Notable new Japanese releases and reissues
It’s starting to feel a lot like spring in Tokyo, and there’s a lot of stuff happening on the music scene if you care to look, including a bunch of new venues and – finally! – a diverse range of international touring acts doing the rounds. That said, I feel like I’ve been spending a lot more time compiling listings of upcoming gigs than I have actually going to them, which is a balance I need to redress. Anyhoo, enough of my prattling: here’s some of the good stuff that’s caught my attention over the past few months, both new and archival. As ever, I’ve just focused on artists who are active in Japan, which means I haven’t written about Tujiko Noriko’s extraordinary Crépuscule I & II, though you should definitely check that if you haven’t already.
99Letters
Makafushigi / Honyaku Ensou
(Disciples)
Takahiro Kinoshita had me at “gagaku techno” – his name for the music he now makes under his 99Letters moniker – though I think it’s also why last year’s Kabou Zukan left me a bit underwhelmed. Not that it was a bad album, but Kinoshita’s chopped/screwed source elements, drawn from Japan’s ancient court music, mostly just served as texture for some grimy but otherwise rather ordinary, grid-bound tracks. These companion pieces surpass the original album, and come closer to delivering on the concept’s promise. Makafushigi lets things unspool across five lengthy tracks that have the dank atmosphere and ravenous spirit of early Demdike Stare. They’re eldritch sprawls to get lost in. Meanwhile, Honyaku Ensou reworks a couple of tracks in a live session with traditional instrumentalist Youji Ueki, the first of which is particularly fine.
Yuurei Shimai
Just Like Gold
(Otomizo Records)
Saga-based techno producer Sappow does a deliciously weird approximation of rock music here. Playing most of the instruments himself (with contributions from pals Montahes and Kenji Maeda), he aims for a shambling, improvisational feel, laced with spiritedly amateurish guitar work. It’s kind of groovy, but the rhythms are stiff-limbed and keep forgetting where they are (as will you, during the interminable 20-minute ‘wanderlust’). The first four tracks are the real keepers: a “rock-like catharsis” that sounds like a glitchy deep learning algorithm trying to imitate Faust.
Akira Sakata/Ken Ikeda
Gauche
(Ftarri)
Carl Stone & Ken Ikeda
DAM
(Experimental Rooms)
Electronic musician Ken Ikeda has been keeping himself busy since returning to Tokyo from London in 2020. These two recent releases make for an appealing contrast. On Gauche, recorded live at Ftarri last year, Ikeda deploys a palette of fluid, early electronics-style sounds in a playful exchange with Akira Sakata at his most subtle and probing. At first, it’s hard to parse: while I initially thought Ikeda was creating aqueous environments for his collaborator to explore, a closer listen revealed a more intricate inter-species dialogue, like Sakata is duetting with the alien “water tentacle” from The Abyss. On DAM, Ikeda joins Carl Stone for a session recorded inside the Uchinokura Dam in Niigata, which has an over 40-second reverb time. I’m guessing it’s Ikeda who sends sonar pings echoing around the space, while the snatches of vocals and waterdrops presumably come from Stone’s laptop. Either way, it’s a transporting experience, suggesting the Deep Listening Band on a trip to the outer reaches of the galaxy.
Boris
Fade
(Fangs Anal Satan)
Boris had an extremely productive 2022: this was their third full-length of the year, released with zero fanfare in December, like a Christmas present for the faithful. Compared to W and Heavy Rocks, it initially seems like a return to core values, tapping back into the primordial drone metal vein they explored on albums like Flood and Dronevil. But I can’t recall the band ever sounding so deeply buried in layers of sonic crud – not murky, exactly, but clad in a thick patina of noise and loam. Sunn O)))’s Black One sounds positively clean-cut in comparison. It’s a good winter album, wind-scoured and chilly, though not without a few cheeky touches – like the way the band twiddle the radio dial at the end of a few songs and pick up a thrash metal station (or, more likely, an outtake from 2020’s NO).
