From the archives: Keiji Haino, 2017 Japan Times interview

“The difference is awareness”

Photograph by Kazuyuki Funaki

“I don’t want people to treat me like a god,” says Keiji Haino, chuckling. “I want to be a bad boy, right until the end.”

An audience with the 65-year-old iconoclast, a towering figure on Japan’s underground music scene, is always memorable. When I meet him at a coffee shop in Kawagoe, ostensibly to talk about the vinyl reissue of his 1981 studio debut, Watashi Dake? (“Only Me?”), the conversation sprawls for well over two hours.

New (and old) music from Japan – Winter 2023 edition

Notable new Japanese releases and reissues

By far the most time-consuming thing I wrote this year was a guide for Psyche about listening to music in the age of abundance. It’s a subject that I think about constantly, and I’m still not sure if I have the answers (who does?). Looking through other people’s AOTY lists, I’m amazed not just by how much music the serious heads are managing to listen to, but that they manage to remember it clearly enough to compile a proper ranking. Patrick St. Michel’s exhaustive list for Make Believe Melodies runs to 100 releases, while Ryo Miyaichi has posted a bunch of 2023 round-ups on This Side of Japan, including a great rundown of his 60 best albums that are available on Bandcamp. I was planning to do something similar myself, but it would’ve meant relistening to a bunch of stuff from earlier in the year, and I honestly haven’t found the time. Instead, here’s a bumper wrap of some new releases and reissues from 2023 that I haven’t already written about on here.

New music from Japan – Summer 2023 edition

Notable new Japanese releases

I swear, if it wasn’t for the arbitrary deadline of Bandcamp Friday, I’d probably never get around to finishing one of these things. Here’s a selection of music from these fine isles that has caught my attention over the past few months. No reissues this time (though Music from Memory’s Dream Dolphin compilation, released in March, is making a weird kind of sense now that we’re swimming in an interminable summer heatwave).

New (and old) music from Japan – Spring 2023 edition

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.

Favourite Japanese releases of 2022

A personal Top 10 Japan albums of the year

Given the absurd volume of music that’s getting released at the moment (plus the stacks of used CDs that I keep picking up at bloody Disk Union), I find it’s easy to keep grazing without ever spending long enough to forge a deeper connection with something. I’ve written about a fair number of new and archival releases this year, many of them pretty good (you can read my previous round-ups here, here, here and here), but there weren’t many that I kept returning to throughout 2022. These are the ones that have come to feel like good friends. The rest are just drinking buddies.

New (and old) music from Japan – Autumn 2022 edition

Notable new Japanese releases and reissues

My Twitter feed recently has been full of grim stories about the challenges facing touring artists at the moment, so it’s as good a time as any to splurge on music (you know, like they did in the 1990s). Here are some of the releases that have caught my attention over the past month or two, with the usual apologies to everyone I’ve left out.

New (and old) music from Japan – Late Summer 2022 edition

Notable new Japanese releases and reissues

In a recent review on The Quietus, Danijela Bočev recounted how she had recently developed a fear of boring music: the kind of grayscale, monotonous stuff that provided a weird kind of comfort food during the early days of the pandemic. I could relate, and not just because of the way she linked her argument in with her experience of grieving for departed family members. Sifting through PR emails and the recesses of Bandcamp, I find myself glazing over at the mere mention of ambient drone, field recordings, ASMR and minimal anything. That’s partly a reflection of quite how much music in this vein has been released over the last couple of years, the vast majority of it utterly disposable. But there’s also something in the air right now: with the live scene back in full swing (more or less), music is going back to being a communal activity. And, speaking for myself, I just wanna get loaded.

I could (and probably should) fill a whole column just with the music that’s being released during September, but in the meantime, here are some things you might have missed over the past few months.

New (and old) music from Japan – Spring 2022 edition

Notable new Japanese releases and reissues

Maintaining the gig listings on here was a depressing experience for much of the past year, but it feels like things are finally picking up again on the Tokyo music scene. Promoters are starting to book international artists in earnest, while venues that were mothballed for much of the pandemic are getting their shit together. I’ve only just started to venture out to shows again myself, so my listening has been happening mostly at home, but here’s a selection of releases that have caught my attention recently. As usual, I’ve restricted things to artists who are actually active in Japan, which means I’ve had to pass up on some interesting releases by NAVU, Yama Warashi and Hinako Omori, among others. I also haven’t had a chance to investigate the releases being posted to the We Love Junzo Bandcamp page, which is raising money to help Junzo Suzuki, but don’t let that stop you.

And so, without any further ado...

New (and old) music from Japan

Notable new Japanese releases: Setsubun 2022 edition

I’d been meaning to post a round-up of my favourite albums from last year, but it didn’t happen. I was busier than expected over the holiday period, and as 2021 began to recede into the distance, I realised that I didn’t feel like playing favourites anyway. My sister died last summer, and it eclipsed pretty much everything else that happened during the year. I spent a very intense month back in the UK, and then life kind of returned to normal, just a little less so. Grief manifests itself in curious ways, and for months afterwards my emotions were out of joint. It’s not like I was spending every day in tears, I just wasn’t connecting with things in the same way, and that included music. It’s only been in the last few weeks, really, that I’ve found myself sitting in front of my stereo, completely enthralled by what I’m hearing. So here we are again: a selection of notable releases that have come out of Japan over the past few months (plus a few random picks for the nerds).

New music from Japan (Winter 2021 edition)

Notable new Japanese releases, in brief

Year-end list season is upon us, when I realise how much brilliant stuff I could’ve been listening to instead of the new Mono album. I’ll probably be posting a Top 10 later in the month, but in the meantime, here’s another bunch of Japanese music that you may or may not like as much as I did, or didn’t.

New music from Japan (Autumn 2021 edition)

Notable new Japanese releases, in brief

As the latest state of emergency lifts in Tokyo—no doubt to return again soon—I figured it would be as good a time as any to resurrect the gig listings here. Even with the emergency measures gone, venues in Tokyo are still having to limit attendance and close early for the time being. Actually, that’s not entirely true: events can operate at 100% capacity if the audience is likely to stay quiet, suggesting that an onkyo revival may be just around the corner. Anyway, here’s a belated roundup of some of the music from Japan that’s caught my attention over the past few months.