P052: Cabeza de Vaca – Japanese IDM

So we finally end our four part series on Japanese electronica with a special on Japanese IDM and experimental music which is available now to listen at on Cabeza de Vaca and Scanner FM .

There are lots of female artists on this week’s show too which is nice to see. We start off with Kyoka Kondo from Tokyo who was the first ever woman to release on Raster-Noton with her “iSH” EP from last year, quite a surprise after xx years of the label’s existence. She has a new album called "Ufunfunfufu" that is due soon/now on the Onpa))))) label.

Kyoka, who is Berlin-based, is also developing a nice looking experimental techno set and has also played Sonar in Japan. Definitely an artist to look out for.

Somewhere in the middle of the show we feature MimiCof or Midori Hirano who was born in Kyoto and is now based in Berlin. She has several albums to her name including her latest “KotoLyra” on PROGRESSIVE FOrM which features heavily on the show this week as it has been an important outlet for many Japanese IDM artists.

We also close the show with some older tracks including one from Mariah that somehow reminds me of the music that might play after a “and they lived happily ever after” finale to a film as the credits roll. Therefore it seems an apt way to close. Don’t know too much about Mariah though and she doesn’t appear to have too many releases. A curiosity of this track is that the song was written by two artists with Western names, so it could be a cover version if it wasn’t written for her directly. She definitely sounds like she was singing in Japanese though.

Tujiko Noriko was also definitely singing in Japanese about the Tokyo Tower who just announced in September that the Tower would be closing for some time and losing their collection of Krautrock waxworks .

Tujiko Noriko has also done a lot of collaborations, including with Aoki Takamasa who’s track “Constant Flow” we did not do enough justice to in the show by only managing a platry 4-5 minute of its 20 minute epic length. The duo shared the credits on an album for FatCat in 2005.

She has also worked with Lawrence English and John Chantler as well as recently with Nobukazu Takemura as well as having an extensive back catalougue of beautifully inventive avant pop.

Speeaking of Aoki Takamasa, he also has an album out on Raster-Noton called “RV8” standing for rhythm variation. We will have to pay him back one day, by looking a bit closer at his music.

As we mention in the show, part of the reason we went up to four programs from three is because there was a few labels who offered promo tracks once we started the series. In particular, the samples of the upcoming 4^th release on Malmö-based label SonuoS sounded exceptional enough to build a show around it. In the end Finn Albertsson sent the track so many thanks to him as it is a stunner from Go Koyashiki. The original too of “Rundgång” also sounds pretty impressive from Swedish artist A.O.T. or Fredrik Nilsson,

<iframe width="100%" height="166" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F99905543"></iframe>

Go Koyashiki has just released a piano-driven album “Silent steps” that sounds quite beautiful and cinematic. You can hear his playing at the end of the “Rundgång” remix as well, where it feels natural and felt and not just added on.

Finally, Kashiwa Daisuke was a great find. He is an artist that I had not heard before, but I was very impressed by his editing and as well as some of the tracks on his recent album “Re:”, his previous outing “Program Music” is also highly recommended for its scope and ambition.

If you still need more, head over to FACT Mag’s recent article on Japonism 2.0 for an overview of 8 Japanese hip hop artists and reference to a couple more in the text.

And here is a motley collection of random Japanese electronic artists, past, present and future that I couldn’t fit into the show just for time:

Number	Artist	Track	Label	Year
1	Kyoka	HADue	Raster-Noton	2012
2	Geskia!	BGMREM	PROGRESSIVE FOrM	2013
3	Kashiwa Daisuke	Ajanagar	Virgin Babylon Records	2013
4	ENA	Mule Mouth	7even Recordings	2013
5	A.O.T.	”フィードバック (Go Koyashiki Remix)” (Rundgång)	SonuoS	2013
6	MimiCof	Horologium	PROGRESSIVE FOrM	2012
7	Ametsub	Cloudsfall	Nothings66	2012
8	Fugenn & The White Elephants	Timeless	PROGRESSIVE FOrM	2013
9	Aoki Takamasa	Constant flow	Svakt	2013
10	Tujiko Noriko	Tokyo Tower	Tomlab	2003
11	Mariah	心臓の扉 (Shinzo No Tobira)	Shan-Shan	1983

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P051: Cabeza de Vaca – Japanese techno

Again, not so many notes necessary to accompany this week’s Japanese techno special on Cabeza de Vaca and Scanner FM.

First up we should give a bit of attention to Shin Nishimura who is the label boss behind Plus who have released a lot of 12”s and albums by Japanese artists since 2004. Today we highlight their most recent 12” by Takaaki Itoh, but previous artists have included Nishimura himself, Hiroyuki Arakawa, Nobuyuki Tokunaga, Fumihiko Takei and more. Clearly by name and sound there is a big influence from M_nus, but overall there is a lot more toughness than M_nus bringing it closer to the likes of Drum Code and the like. It is no surprise to find Adam Beyer as a big supporter.