Gezan with Million Wish Collective
Anochi
(Jusangatsu)
Gezan’s post-pandemic rock opera is a lot to take in, displaying a breadth of ambition that puts most of their contemporaries to shame. Since losing bassist Carlos Ozaki in 2020, the band has morphed into a much larger collective, adding percussionist OLAibi, The Hatch’s Midori Yamada, and a 15-strong mass chorus. The opening stretch of Anochi seems like a natural continuation of 2020’s Klue – a glorious pandemonium of metal riffs, trombones, bagpipes and “we can’t take it anymore” chants – but album centrepiece ‘Suiten’ (gospel-emo, anyone?) signals a pivot to something more resembling a love-in. There are dazzling moments – the internal monologue montage of ‘Tokyo Dub Story’ recalls the opening sequence of Wings of Desire – and a few songs that I’d happily never listen to again, yet even the rough patches feel like essential parts of the whole. Anochi captures something of the present moment just as acutely as the band did with Klue. It’s a reminder that, however confusing life gets, we’re stronger together.
km:
vinyl
(Kirigisu Recordings)
I’m not sure if km: is deliberately trolling us by calling his third album vinyl then releasing it only on CD and digital, but I certainly hope so. This is a collection of unobtrusive, quietly absorbing sonic experiments, the methods for which are detailed in the liner notes. What sounds like waves lapping against the shore on ‘base’ is actually an exercise in Toshimaru Nakamura-style “no input” music, while ‘day’ is what Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Green might have sounded like if he’d swapped all the synths for guitar harmonics. km: (it’s pronounced k-m-colon, in case you were wondering) loses me a bit when he foregrounds his classical guitar, but the dronier stuff is damn nice.
moonageandthegoats
Half Shade
(Miles Apart Records)
This five-track EP was released on cassette only, and it’s the logical format for Hayaki Saito’s lo-fi bedroom (dream) pop. As moonageandthegoats, he makes initimate guitar lullabies drenched in tape hiss, with English-language lyrics delivered in a somnolent murmur. Texture counts for as much as songwriting here: these don’t sound like demo versions, and would probably dissolve if you tried to clean them up. The label isn’t wide of the mark when it mentions Duster’s Stratosphere as a point of reference, but I’m equally reminded of Hisato Higuchi’s hermetic soundworld.
Okazaki Zettaro
Rondo
(Self-released)
I have very fond memories of the colourful chaos Okazaki used to unleash as one third of Mammoth, who mixed primitivist hip-hop with junk noise and ikebana. This beat tape sounds perpetually on the verge of falling apart: opener ‘marry me’ finds MF Doom duking it out with Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’, and that isn’t even the weirdest thing here. The longest track, ’square of light’, feels like being sucked inside a Tadanori Yokoo collage.
Hallelujahs
Eat Meat, Swear an Oath
(Black Editions)
Given how consistently strong the reissues from Black Editions have been, it’s perhaps inevitable that not all of them have garnered the attention they deserve. If you missed this one when it came out last November, it’s a real charmer. Formed by future Nagisa Ni Te mainstay Shinji Shibayama, Hallelujahs were a “fictitious band” whose sound was completely out of step with mid-80s Japan and all the better for it. The songs (a couple of which Shibayama borrowed from collaborators Naoki Zushi and Takahisa Watanabe) are rambling and gently psychedelic, with the occasional burst of guitar pyrotechnics. It’s redolent of the first Galaxie 500 album, though predates it by a couple of years, and I swear I can also hear a trace of Hachimitsu Pie in there.
Kenichi Fumoto
3
(Fumoken / Kiti)
Underappreciated singer-songwriter Kenichi Fumoto has never courted popularity. His first album in over a decade snuck out in a CD-only release late last December, practically guaranteeing that most people would miss it. 3 only caught my attention because it’s produced by Eiko Ishibashi, who drapes oh-so-subtle arrangements around trio recordings captured in the studio with Fumoto and Jim O’Rourke (who also mixed and mastered the album). It’s a winning approach, giving Fumoto’s songs more space to work their peculiar magic than he had on 2011’s (admittedly very fine) Colony. He’s working in a tradition that lends itself to over-earnestness, yet his Red House Painters-esque songs always seem to fall on the right side of the line. And, of course, he’s in very good company this time around. Available here.
Nessie
Close Season
(Self-released)
This came out last autumn but only popped up on Bandcamp recently, which means I also had a chance to catch the band live in Tokyo in the meantime. A lot of music gets described as “Lynchian” that’s really just bad trip-hop, but this actually merits the designation, in the way it suggests a familiar world tilted askew. Chihiro Yano’s dry, affectless vocals provide a fulcrum for the rest of the group to stumble around: although at some points they sound like Deerhoof auditioning for a lounge band gig, I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one of the members has some Beefheart and Prime Time albums in their record collection. Don’t get scared off by the noise-blasted opening track, which isn’t representative of the more hushed uncanniness that follows.
