Notable new Japanese releases: Setsubun 2022 edition
Hikaru Utada – Bad Mode
Epic
All that time in London seems to have rubbed off. Hikaru Utada’s latest album is the clubbiest thing they’ve done since 2004’s Exodus, with production assists from Sam “Floating Points” Shepherd, A.G. Cook and some guy called Skrillex. In a recent interview with Billboard, Utada spoke of wanting to do “something sonically very weird,” which turns out to include a 12-minute acid house track, and a series of songs that take delight in experimenting with texture and form. Even when the pace slackens during the album’s middle section, it rewards perseverance, like the way the trudgy trip-hop of ‘Kibun ja nai no (Not In The Mood)’ blooms into a sublime extended outro. This is Utada’s first fully bilingual album, and confirms that they’re a subtler lyricist in Japanese than English, but that’s neither here nor there. Available here.
Shapeshifter – Dark Ritual
ungulates
I didn’t hear nearly enough noxious band music during 2021, though maybe I just wasn’t looking in the right places. Anyway, Shapeshifter get the year off to a strong start with this intense blast of grind/powerviolence, which is making me think of Osaka’s mighty Palm. Lots of blast beats and vomiting vocals, but the band also pull a few neat tricks: ‘Rust’ is the sound of a mellow 90s alt-rock track getting dragged into the moshpit at gunpoint, while ‘Toxic’ compacts a whole lotta drama into just 19 seconds.
Hideki Umezawa – Music for Installation Works
hōlm
Hideki Umezawa’s synaesthetic sound design has a way of stopping you in your tracks: try concentrating on anything else while listening to pieces like ‘Dokkyaku’, from 2020’s Two Views of Amami Ōshima. This collection hews closer to the Eno ideal of ambient music, creating phantasmagoric sonic environments to get lost in. You could conceivably leave it playing in the background, but listen closely and the placid surfaces reveal yawning depths, while rendering even the most cliched ingredients—bird song, trickling water, temple bells—with a startling freshness and acuity, a bit like being on shrooms.
D.A.N. – No Moon
SSWB/Bayon Production
While some music invites comparison to cinema or visual art, D.A.N. just make me think of product design: I can admire the craft, but it’s all so damn functional. No Moon finds them still staking out a tasteful middle ground between The xx and Caribou, but hints that they’re beginning to look elsewhere for inspiration. There’s a discernible hip-hop influence, and not just on the (iffy) Takumi-featuring ‘The Encounters’. On album highlight ‘Overthinker’, Daigo Sakuragi sing-raps over a rhythm that’s practically UK garage, suggesting that maybe the band will have more fun if they just loosen up a bit. Available here.
Meitei – Kōfu II
Kitchen. Label
I’ve heard Meitei’s music playing in Shibuya Parco, and it was a good fit. Daisuke Fujita works like a designer crafting clothes from old kimono fabric, turning shellac relics from Japan’s past into a wistful soundtrack for its present. This sequel to 2020’s Kōfu draws on material from the same sessions as that album, and features a handful of beat-driven plunderphonics exercises that could have appeared on a late-90s Ninja Tune compilation. Meitei is playing to the crowd with stuff like ‘Akira Kurosawa’, but his more contemplative moments (like the hiss-drenched ‘Kaworu’ and spare closer, ‘Ji’) still have a peculiar magic.
Haraen – Hairetsu naru irodori
Self-released
I can’t find much information about Haraen online, save for the fact that they’re based in Japan and have released a heap of DIY cassettes over the past few years. This latest missive doesn’t do anything particularly fancy, and doesn’t need to. Alternating between palate-cleansing miniatures and slightly longer pieces, Haraen spins a series of hypnotic loops that are big on reverse tape effects and ambient fuzz. Maybe it’s the sheer minimalism or the muzzy sonics, but the whole thing is giving me serious Buddha Machine vibes.
Boris – W
Sacred Bones Records
There’s no way Boris could release an album as dumb and fun as 2020’s NO without then going and doing the exact opposite. W finds them in ethereal mode, with Wata’s whispery lead vocals swaddled in layers of MBV guitars, though there’s a conspicuous synthetic edge to the sound (thanks to the involvement of Buffalo Daughter’s Sugar Yoshinaga, perchance?). They still find time for the odd bit of slow-mo head-banging, but even at their dreamiest, the band find ways to give you whiplash: opening track ‘I Want to Go to the Side Where You Can Touch…’ rides a slowly cresting wave, only to cut off abruptly before the expected flood (or Flood). Keep it contrarian, eh?
