my favourite japanese recording
Various writers: diverse overviews provided (1995) by Ed Baxter, Clive Bell, Steve Besesford, Chris Cutler, Stefan Jaworzyn, Thurston Moore, Edwin Pouncey and David Toop

ED BAXTER:
Composed and recorded in four days, The Blue Kite is Otomo Yoshihide's soundtrack to the film by Tian Zhuangzhuang - a work banned in China, where it was made, but seen in Europe on both the art-house circuit and on television. Listeners familiar only with Otomo's electrifying work on the fringes of rock (with Yamatsuka Eye, Tenko's Dragon Blue, Ground Zero, Zorn, Rose, Marclay et al) will be surprised by the delicacy of the pieces, which draw on the folk tune "Crow Song," twisting it this way and that in the absent-minded manner of a child playing with a piece of string, or a retired hangman unconsciously toying with a rope.
The performers include Wha Ha Ha and Ground Zero pianist Chino Shuichi, a familiar name for those who follow the ins and outs of Japanese new music; and the Altered States guitarist Uchihashi Kazuhisa, about whom I know little but who contributes a meticulously controlled and soul-achingly exquisite guitar solo version of the soundtrack's main theme, a brief piece that doesn't feature in the film proper. The melody recurs in various guises, with prepared piano, zither, children's voices and dialogue from the film: it effortlessly imprints itself in the memory, to recur in the listener's dreams forever.
Lacking any flamboyant star turns, and concentrated on quiet collective work, singularly focused on mood and texture, it's not an immediately startling album; but in the context of Otomo's current output "The Blue Kite" confirms him as a prodigious talent - a power not merely in Japan but on the global new music scene.

CLIVE BELL:
Bon Voyage Co. by Haruomi Hosono (Crown/Tin Pan Alley,1976) opens with slack-limbed funk drumming, spiced with a shamisen (the three-stringed instrument crucial to all Japanese music from classical to Okinawan folk). Then, like the mighty wave in Hokusai's print, there's a splash of New Orleans piano and we're all aboard Hosono's ocean liner - sax section, doowop bass vocals, girly chorus crying out in authentic Japanese folk style, the shamisen playing it straightfaced all the way through against the lazy swing of the rhythm. This is "Cho-Cho-San", Hosono's own song about Madame Butterfly, and his whole project is laid out in the first few bars.
To cover the popular "Sayonara - Japanese Farewell Song", Hosono brings on jabbering monkeys and a torrent of fake exotica. Marimbas and steel pans tumble over each other. But the arrangement is always exquisitely balanced, the rhythmic feel is like a row of palm trees, and the ironic wit is spot on. By the time we reach "Roochoo Gumbo", the marriage of Okinawa to New Orleans seems the most natural thing in the world.
Hosono sings, produces and plays bass. By this time (1976) he had a wealth of experience in recording studios, working in America with Van Dyke Parks and Little Feat, and in Japan with Happy End. From 1979 he would become a superstar with Yellow Magic Orchestra, but his three mid-70s solo albums are all on my Desert Island chart. In fact, Tropical Dandy (1975) sounds like it was recorded on a tropical island, and will do nicely if Radio 4 ever need to change the Desert Island Discs theme tune.
I've picked "Bon Voyage Co." as my favourite of the three, maybe because my copy is on vinyl, maybe because it was released in 1976, the personally pivotal year that I went to live in Japan. It could drift by in the background as a pleasant slice of exotica, "Made In Tin Pan Alley" as it says on the sleeve. But the more I listen the more I'm impressed by Hosono's meticulously crafted casualness.

