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May 23 |
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May 25
Japan Diary Part 1, May 18-21 |
photos
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Otoya concert mp3's |
my goth/darkwave mp3 and the KUF poster
some Japan tour links:
venues/shows:
artists:
May 25th, Osaka
I know I'm ready to come home. I found a place that proclaimed "Japan's best burger" and immediately went in, lol. It has a wonderful sign that I'd give my left testicle to have on a t-shirt: "Hamburger is my Life". This reminds me that I have found a couple of great "Engrish" t-shirts to bring home to Chris, my wife. One says: "Time's UP! Timing that leaves is essential". There are whole websites devoted to Engrish or Japlish t-shirts. These are t-shirts where people have attempted to write English phrases but the translation just doesn't make it. I just love these things. They are so heartfelt and so hilarious when you them.
Here are a couple of good sites:
www.engrish.com
www.thejasper.com/Engrish/Eindex.html
I imagine the same phenomenon exists going the other direction, but because I don't read or speak Japanese I just don't know.
It is very difficult to find Japanese Kanji characters on Japanese shirts. The Japanese are just crazy about english language t-shirts and that is all you see here. I sooooo wanted a japanese baseball shirt with Kanji characters but they don't appear to exist at all. All the major league baseball teams have English writing. I did find a soccer team in Kyoto, but you can only get their beautiful jerseys at their official headquarters.
**************
I'm awaiting the start of my last gig, another hour to go before it starts. Not being a band I keep getting relegated to too-quick sound checks. I hate the conceit this represents in the Rock world. I goes like this: If you are a one person act you couldn't possibly have a long, difficult sound check. It is frequently difficult to get across to event organizers or sound people that I am trying to be a small one person orchestra so I have a lot of things that need to be checked. I have a single condenser microphone on stage with a wide variety of different sound pressures emanating from a plethora of instruments, both found and normal. If I'm forced to have a 10 minute sound check I can't possibly have a happy gig................levels will be off the whole night. Okay..........rant over.
Aci wants me to sing and play my goth tune again tonight, even though I'm doing a live looping set, which completely takes me by surprise. There will also be a collaboration with the British performance artist Elizabeth Rose and I've been asked to sit in on industrial/metal percussion with Psycho Dream, my new favorite band of the tour.
I hastily ask the kitchen staff if there are any large pans or big pieces of scrap metal I can use for instruments, and I also discover that halfway into the small club that there is a large set of steel wheels that I decide to begin my performance with, even though they can't be moved to the stage.
Canaria tells me that they open at 7:30 and that they want me to sit in on the 2nd and 7th tunes of the set. I eat my American styled burger (pretty good, actually) peacefully and arrive back at the FANDANGO club a leisurely 10 minutes before they are planning to go on to discover to my horror that their start time has been moved up to 7:00. I have already missed the really heavy industrial tune I practised with them in soundcheck which leaves a much quieter piece. I am a little panicked because I don't want to offend them and don't have the language skills to explain what has happened. To make matters worse, I mistake one of the tunes as the proper quiet tune and jump up on stage only to discover at the last minute that this is the song BEFORE the song I'm supposed to play on.
Gosh, now I really feel embarrassed and self-concious but it goes well.
I really like this band, and there is some talk about collaborating through an FTP site on their next record. I think no one here has heard the kind of indutrial beatboxing that I do...........replete with fake noise bursts. I have a wonderful stuttering algorithm on my Digitech Vocal 300 which allows me to apply square wave tremolo, whose speed I can vary with the expression pedal.
warning: tech speak ahead...........just bypass this paragraph unless you are interested in the particulars of DSP processing...... Unfortunately, I've come to the end of using this pedal...........It has so many cool things that it does but it's ridiculously noisy. Since I am using a phantom powered microphone and then putting it through two mic pre-gain stages BEFORE I even go to the main board, I already have the tendency towards a rather noisy mix.
Well, my set goes very well with the exception that a loud repetetive click starts occuring that I can't get rid of. It is naturally happening as a samba rhythm............X*XX**XX**XX**X and I cannot figure out how to stop it and there is no time. I decide that this will be the rhythm of the entire performance (when life gives you lemons make lemonade) and do one entire piece using it as a loop. Mercifully, I discover that one of the destroyed channels on my board has become unmuted and this is the source of the problem. Things get better and the audience seems appreciative of my wierd idiosyncratic approach.