Tomoyoshi Date
438Hz As It Is, As You Are
(laaps)
Tomoyoshi Date’s first solo album in over a decade brings the special sauce, recalling the 1970s urtexts of ambient music (Eno’s Music for Airports, Michael Nyman’s Decay Music) while conjuring an atmosphere that’s entirely its own. The album was made using a Kawai-produced Diapason upright piano from the 1950s, which Date tuned to the titular pitch, giving it a slightly less strident tone than it might have had using the industry-standard 440Hz. However, each of these pieces – spare, impressionistic watercolours supplemented with delicate electronics and environmental sounds – is also designed to be played at both 33 and 45 rpm, letting listeners vibe to the frequency of their choice. It’s an ingenious concept, and the music seems to get richer each time I go back to it – at either speed.
Omochi
Interior 1
(Ethbo)
A colourful mixed bag, reuniting London’s Ethbo label with one of its earliest signings. Tadaki Matsunaga was once bassist for Tokyo’s Femini Flyers, who released a lone 7” in 1999 that’s pretty cool. Now going under the moniker Omochi, Matsunaga doesn’t settle on a signature style so much as hurl multiple ideas at the wall. The first couple of tracks made me think of The Books at their most hyperactive, but by the end Matsunaga has switched into lo-fi R&B Lothario mode.
Various
PAL.Sounds2
(PAL.Sounds)
The 90s remains a touchstone for many modern producers, though they aren’t all sipping from the same cup. While Kyoto’s NC4K label summons the energy of a peak-time warehouse set, PAL.Sounds explores the intersection between club and chill-out compilation. Its latest collection is awash with plush Balearic synths and breakbeats that caress rather than clobber. Ktskm’s ‘Undertow’ is liquid drum and bass at its most weightless, while Keiju’s ‘Paramisty’ rides a swell of rave nostalgia to a euphoric four-to-the-floor climax before slowly winding down. Unsurprisingly, E.O.U supplies one of the highlights with ‘Elephas’, which sounds like a dubbed-out reimagining of the same inspirations, painted in colours beyond the visible spectrum.
Katsunori Sawa
Entranced
(10 LABEL)
Speaking of Kyoto, this is some good stuff from 10 Label co-founder Katsunori Sawa, a stalwart of the city’s weirdo techno underground. Remember those scaremongering “This Is Your Brain on Drugs” ads from way back in the day? ‘Random Tool’ sounds a bit like that.
Cycheouts
Cycheouts' Counterattack: Best Cuts 1995 - 2000
(EM Records)
Also on a rave tip, this retrospective from the always-intriguing EM Records is nicely timed. Led by Akira Ohahshi, Cycheouts played a pivotal role in the evolution of Japan’s hardcore continuum, peddling a chaotic, sample-heavy mash of jungle, dub, breakbeat and pisstake humour that they dubbed “virtuacore.” Later on, they would become early pioneers of dubstep in the domestic scene, but the music collected here dates from the collective’s late-90s zenith. Highlights include a junglist take on the Urusei Yatsura theme (‘Lum’n’Bass’) and posse cut ‘Mujin O.B.’, which sounds like a hybrid of Soundmurderer, Public Enemy and Tinnie Punx. Not sure I needed 70 minutes of this stuff, and the Meat Beat Manifesto-style downtempo tracks during the compilation’s middle stretch are a bit of a drag, but it’s a fascinating document.
Shuta Hiraki
A Wanderer
(Vaagner)
Berlin’s Vaagner label put out a trio of ambient-ish albums by Japanese artists last November. They’re all worth your time, but this is the one I’ve kept coming back to the most. Shuta Hiraki traverses hauntology, echo-drenched keyboard reveries and the eerie no-man’s-land explored by Coil during their Black Light Distict period, en route to a wheezy pipe-organ finale that could almost pass for Kali Malone. It’s spliced together in a way that makes me suspect cinema has been a key influence on Hiraki’s work – think Lynch, folk horror and Kiyoshi Kurosawa. On the title track, he seems to be singing to himself in an otherwise deserted tunnel, while pigeons coo in the background. I know the feeling.