STEVE BERESFORD:
Two bad-tempered young Japanese women sit demurely in a tree. One is all in black, right down to her lipstick. Behind them, happy families bask by the side of a lake. The titles are printed in silver, which makes me think that the sleeve printing bill may have come to more than the recording budget. As far as I can remember, this LP - by The Honeymoons - was given to me by Ken-Ichi Takeda on one of his visits to the old LMC building in Gloucester Avenue. He had very long hair, wore white flowing clothes and spoke very softly. I think he produced the album, but almost everything on the cover and insert (except for the lyric "21st century game no more") is in Japanese, so I can't tell.
A bit unfair, this, because this is not really my favourite Japanese import, in terms of the music. In fact, I haven't played it for years. I retain an image of a lot of shouting over drum machines. The cover, however, is terrific. Years later, I discovered the woman in black to be Tenko, and her companion to be Atsuko Kamura (one-time singer with Japanese vocal group Frank Chickens). Both are currently resident in the UK.
It did start an interest in Japanese vocal duos, which peaked when I saw The Peanuts - miniaturised versions - serenading the giant moth Mothra in a Godzilla movie. Who were these magical creatures?
A visit to a charity shop in west London unearthed a ten-inch album by them, on the Golden Dollar label, including such delights as "Petite Fleur" and "Come Prime." Kazuko Hohki and I subsequently covered their song "Yoneyama Sankara" for a CD we were doing about rain.
They really sing very well, perfectly in tune in the unisons and with well-timed harmonies. The standard 50s Japanese lecherous but arthritic tenor player is there, as is the seductive but wobbly vibraphonist, giving an overall feeling of well-scrubbed seediness.
There's a strong Latin influence even in the Japanese numbers. "Yoneyama" breaks into a dusty mambo at times and there's a Cha Cha Cha with Japanese lyric too.
However, I cannot honestly claim this to be my favourite Japanese import, either, because the Golden Dollar Record Company has omitted to print its country of origin anywhere on the sleeve. Catalogue number GL-1 suggests that it was their first release; as the album is The Peanuts Vol.1, I am now forever doomed to search for volume 2 in charity shops around the world.

CHRIS CUTLER:
My personal LP Of The Year Award in 1984 would have gone unhesitatingly to Kanishabali by Haniwa Chan - an album of great songs which are an impossble combination of 1. state-of-the-art technology, 2. the radical compositional deployment of wildly disparate musical genres, 3. frighteningly fine performances and 4. humour.
Taken singly:- 1. This is unequivocally recorded music; I mean the facilities and nature of the recording studio are integral to its musical form. At first it is the sound that's so extraordinary, one might say hyper-real and hallucinatory by turns. Haniwa Chan was not afraid to process and tweak everything that went to tape, so although all the parts are played (not sampled or synthesised) the sounds are not obliged to be 'natural' and the parts played are conceived as recorded, not performed. Everything is mediated, and all attention is to the object - the recording - and not to the performance per se. Reverbs, real-time pitch shifting, stereo placement are incorporated into the compositions and aren't additional details.
2. without embarassment or straining for effect, Haniwa can shift from a gritty Stones riff to a 60s cut of the James Bond theme to an apparently traditional Japanese popular song in the space of a handful of bars; maximum distort guitars, easy listening bigband clarinets and luminous koto sit happily together, driven by drum parts that partake evenhandedly of sounds and styles taken from the history of rock (simpler than Charlie Watts, more complex than John French) using a (virtual) kit composed equally of western and traditional Japanese drums, mostly highly electrified. As a drum record, it's a monument. And all this to produce not 'experimental' music but great pop tunes, brilliantly and eccentrically arranged, with singing of ineffable charm.
3. Everyone on this record does everything they do perfectly. I mean this in the same way that an actor or forger is perfect, and not - to make a facile comparison - like the 'perfection' of Jazzrock or the ECM house sound: so sterile that you want to beat your head until it bleeds just to feel something. It's perfect in the sense that every quotation, every expression, is appropriate to its place in the music - ego is wholly subsumed into doing the needed thing, the thing that makes the whole song work. Brilliant execution is applied either to perfect imitation, or startling innovation, as required. Styles are not adopted but worn.
4. The tone of the record is light, even when the sound is heavy. There's no straining to impress or amuse, but some of the details and juxtapositions and effects provoke just that kind of liquid lightheadedness I associate with wit. I'm told the texts are extremely playful, which seems about right. Little experimental music flirts with humour, less successfully; lightness is harder to do well than heaviness, but this is light and heavy together, approaching luminosity.
The record was never released in England. When I asked CBS for a licence, they told me it wasn't worth a lawyer's time to draw up a contract.