When the time comes to do my song with Aci sitting in on violin, I have forgotten that I was going to do it and I have lost my cheat sheet notes with lyrics on them. Miraculously, the lyrics all come back to me and for the first time ever, I sing the song with abandon, with a strong voice, and I'm able to perform as I do it. The manager of the OTOYA comes up to me afterwards and says, "You sing with very strong voice tonight". I have never heard nicer words in my entire life, and suddenly it occurs to me that not only am I becoming a singer but that I have the ability to be a good one if I work hard at it. I was so scared to take this on when I first started and miraculously it has resulted in one of the most satisfying and successful tours of my life. I realize that in one fell swoop I am no longer afraid to get up there and sing. I feel really blessed and extremely happy.
To top it all off, Aci and Haru take me to a local restaurant for our last meal and the owner, a New York Yankees fan who is really an irrepressible comedian and natural performer, with a passable command of English, comes out and entertains us.....................he keeps making plate after plate of delicacies.............with some alchohol that he has plied me with..... I'm too tipsy and exhausted to have even remembered what everything was called but he must have trotted out 15 different small plates of food for us to sample.
Aci has been so incredibly generous with me. He has driven me everywhere............not letting me pay for any gas, parking or road tolls................He has taken me out to a different kind of regional specialty of Japanese food at least once or twice a day for an entire week. He won't let me pay for anything. Everytime I ask him about this he says, "you took care of Haru and me when we were in California so I will take care of you here". I try to protest that he was only in California for one day but he will not hear of it. One time he even seems a little pissed that I have brought it up so I decide to be gracious and be taken care of for the whole rest of the trip.
One time I get him though: I spy a Starbuck's (what a cancer to the world) in Kyoto and ask Aci if I can go in and get the first strong espresso that I've tasted in my entire trip.................Japan is famous for many many culinary things, but the coffee there is worse than the worst roadhouse coffee in the United States. I wonder if an Italian could even survive in Japan.................
The Japanese have such a strong sense of honor. It is something I really admire about them. They are always bowing to each other and I even discover that they bow much lower to each other if a foreigner is not watching. One time I catch Aci and another musical cohort bowing to each other and they both bend almost double when they bow to each other only to appear a little self concious when I suddenly walk in the room unannounced. I have take to bowing to everyone who helps me out and to all who I play with. The technical staffs at all events are infinitely more polite and service oriented than in any other country I've ever been in and the level of professionalism seems very, very high everywhere I go. I have nothing but good things to say about playing in Japan.
The audiences are amazing here. If you hit a note with a long decay at the end of a song, they will wait in utter silence until the note has completely faded away; they'll pause for just a moment in the silence afterwards and then they will lustfully applaud. I have to say that I love being respected in this auditory way and I can't wait to return here to play and I can't wait to host some of my talented Japanese musician friends when they come to play in California.
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Well, it is time , regretfully, to return home. I can't belive how long it seems since I first came here even though it's only been 8 days. I'm very nervous going into baggage at the airport because I have purshased several things and am in grave danger of exceeding my weight limit for the ride home. Mercifully, all the little gifts that I brought to Sunao, Aci and Haru weighed a lot so I'm just barely under my limit and don't have to pay excess baggage. Finances have been tight enough that I have been a little stressed about spending money on the tour. Of course, Aci and Haru have been so generous that I have saved literally hundreds of dollars in transportation, hotels and food alone, so I return home in a pretty good place.
I live really close to the bone ever since I decided to live entirely off of my artistry five years ago. I rarely do commercial musical work anymore and, miraculously, have made all my living from my art in the last four out of five years. This year has been very tough and in this day and age, unsupported tours usually lose money. This year I"m really depending on the income from my teaching.
I am glad to get home..........really glad and I feel so inspired but all that I have heard and seen. I want to start work immediately on working in some of the influences that turned me on on this tour into my live set and am starting to think seriously about how to change my performance at the big Zurich looping festival tha I will be playing in at the end of August.
Out of the last 8 days I have had three days where I didn't sleep for over 24 hours and I am very, very exhausted.
On the plane home I sit next to a homophopic young military man who makes no bones about the fact that he wants nothing to do with me. I"m dressed with brightly colored jellies on my wrists and colorful sneakers and I have black finger nail polish on my hands from the Goth festival. It makes him very nervous even when I show him my wedding ring. Consequently, I have a very hard time and can't fall asleep.
Now as I write these last sentences, it has taken me two solid weeks to recover from my exhaustion and I finally feel like my old self.