Various
Subliminal Big Echo
(Slide Motion)
Koenji record shop Los Apson? picked this as their favourite release of 2022, and it’s just the thing for people who like their dub served weird and wriggly – think Yximaloo’s dancefloor experiments and you’re on the right (wrong) track. Hair Stylistics is probably the best known name here, though there are also appearances by cult OG producers including Kuknacke and Discoromancer, plus a rather off-topic Bushmind remix of D.O.D’s ‘still chicago’ that’s f-u-n. The two contributions by Toxobam are proper head-wreckers, and also turned me on to his brilliantly screwy 2020 album Hot Goth, which I missed at the time. It happens! A lot!
Taika
On Chitou Jichi
Zouen Keikaku
Tokyo duo Taika started off making an appealingly lo-fi garage rock, but they’ve since blossomed into something far more peculiar. Their follow-up to 2020 lockdown album Kawara Kessha (recorded al fresco on the banks of the Tama River) feels like their most fully realised effort to date, though it’s still not the kind of record you’d take home to meet your parents. This is psychedelic rock in the truest sense – not the pasteurised retro pastiche of bands like Kikagaku Moyo, but music that sounds both exploratory and a bit unhinged. Shinya Shimazaki’s full-throated vocals recall Hikashu’s Koichi Makigami at points, while the twanging guitars and junk percussion bring to mind the folksier side of Sun City Girls.
The Rabbits
The Rabbits
(Mesh-Key)
While its recent Jacks, Aunt Sally and Morio Agata reissues are all albums that are well established within the Japanese canon, New York’s Mesh-Key digs deeper with this one. The Rabbits had a short-lived career on the punk underground in the early 1980s, releasing a couple of cassettes and a flexi-disc before splitting up. Frontman Shoichi Miyazawa was mates with The Stalin’s Michiro Endo. It sounds closer to Chrome than what was happening in Japan at the time, with delay-heavy vocals and guitar lines like smears of radioactive snot.
TOGANE B¥PASS
TAILLAMP
(WDsounds)
Sophomore album from the Chiba duo of DF¥ and beatmaker Sostone. Much of it is in the lo-fi beats vein, built around viscous/vaporous soul and jazz samples, but done well. While a lot of Japanese hip-hop of the old-school persuasion descends into endless singalong refrains, the duo move on as soon as they’ve made their point: only a couple of tracks clock in at over three minutes. This economy is one of the album’s greatest strengths, though it helps that the beats absolutely slap, too.
unbuilt
unbuilt
(throughout records)
Not sure who’s behind this release on Kyoto-based tape label throughout records, but the gibberish track names (‘bgvcx’, ‘dnte orte wddgll’, etc.) and writhing, non-repetitive synth squiggles suggest a strong Autechre influence. Given that there don’t seem to be a whole lot of producers in Japan working in this idiom at the moment, that’s not a bad thing. Even with all the deconstructed club music that’s out there, the inscrutable logic of algorithms hits in a different way.
DJ Shufflemaster
EXP
(Tresor Records)
Way back when I used to edit a weekly magazine, I kept a cache of peak-time Surgeon mixes saved on my desktop to crack open when I really needed to get shit done. This expanded reissue of DJ Shufflemaster’s 2001 album for Tresor has a similar galvanising effect (and, indeed, features a remix by Surgeon himself). It’s a sound that’s forever associated in my mind with the Labyrinth festival. The tracks here are hard as fuck, often hurtling along at over 140 BPM, but they also do funny things with your sense of perception.
Ryuichi Sakamoto
12
(commmons)
Ryuichi Sakamoto’s latest album comes burdened with the knowledge that it will likely be his last, yet he’s seldom taken as light a touch as he does here. The pieces collected on 12 are an audio diary of sorts, each stamped with the date on which they were recorded. There’s a tangible sense of presence throughout: you can hear Sakamoto’s laboured breathing at times, while on ‘20220123’ he sounds like he’s playing with all the windows open. The timbres are familiar from 2017’s async – nebulous pad synths, spare piano melodies swimming in reverb – but where that album was meticulously wrought, these sketch-like pieces seem to dissolve at the touch. It invites the kinds of comparisons I’d normally resist: to haiku, ensō circles. Available here.