STEFAN JAWORZYN:
Wow - this particular 'assignment' has even more potential for indulgence than usual: after all, who can resist the prospect of discovering what sensational exclusives a bunch of self-made scenesters are hoarding in their closets? Realistically, no one who buys this stuff would ever dream of wasting time by actually playing it anyway; whatever, before mutually exulting in a (lengthy, naturally) musing on the quintessence of my most fabulous super-rarity, let's briefly survey some pinnacles of Japanese collector scumdom (scumhood?) which even I'm not foolish enough to own...
The most insane Japanese 'collectable' has to be Merzbow's one-off CD sealed into the stereo of a brand new Mercedes. Whether this scam is merely an apocryphal tale or God's Honest Truth matters little -- it's such a great concept that I want to believe it, and that's all that counts...
While Masami A undoubtedly cornered the world's scum market with that little number, the holy grail of Japanese collector idiocy is The Boredoms' "Surfin' Bird", a 25 copy-only gold flexi-disc, which doubtless sounds like hell - anyone's whoŐs heard a New Zealand lathe-cut record will testify to their grade zero fidelity: imagine the quality of a home-produced lathe-cut flexi-disc...Say no more, other than 'arm and leg, probably torso too' when negotiating for one...
Like RRR's Chop Shop 10"package and some copies of Big Black's Bulldozer EP, KK Null's first LP, Saishiyu Bushitsu, originally came in a metal sleeve. Even attempting to trade your wife and children is unlikely to secure a copy. I know.
Less impossible to find and not quite as expensive - but equally pointless - are two 4 CD sets from Alchemy: Hijokaidan (Jojo of Alchemy's group, one of the longest-running Japanese noise outfits) came first, followed by Merzbow. I'd like to know how many people could 'listen' to a 4 CD set by Hijokaidan and experience anything other than an immediate desire to leave the room. It's perhaps academic, and what's more, pondering it has caused me to run out of space before I've had the chance to tell you what my particular favourite Japanese import is... Damn...