More good news is that Iori who lcoses the show also has a new release out this week on Prologue, a 3-track vinyl 12” and 6 digital tracks called “Antimonit”. Definitely one to keep an eye on. His remix of Wata Igarahi’s track “Paranoid” will probably come up in a few weeks in a dub techno show.

Go Hiyama also has something out on Warm Up Records that is more recent than his Token track, but in order to spread the love around we went with the older track. He is perhaps one of the more recognisable names from the Japanese scene having released on some big labels like Warm Up, with remixes from Oscar Mulero, as well as Stroboscopic Artefacts. Hiyama-san has also just done a recent mix for the Pole Group radio series.

He too will have another new release out on HueHelix, another Japanese label coming to the fore with a lot of interesting artists and releases. This week on the show we play something from Ryuji Takeuchi.

Of the new comers, Yuuki Sakai has a promising and intense sound that is dark and sonerous, in keeping with one label where he has released, as well as “tribal inudustrial” as he describes on his Soundcloud page. His latest EP, the first digital release for Warm Up Records, is a brutal affair, maybe better for the club than home, but the epic 10 minute track “Picasso” is certainly persuasive by force. His other work carries the same violent core, but is less aggressive.

Next week we finish off the Japanese electronica series with some IDM!

Number	Artist	Track	Label	Year
1	Hironori Takahashi	Jazert	Informa Records	2013
2	Ryuji Takeuchi	All doors closed	HueHelix	2013
3	Go Hiyama	Farnsworth house	Token	2012
4	Sawf	Menete (Yuji Kondo remix)	Perc Trax	2013
5	Yuuki Sakai	Cigarette	Warm Up Records	2013
6	Wata Igarashi	Arachnoid	Counter Pulse	2013
7	Takaaki Itoh	Plus 1	Plus Records (Plus Tokyo)	2013
8	Shin Nishimura	Another face	Mona	2013
9	Iori	Spaciotemporal	Bitta	2012

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P050: Cabeza de Vaca – Japanese house

Not so many notes necessary to accompany this weeks Japanese house special on Cabeza de Vaca and Scanner FM .

Firstly a quick aplogy as this week I was very tired doing the show after a couple of 12 hour days and then a late night midweek to see Alfonso (Monkey Bar), Svreca (Semantica) and Eduardo de la Calle (Analog Solutions) at Razzmatazz. They also made me learn Ableton Live in the last minutes before starting to record so I was a bit unfocussed this week. For this reason I forgot to congratulate Tokyo on winning the Olympic Games bid. Congratulations!

おめでとう！

One thing I didn’t mention either in the show is the recent crackdowns that have been reported against some of Japan’s clubs and dancers which at one stage seemed like it would threaten the potential of the club scene as a whole in Japan at a moment when it seems to be reaching a critical juncture, with wider exposure for festivals like Labyrinth, with Sonar and RA translating and translocating themselves into Japan/ese and a lot of exceptional artists steadily coming to the fore. It is not clear how much of a problem this is today, but it is clearly an important cultural issue that will need to addressed.

Resident Advisor

Time Out

The Guardian

Perhaps the biggest news is that we look like going up to four shows on Japanese electronica instead of three. The reason for this is a late influx of tracks following a couple of emails so now I can rearrange the surplus tracks with the new ones and build up to four. So next week will be all techno and the final show will be more experimental and IDM sounds.

Susumu Yokota opens the show with a track from one of his earliest albums which was one of my introductions to his work just as he began to peak with ambient and experimental works like “Image”, “Magic thread” and the legendary “Sakura”. The later certainly broke in to the public consciousness in a big way and got glowing reviews everywhere and anywhere just as it deserved. Since then it has been a bit more mixed in the public eye for him though. Certainly with 27 albums the quality cannot always be high, but his last albums “Dreamer” (2012) and “Kaleidoscope” (2010) were very diverse and satisfying, mixing dub techno, house and ambient and experimental interludes. It would be nice to see Yokota-san back in the limelight a bit more, but since is getting up towards two years since his last album, we might see something more from him soon?

There are a couple more veterans on the show, but without the same level of oeuvre as Yokota. Hiroshi Watanabe is a strong contender, but perhaps by spreading his work between his own name and his better known Kaito alias he has down played his influence slightly. As well, his Kompkat discography is impressive, but somewhat diluted down with the beatless versions of the albums. “Special life” subsequently came out as “Special love” whereas “A hundred million light years” also came out as the beatless “A hundred million love years”. This is not to take away from his productions. “Everlasting” is still one of the best Kompakt tracks ever released and still gives me shivers every time I play it. We wait with baited breath for the new album “Until the end of time”  due in October.