HUH – We Aren’t You / Own It
Self-released
Tokyo’s most unhinged two-piece dropped a couple of albums’ worth of improvised skronk last November as a T-shirt/download package, and they feel like relics from an era when sweaty gigs in poorly ventilated basement venues were still fun. Lacerated guitar and drum fusillades clash with shrieked gibberish and crude electronics, including some passages where the band seem to be playing along with the radio. It’s anyone’s guess what guitarist/vocalist Kyosuke Terada is hollering about, but track titles like ‘World is prison’ and ‘Eat money, and die’ suggest a political edge to HUH’s sonic frenzy.
Zezeco – Sanzen
Felicity/P-Vine
Downy are probably the closest thing Japan’s ever had to its own Radiohead, so it’s no surprise that this electronic excursion by frontman Robin Aoki bears a passing resemblance to Thom Yorke’s solo work. Hooking up with Okinawa producer Manukan, he does a kind of cybernetic trip-hop thing that’s like make-out music for modems. There are moments when you could almost be listening to D.A.N., but Zezeco are most interesting when they push things into the uncanny, as with the lysergic Autotune on ‘Coffee Stone’. Available here.
Barbican Estate – Way Down East
Self-released
A very solid debut from this Tokyo three-piece, who cite influences including Les Rallizes Denudes, Sonic Youth, D.W. Griffith and Brutalism (natch). There are songs that recall the dark gothic drama and gauzy textures of mid-1980s 4AD, though the band also have a talent for churning, motorik-driven drone, best heard on the pointedly titled ‘White Jazz’. The way bassist Miri’s vocals drift languidly through the music evokes fond memories of the late Sachiko Fukuda from Umez. I can’t help feeling that the album’s heavier moments could hit just a bit harder, but there’s tons of potential here.
Shokuchudoku Center – Hakimakuri Olympic
Will Records
Foodman’s solo work is defined as much by what isn’t there as what is, which doesn’t exactly lend itself to collaborating with others. On Humanity, an unlikely union with Koji Nakamura and veteran session drummer Takashi Numazawa, his distinctive voice gets lost across a series of nondescript jams that probably didn’t warrant a physical release (available here). Shokuchudoku Center, his duo with Masaya “Hair Stylistics” Nakahara, is more successful. The pair’s methods complement rather than cancel each other out, producing some seriously/deliriously goofball chaos in the process—like a primal scream therapy session for 8-bit consoles on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Non Band – Non Band II
Telegraph Records/Mangalitza Records
For a brief moment in the early 80s, Non Band were one of the most exciting acts on the Tokyo live circuit, but they left such a scant discography that it’s hard to know what to expect from this reunion album. While new initiates should start with the group’s 1982 debut, Non Band II has its moments, and is given poignancy by the fact that Mitsuru Tamagaki passed away before it was released. Her voice deeper and even more ragged, Non remains a commanding presence, and the best songs opt for a primitivist no-wave thump, pairing her ostinato bass lines with droning violin, accordion and Tamagaki’s thunderous drumming.
NicFit – Fuse
Upset The Rhythm
Nagoya’s NicFit have a garage/no-wave shtick that’s a little more grizzled and a little less frenetic than some of their Tokyo counterparts. With its determinedly analogue sound, their decade-in-the-making debut album could pass for a lost artefact from the early 80s, which is probably the point. A closing cover version of The Urinals’ ‘Ack Ack Ack’ offers the most conspicuous hat-tip to the band’s forebears, though they permit themselves to get a teeny bit more sophisticated in their own songs, which are tough and sinewy, full of snarling guitar lines and vocals that manage to sound both insistent and insouciant at the same time.