THURSTON MOORE:
Sonic Youth first went to Japan around 1988. We weren't the first New York import. I believe Zorn and Frith and a few others from the underground improvisors scene had been connecting there. But as far as post-no wave/noise rock bands go we weren't the first. Einsturzende Neubauten had gone there. And Lydia Lunch went with Richard Kern and they hated it. But it was Pussy Galore who were the first New York noise freaks to hit Japan. They came back and mumbled something about this band that opened for them in Tokyo called The Boredoms. They referred to them as Japan's Butthole Surfers.
Six months later we make it to Japan and play a tiny, tiny club in Tokyo and, sure enough, The Boredoms are opening. Yamatsuka Eye literally burst into the dressing room (the hallway between the stage and the back door) saying, "Hello we are Boredoms. I am Eye. This is P-We. She is 16 years old. We are Pisshole Surfers! Yeah yeah yeah!" And they played a set of music very tangled and free and with a full-on head of velocity. We were awed. Eye gave us records. One was the first Boredoms LP called Onanie Bomb Meets The Sex Pistols. The other was an LP by something else of Eye's called the Hanatarash (loosely translates as: the snot nose). The Hanatarash LP was pure screaming noise. We were told the legend of a Hanatarash gig in Osaka where Eye hot-wired a mini street-demolition tractor and drove it into the club and proceeded to tear the place apart.
Through Eye we found out about other musicians exploring like-minded territory. Eye was at the centre of it all in the sense that there was an evolving history of Japanese noise-music before him (notably Hijo Kaidan, Merzbow, Null and Keiji Haino) and an insane influx of it after his Hanatarash debut. Noise labels, such as Alchemy Records, documented the music on vinyl. But it was the cassette which would give this expanding scene its identity. Eye ran a cassette label called "?" and musicians as wild as Masonna and Aube created labels (Coquette and G.R.O.S.S.) to further the exploits of their own noise as well as others.
The next time Sonic Youth went to Japan I spent every free minute tracking down noise-cassettes. The music began appearing on CD and I started gathering those as well. Enthusiasts in America, the U.K. and Europe began to release cassettes of Japanese noise: Boredoms, UFO Or Die, Masonna, Ruins, Bustmonsters, Omoide Hatoba, Zeni Geva, Volume Dealers, Incapacitants, Hanatarash, Gerogerigegege, Violent Onsen Geisha, Hijo Kaidan, Aube, Pain Jerk, Merzbow, MSBR, Magical Power Mako, Fushitsusha, and many, many more. It all reached a peak in about 1992-93. Many of the same noise-artists continue to release brutal hyper-electronic noise cassettes and CDs. I want them to stop. I figured I may have 900 hours of sick and insane Japanese noise-music in my apartment. I've stacked it all in boxes. I told Yoshimi, the Boredoms' drummer, that I plan on selling it all as a lot. She looked at me and smiled and said, "No one will buy it." Sometimes I think I'm going to have a nervous breakdown when I receive notice that Vanilla, G.R.O.S.S., Alchemy, P.S.F., Mom 'n Dad, Public Bath, Japan Overseas, Beast 666, Forced Exposure, Nux, Endorphine Factory, My Fiancee's Life Work, Coquette, etc, etc, etc have released a new Merzbow or Incapacitants cassette, CD, LP or 7" (Masonna released a mini-disc made to order for anyone willing to buy it. I bought one immediately.) I devised various plans of action. One was to purchase hundreds of cheap walkmans and build a small-scale house and line the structure with continuous playing noise. I'd heard that Merzbow released a CD in an edition of one. This CD was in a car CD player installed in a Mercedes- Benz. I bought the less limited edition, the one in a box with a t-shirt. I obsessed about buying the car edition, though. I imagined parking it in front of my noise-house. From time to time I figure I should just dump the stuff on someone who loves the music but can hardly afford to buy anything.
As I pondered this over the summer of 95 I got a call from a major label record company asking me if I wanted to remix a track off the forthcoming Yoko Ono LP Rising. I said I hate being locked in recording studios and am not into remixing anything but I'd listen to the tape. There was one track on there, the title track, which I loved. It was 10 minutes of acoustic guitar, tabla drum and Yoko singing these scarily beautiful lines and going off into lovely warble-improvs. I realized I had found a home for my Japanese noise-cassette children. I called the record company and said I'd do it but it had to be immediately as Sonic Youth was preparing to leave for tour in a few days. The next day I went to this amazing studio in Manhatten. The Yoko tapes were there as were two studio engineers prepared for a good two days minimum pro-remix. I brought my box of noise. I pulled out cassettes, some wrapped in homemade gunk, and had the engineer fill up every open track on the song. There were many open tracks. I cranked Yoko's voice, closed my eyes and listened to the playback. When I yelled, "Go!" the engineer would toggle switch the stereo-rainbow of MSBR, The Gerogerigegege, Hanatarash, Masonna, Solmania, Incapacitants, Violent Onsen Geisha, C.C.C.C., Hijokaidan, Aube, Monde Bruits and Keiji Haino into the mix completely obliterating everything in its path. And when I yelled, "Stop!" heŐd toggle it off. It took four hours and I got paid enough to cover a good percentage of what I had paid out for all this noise. My guilt was somewhat relieved. Only problem: I didn't ask any of the artists for their permission. I told the record company to get clearance from each artist and to compensate them fairly. The label received two responses from Japan. One was, "Please use my music freely anywhere, anytime, anyplace!" and the other was, "How dare Thurston Moore use our music and tell us afterward?!" I responded to all who had animosity and everything was ironed out but I did get called a weird Japanese name by Hijokaidan.
Which leads me to what is probably my favorite Japanese recording. It's a cassette compilation entitled Gomi-Akta (Gomi and Akuta roughly translate as Trash and Dirt, metaphorically as something with absolutely no value). It's released by Masonna's Coquette label and a weird, wild assortment of the Japanese noise underground is present on this tape. Yamazaki Takushi from Masonna gave all participants a set of rules: 1. No electricity or batteries allowed - 2. One take, no corrections - 3. Recording time less than three minutes - 4. All recording done on Yamazaki's Walkman. The tape is wrapped in aluminium foil and has ripped Sony cassette wrappers rubber-banded to it and itŐs all dumped in a crinkled plastic bag. All 41 tracks are masterpieces. Eye is screaming and flushing a toilet in a club dressing room. The liner notes claim, "The resonances of the toilet bowl are idiotically fascinating." All kinds of shit goes on here with people shaking pachinko balls in beer cans, breaking chopsticks, screaming underwater, hitting cash registers, teeth brushing, ordering yakitori, a paper cup leaking cola, teeth being extracted.
One track is by the owner of a record store called Fujiyama. Fujiyama is a shack full of noise on the outskirts of Tokyo. I had heard of this mecca a few years ago and trekked there only to find it shut. There was no information on when it was open and so I returned two or three times a day for two or three days until it was finally open. The owner was an interesting, eccentric fellow and he had a motherload of original Japanese noise artifacts. I found cassettes from the incredible Beast 666 label as well as early Hanatarash items. Photographs of Eye destroying stages as a young man were slipped in plastic baggies and sold as Hanatarash ephemera. I went hog wild. I've been back a few times since then. On the Gomi-Akta cassette the store owner, Watanabe Tadashi, recites what the liner notes refer to as "incomprehensible repetition of nonsense". The liners also note that Watanabe "often capriciously closes his shop. He was once severely scolded by Thurston Moore, who was unable to shop there despite several attempts."
Well, this is patently untrue as I believed myself to be dutifully respectful to Mr Watanabe. My thanks to Resonance for letting me put the record straight.

