smashing Pumpkins and QOTSA. The promise of lead single “NWOBHM” is fulfilled on the title track, all soaring guitar leads and Maiden-style triplet riffs. A real blast.
Where To Now? Records (Bandcamp)
H.Takahashi makes music of pearlescent beauty and restraint, while avoiding the prettiness and easy resolutions that make so much stuff on the new-age/ambient spectrum absolutely insufferable. His latest missive is apparently “intended for when you want to feel like a plant,” and its chiming tones resonate softly in infinite space, suggesting subtle movement without actually going anywhere. Much as there’s no shortage of music like this out there, Takahashi keeps hitting the sweet spot.
Bison (Bandcamp)
Kumio Kurachi has been plying his idiosyncratic songcraft since the ’80s, which makes this debut overseas release – produced by Jim O’Rourke, no less – as delightful as it is unexpected. His sprawling songs, played on an electric guitar with koto-derived tunings, could be seen as a precursor to the likes of Katan Hiviya and Ichiko Aoba. Kurachi delivers them with a theatrical flourish that’s as engrossing when he’s spinning surreal fantasies as when he’s asking “what shall we have for dinner tonight?”
Self-released
Though they’ve been tipped as the band most likely to do a DYGL, No Buses seem to have little interest in succeeding the conventional way. Barely half an hour long, their debut LP is crammed with indelible hooks and angular garage rock, delivered with a nonchalance that verges on boredom. Sure, it sounds like the Arctic Monkeys, but they’re equally happy to pinch from The Strokes, Blur and Weezer (and that’s just the first three songs). Shows potential, but not quite the knockout I was expecting.
Nature Bliss (Bandcamp)
A winter sabbatical in Berlin and a trip to Auschwitz provided the sombre inspiration for this missive from ambient musician Kengo Yonemura. Mixing field recordings, muzzy synthesisers and decaying guitar loops, it verges into Fennesz territory in places, though there’s a faded quality to the sound that’s more akin to Abul Mogard. The album starts almost daintily, but seems to get deeper and stranger as it progresses, gradually shucking off any familiar contours and losing itself in the gloaming.
Unseen Worlds (Bandcamp)
You wait years for an album of new music by Carl Stone, and then two come along at once. Landing just a few months after Baroo, Himalaya offers a broader account of the Tokyo-based composer’s current activities. The first half features more of his incredible dissections, which sound like listening to the source material (disco? ’70s highlife?) while fast-forwarding through it at the same time. The extended vocal pieces that follow, one of them with regular collaborator Akaihirume, are really rather sublime.
Prepaid Records (Bandcamp)
He may be based in Tokyo, but Yosuke Tokunaga keeps such a low profile that I doubt I would’ve found him without an effusive recommendation from Kevin Martin. His third release of 2019 is nominally a beat tape, though it’d take a very intrepid MC to attempt to rhyme over this. While Martin compares Tokunaga to Scorn, Burial and DJ Krush, what it reminds me of most is Fumitake Tamura, in the way it takes familiar structures and heat-warps them to the point of abstraction. Pretty dope, all told.
Horen
Probably the most intriguing package I’ve picked up this year, this album from the percussion minimalists behind Dadarhythm (playing here in their cymbals-only Nanaentai incarnation) comes housed in a 10-inch record sleeve, with a CD and DVD documenting a performance at the duo’s Ntiti building in Osaka. Recording engineer Yasushi Utsunomia contributes a lengthy treatise about transcending the limitations of stereophonic sound, and the DVD contains an eight-channel interleave version for listeners who are inclined to follow suit. The two-channel CD “thumbnail” mix is rewarding enough, though, folding street sounds into a performance that builds layers of metallic shimmer redolent of Harry Bertoia, and rhythms that overlap like a city’s worth of church bells on a feast day.