Souk – Souk Demo
Bandcamp
Speaking of frenetic, this demo by new-ish Tokyo trio Souk features a few moments of inspired punk pithiness; ‘OUT’ clocks in at just 52 seconds, and makes every one of them count. It’s poppier than vocalist/guitarist Hisane’s previous band—the more hardcore-inclined NoNoNo—though that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Toshimaru Nakamura/Tetuzi Akiyama – Idiomatic Expressionism
Ftarri
I grabbed this a little while back, and have returned to it multiple times since. No-input mixer maestro Toshimaru Nakamura and guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama are two of the most instantly recognisable voices on the Tokyo improvised music scene, and these studio recordings capture them in intimate, hold-your-breath detail. Akiyama lets each plucked harmonic and misshapen chord hang in the air, while Nakamura responds with furtive splurts and restrained feedback. It’s an engrossing set, and ends on a genuinely unexpected note, as the duo indulge in some Eraserhead-worthy atmospherics.
Futoshi Moriyama – Yūtai-ridatsu ±
EM Records
Originally released in 2015 on Koshiro Hino’s Birdfriend cassette label, the music on Yūtai-ridatsu ± sits so far outside any recent trends that it’s hard to place. There’s a naive optimism to Futoshi Moriyama’s miniature symphonies and meditative drifts, composed on software instruments and with a blessed absence of irony. The title track is whimsical baroque indie-pop with MIDI instruments, while the pizzicato overload of ‘Time Limit’ is closer to Orange Milk territory, and ‘Nico Electro’ is making me think of David Byrne’s contributions to The Last Emperor soundtrack.
Ermhoi – Dream Land
Space Shower Music
A lot of people heard Ermhoi during 2021 without necessarily realising it, in settings from Millennium Parade to Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle. Her first solo full-length in a good while, Dream Land is more of a niche prospect. At points, it’s reminiscent of the exotic strains of avant-bedroom pop that flourished in the early 2010s (think early Grimes or Glasser), Ermhoi’s vocals swooping and cooing over productions that mix the tropical and tribal, with lavish doses of reverb. When she works with acoustic instruments, it isn’t always so arresting, but the swirling, hall-of-mirrors lullaby ‘Learn while you sleep’ is a standout. Available here.
Yosuke Tokunaga – 12 Connectedness
Second Sleep
A very belated mention for this one, which came out during the first quarter of 2021 but has been one of my go-to soundtracks this winter. While some of Yosuke Tokunaga’s productions have a thick, humid quality to them, this is altogether chillier. Working at the outer limits of beat music, he sends barely-there rhythms stumbling through a heavy dub fog that occasionally reveals discernible shapes: a sampled voice here, a lonely saxophone there. It’s music for empty warehouses haunted by memories of a good time.
Akira Sakata/Takeo Moriyama – Mitochondria
Trost Records
Aside from his appearance on Last Exit’s The Noise of Trouble, there’s little evidence in Akira Sakata’s late-80s discography of the free-jazz firebrand heard during his Yosuke Yamashita Trio tenure. This live duo with former bandmate Takeo Moriyama, captured to at a church in Chiba in 1986, is a revelation. There are sustained bouts of sax/drum ecstasy to rival Interstellar Space or Jimmy Lyons’ duos with Andrew Cyrille, but it’s when Sakata switches to clarinet that things get really out there. Highlights include a high-wire rendition of Yamashita Trio staple ‘Chiasma’ (seriously, who needs piano?) and the frayed, mournful ‘Tsui-oku (reminiscence)’.
Sachi Kobayashi – Imaginary Trip
Psychic Liberation
Sachi Kobayashi alternates between ambient and more experimental releases, and while the former can veer into the cursed realms of healing music, the latter are more my thing. This cassette for the Psychic Liberation label is far from abrasive, but it has a spirit of fervid, stay-at-home sonic adventurism that makes it sound (to my ears, at least) like a distant descendent of Massimo Toniutti’s Il Museo Selvatico. Kobayashi’s Imaginary Trip roams through empty lots and corridors filled with malfunctioning fax machines, and then turns in on itself with a B-side that deconstructs the preceding tracks.
Chaase – Untitled
Kikyuu
Chiba-based Texan Chase Gardner made this double-disc set to accompany a tour of Kansai earlier in the year, and its 24 tracks are about a dozen more than I really needed. Taken in small doses, though, it’s gloriously queasy stuff. Working in the best outsider music tradition, Chaase sings wordless vocalisations to an accompaniment of pitch-agnostic electronics, much of which seem to be played on a synth guitar. It’s all very wrong, like what you might get if you mixed Arthur Russell’s World of Echo with Vindicatrix’s Mengamunk and left them to melt in the sun.