EDWIN POUNCEY:
Japanese pop culture takes on many curious guises. The one that hammered home for me was when I first espied a cache of Toho Studios soundtrack albums, the company that was responsible for letting Godzilla and his pals loose on the world. The album that captured my imagination, however, featured a gigantic sabre-tooth turtle on the front of the cover, while the accompanying "obi" [wrap-around strip] utilised a scene from the film in which this creature was the star attraction. It looked as though it was exploding out of the sea, jet propelled by two huge sinewy turbine engines that were, presumably, its main means of transportation whenever puny mortal danger threatened.
The back of the album featured an equally absurd portrait of a blatantly unrealistic pteranodon-type monster emerging from the ruins of a factory complex which it had just lunched upon. Inside were a poster and a lush booklet with more scenes of monstrous goings on, including what looked like a giant ink-squirting squid! I remember that the record cost a fortune but some insane impulse urged me to buy it or regret forever leaving it behind for some other likely mug to gloat over.
When I got the thing home and played it I was initially disappointed to hear nothing more than a batch of wonky themes, some idiotic Japanese girly pop song, and only a few sound effects of the monsters roaring at each other. Occasionally an enormous stereophonic howl of anguish was heard barking over the speakers, but this was almost instantaneously drowned out by the orchestra, playing at a pace which can only be described as sluglike.
Like all truly great records, however, this turned out to be a grower. Constant listenings to certain tracks reveal the orchestra to be only slightly less sinister than the giant turtle, a lumbering, efficiently eccentric bunch of studio musicians who have crafted a work which throbs with an unearthly er... resonance. Surely bands such as Boredoms (especially in Hanatarash mode), Ghost and maybe even High Rise are proud owners of this record, with the occasional reference rumbling subliminally through their collected works.In my opinion the Boredoms' great Chocolate Synthesizer owes much to the Toho Studios soundtrack series, and the high-pitched squeal of surprise that Eye spews forth when confronted by Ghost Mother is the 90s equivalent of the same soul-searing reptilian grunt that rasps from the throat of the radioactive turtle. More alien and strange than anything the West could poke in your ear, this record is undoubtedly the root source for much Japanoise mischief. You'll never find a copy!

DAVID TOOP:
In the west, the composing of Toru Takemitsu is characterised as a floating world of translucent hues, an intricate interlock of European and Japanese cultural signs. One of the reasons I love his film music is because it both confounds and confirms that view.
Volume 4 of Film Music (JVC VICG-5127, 1991) is my kind of album; the eight tracks propel you abruptly from tango to prepared piano and electronics, from a plunderphonic treatment of Elvis Presley to happiness-is-a-smoking-cigar type piano jazz. With his score for Kurosawa's Ran, Takemitsu proved himself superior to virtually any other contemporary dramatic film composer in depicting extremes of tension, malice and despair. What a relief to hear sugar-free string writing. Most of the music on my CD of choice is more playful than that, with the notable exception of his 1991 score for Hiroshi Teshigawara's Rikyu. The film is extraordinary enough: a literally vaporous tale of tea which explores the ultimately violent conflict between Japanese traditions and incoming European influences. Takemitsu's music - scored for flute, strings, koto and percussion - is as evanescent as anything I have ever heard. Combined with the images on screen, sound wafts in and out of hearing with the aetheriality of the steam that rises during the tea ceremony. Paradoxically, the Rikyu score is powerful, emotional, innovative music which charges the film with an alarmingly intense focus.
Setting aside its beauty and compositional virtuosity, the capacity to twist and turn through gradations of feeling and nuances of conflict is what distinguishes TakemitsuŐs composing from Hollywood hack work or any atrocious ambient, new age, east/west fusion. This is mature, highly original work and should be more widely appreciated.

resonance 2/97, 1997
www.l-m-c.org.uk/texts/favejaps.html