On the other hand the discography of Takuya Yamashita has been harder to verify. Discogs says “Japanese Techno DJ and producer, born in 1969 in Kobe” Which makes him a couple of years older than even me, but with almost no release information. Souncloud reveals an upcoming 12” on Cadenza

Beatport gives a bit more information about what he has been up to, but the details of the releases by his other aliases are hidden somewhere on the internet! We shall keep our eyes peeled for new information nonetheless. I am also intrigued to see a 40 year old man opening his account as a techno producer suggesting that there is no limit where there is will.

As for the younger producers, a couple of them coincidentally have some new release out.

Ryo Murakami has the album “Depth of decay” (see a previous post for details about the other Ryo Murakami ) with design by Stereociti!

Kez YM also has the “Late night blue sound” EP on City Fly

And a recent mix for them as well:

Not to be outdonce, Stereociti also posted a nice mix from the start of the year too:

Number	Artist	Track	Label	Year
1	Susumu Yokota	Mushroom girl	Sublime Records	1998
2	Kez YM	Garda	Ragrange Records	2012
3	Rondenion	Assemblage	Plug Research	2013
4	Ryo Murakami	Late fall	Argumento Music Group	2012
5	Stereociti	Dialogue	Mojuba	2012
6	Takuya Yamashita	Rigel	Outpost Recordings	2013
7	Kaito	Behind my life	Kompakt	2013
8	Kuniyuki Takahashi	Get up with you (featuring Fumio Itabashi)	Mule Musiq	2013

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P049: Cabeza de Vaca – Japanese ambient

A special show all about Japanese ambient music this week on Cabeza de Vaca and Scanner FM . It will be the first of a three part series, with the next two shows about Japanese IDM/techno and house respectively.

Tokyo-based Yui Onodera forms the focus of the show, but rather than repeat too much of the information here, I recommend having a read of the recent interview I did with him that has been published over at Cyclic Defrost  in Australia. There is a lot of concept and broader artistic influence behind his work which gives it a variation and a cohesiveness. Not to mention that Yui has a rich sense of sound design to complement his ideas.

One thing that does warrant more words is the compilation that Yui has just been involved in producing called Vernacular that was released on Japanese label Whereabouts .

Various Artists – Vernacular [Whereabouts, 2013]

“Vernacular” is a native language or dialect, a characteristic expression of place and something that many feel is being lost through globalisation and the widening reach of media and social networks or “universal design that transcends locality and ethnicity” as Yui calls it. His idea behind “Vernacular” is to try and recapture that feeling of locality and has been a theme in some of his earlier work too. His collaborative album “Generic City” with Celer came under the influence of Kevin Lynch's book "The Image of the City", for example.

The album combines field recordings by Yui as well some instrumentation and the drones of Celer. But rather than a collage it feels like a real mapped out urban space with the field recordings representing real locations in this imaginary place. Yui explained it in terms of Lynch’s concepts:

“I applied his description of how different elements interrelate with each other to the composition of this work. We can say that the different soundscapes on the album make for a complex entity because they depend on each other. To me, the result looks very much like a city. This work contains not one aspect, but various aspects, which have a structure that depicts the contradiction of the current city as it is. It is like a documentary, and a story without a script, too.”

This also explains the titles, amongst them “An Imaginary Tale Of Lost Vernacular” which clearly introduces the theme of the current compilation. Tellingly, the last track on “Generic City” is “A Renewed Awareness Of Home” which gives an idea as to why he thinks these ideas might be important to explore. In addition to “Generic City”, his “Suisei” album on and/OAR in 2007 was also based on field recordings made around Tokyo, a kind of walking tour through the city.

On the “Vernacular” compilation it is no surprise that he has also used field recordings for the basis of his piece “Blue Planet Sky (For 21st Century Museum Of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa)”. Here, the original recordings were made in the room in the Kanazawa Museum Of Contemporary Art which houses the piece “Blue Planet Sky” by American artist James Turrell.

These sounds were then processed and manipulated until the end result is something like Thomas Köner, a crunching, dubbed out stroll through the room.

The rest of the two disc collection is just as compelling and as would be hoped for, yields different methods and outcomes by a well-balanced roster of established and lesser known names. Without mentioning all the artists, it is worth pointing out a few of the tracks. In terms of field recordings, German artist Jos Smolders adds a barely processed recording of planes passing overhead, whereas Simon Scott and Federico Durand use field recordings integrated into more traditional ambient tracks, in the formers case blending them with chiming drones into a melancholy, pastoral landscape, whereas Durand adds guitar loops for the same effect. There is no such pastoralism with Kim Cascone who’s reverbed and echo drenched recording sounds like a Victorian train station battered by rain and enveloped by mist whereas John Grzinich’s track “Animate Structures #2 (Wires, Wind, Snow)” does what it says on the can and sounds like a rusty gate swinging in the wind. Janek Schaefer’s piece has almost a harrowing, Burial-esque feel to it, although drawn out and protracted, with Troum’s track “Welcen” also sounding pretty bleak. A highlight may be hard to pick given the different moods and levels of abstraction, but overall the compilation leaves a satisfying sense that given the same question, that different artists will produce different results meaning that there is something of a vernacular language intact. It would be interesting to approach the question from another angle and give different artists the same field recording and see what they come up with.

“One could say that cities in various countries will tend to have a similar surface structure. They are losing their identity by accumulating various differences. They look like noise.”

Yui Onodera

Not much is known about Buddhastick Transparent, even though they hold the prize for perhaps the most mysterious and the most enigmatic album in my collection.

Sometime around 2000 a friend of mine sent me a pirate copy of “S”. I have no idea where he got it from or how he heard about it. In the pre-Discogs days it was very difficult to find any information about it and certainly the cover doesn’t help. The artist appears clearly as Buddhastick Transparent. Underneath it is written “featuring Something in the Air” and the letter “S” that wasn't immediately clear in the old days that it was the album title. The accompanying text repeats this with the curious track titles, but adds “Selected and remixed by DJ Fruit of the Original Sin”. Next to that is “Room 999, 1995, 11, 1” presumably meaning the first of November 1995 which was the time of release. The real artists names are Motoyoshi Ueki and Syuji Takahashi. Discogs, which is about the only source of information on the duo says that Fruit of the Original Sin is “An alias for more experimental vibes by the duo famous for the Buddhastick Transparent project” who only released two tracks on compilations under this name. Buddhastick Transparent have three albums and one that is called a mini-mix, all released between 1995-1997 and then that’s it, apparently.

The original “S” album came packaged in a standard jewel case with a three-panel folding booklet, and a business card advertising DJ Fruit of the Original Sin, Ambient Garden Cafe 999, and a full moon beach party from which this footage presumably originates:

The music itself, once past the mystique of who, why, when and where is extraordinary. It has been one of the most constantly played albums in my collection since hearing it, never becoming tired or old and always bringing with it a sense of calm, peace and a sense of inner depth. It is a particularly extraordinary album to play when coming home from the club, seeming to become more with the dawn light and a sleepless night. The music ripples and flows like almost no other, seeming to pass outside time, but also as a metaphore for it: it thrusts and pulls, it drifts and runs, it changes constantly, it reflects, it hide, it carries and it drowns. It is extremely psychedelic as well, playing continuous tricks and illusions, adding and rebalancing sounds at the edge of perception, so that everything is suddenly different without you realising. The last 40+ minute track is probably the best example of this. Highly repetitive, with a very unusual beat, but yet it never seems to dull or bore. Something is always happening mysteriously below the surface.

The other album material released after “S” appears just as good, though the price has prohibited me from ordering them from Japan. Please somebody re-release this material!!!! Out of print for 15 years, interesting, enigmatic and essential.

Other tracks from Buddhastick Transparent:

But there may be even more twists and turns to the story. Over at Otoneon the main Japanese website link for the group it says “Kabach 1983-1991, Buddhastick Transparent  1993, Fruit of the Original Sin 1997, Otoneon 2005”

It turns out that Kabach is pretty impressive sounding post-punk shoegaze psychedelic band from Japan in the late 80s somewhere between The Cult’s “She sells sanctuary”, jangle pop and The Cure. Without having too much more information, you would have to bet that the guys from Kabach went on to form Buddhastick Transparent.

Otoneon have one album out called “(.)dot” from 2009 which is available on iTunes and appears to be a collection of short experimental pieces. With reference to microdots it continues the drug references throughout the group’s trajectory, with a buddhastick being old slang for a Thai stick or a specially wrapped quantity of marijuana, with a microdot (name of a track on the above album and perhaps referenced in the title too) being a particular type of acid that was around in the 80s and 90s, but is probably unheard of today.

And finally some other Japanese artists and collaborations who couldn’t fit on today’s show:

Number	Artist	Track	Label	Year
1	Tetsu Inoue	Karmic light	Fax +49-69/450464	1994
2	Buddhastick Transparent Feat. Something In The Air	Red incence on golden	Sharira	1995
3	Yui Onodera and Celer	A Renewed Awareness of Home	Two Acorns	2010
4	Yui Onodera	Rhizome 2	Gears of Sand	2007
5	Yui Onodera	Blue Planet Sky (For 21st Century Museum Of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa)	Whereabouts Records	2013
6	Sawako	Hovering	Air Texture	2012
7	Yuya Ota	Tokyo	Glacial Movements	2013
8	Illuha	Interstices 1 (Seiya)	12k	2013

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