What a great tour. I can't wait to return to beautiful Japan. It looks like I may end up doing some collaborative work with Psycho Dream, Aural Vampire and maybe even Genet from Auto Mod. Two of these bands are from Tokyo and we have been corresponding a lot since I returned. I've never been to Tokyo and I'd love to return and play the Tokyo Dark Castle, which is the biggest goth event in Japan...........an event that Genet started and continues to produce. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
(return to the top of page)May 24th, ZINK, Kobe
Today's gig is at the Zink in Kobe. Like in many cities around the world, the Zink is in the industrial warehouse section of Kobe, a beautiful city nestled in hills about an hour from Osaka. My japanese friends call it the San Francisco of Japan.......noted for being 'out of the box', artistic and quirky, but frankly it reminds me more of Santa Cruz as it doesn't have a big city vibe at all. I toured here with my brother, Bill, in Worlds Collide back in 1995 and we had made incredible connections to come back and produce records for a major recording studio/label until the great earthquake occurred one year later, destroying the entire company. I was told that many huge businesses had no insurance and were completely wiped out after the enormous earthquake that happened here, and after our huge one in California in '89, I'm well aware that I'm in the middle of heavy earthquake country.
I really have an affinity for this particular town, and the manager of Zink is a wonderful woman (whose name I regretfully have forgotten) who had come to my show the night before (and would come to the last show In Osaka as well). We could hardly speak with each other but we liked each other immediately. That is the beauty of travel at times. Even when you can't make an articulate conversation occur there are times when you know instantly that you are simpatico with someone. This happened several times on my tour.
The Zink is upstairs in a huge warehouse and has two completely daunting sets of very narrow 20 foot stairs that have to be negotiated. I always let out a sigh when confronted by such a physical impediment to loading into a club because it is always tough getting all of my heavy gear upstairs. Aci has disappeared parking the car, so I make the mistake of trying to get my 70-plus pound rack up the stairs by myself. I aggravate an old arm injury that will have me up all night as it turns out.
The club is really cool; very spacious with a very high ceiling in that warehousey kind of way... I'm just delighted because there are several regulation-sized pool tables in the club and I play a little one-handed pool while Sins of the Flesh do their soundcheck.....enough so that the Brits in the band are reluctant to play with me......lol..
As an aside, I discovered the open pool tables at the Santa Cruz Goth scene, called the Box, about four years ago......it was playing pool by myself and listening to the intriguing and unknown modern goth music that got me interested in finally going inside one night to check it out.....absolutely sure that I would be tossed out or frozen out by the Goths who I assumed were really uptight, negative and judgemental. To my delight I discovered that the people who populate this scene are nothing like what I expected: They are almost all very friendly, intelligent and creative. Almost everyone I know in the scene is a painter or dancer or theatre designer or poet or DJ or musician. As a matter of fact, the SC scene has the highest per capita number of artists of any social or musically social scene I've ever been involved with. Coupled with the fact that it is the only scene I've ever encountered that seems almost entirely non-sexist, non-homophobic, non-ageist and non-racist. I love being theatrical and dressing up. I love dancing wildly and really idiosyncratically and this is the only scene I know of that allows me to just be entirely myself when I go out for a night's entertainment. I'm a fan I have to say and this is what prompted me to do some remixing for the local DJs and to finally write the song ("It Doesn't Matter" - www.looppool.info/UltraViolette/) that is my first foray into pop music in 20 years, and results in this wonderful tour.
Okay, enough about me...........what do you think about me? LOL.
Seriously, I see my friend the manager of the Zink and she just beams at me. I really feel at home, immediately. Sound check was sound check (rushed as always) and, again, Sins of the Flesh and Mimetic are both on the bill. This time there is a wonderful band called Psycho Dream on the bill. The word Psycho has a completely different meaning to the Japanese than to the British or Americans, having the connotation of something that is wild and happy and over the top in a very good way. The lead singer, whose name is Canaria, is a beautiful young Japanese woman with a lovely voice. She had emailed me with a huge welcome before I came to Japan and it is really great to finally meet her. The young musician, named Psycho, who writes all the music, is immensely talented: playing excellent and very heavy distorted guitar, programming excellently arranged electronica backing tracks and playing industrial percussion along with his singing. He also is a great and unusual performer with a very unique hair cut. He wears a dress and high boots and is very androgynous looking but he also has an intriguing air of chaos and pent-up violence about him..........not real violence, but he is explosive on stage and sometimes really spastic in a very appealingly chaotic way.. There is also a young woman, Haji, who plays metal percussion, and each musician on stage has a metal percussion station where at periodic times the whole band breaks out into really simple and powerful rhythmic unision breaks. It is like industrial taiko and it later inspires the hell out of me. Haji is also very kind to let me come up later and share her percussion station.
The band is literally one of my favorite discoveries in Japan and they are just starting out. Jude of Sins of the Flesh is thinking of starting a goth label in Japan and he is obviously courting them to sign with him. I think they could go really far. The music is by turns really heavy, really melodic, really industrial, really heavy rock and then really beautiful pop with lush melodies. It's hard to pull off such a combination of styles but they do it well and they are just scintillating to watch. I vow to ask them if I can sit in on metal percussion at the last gig of the tour that they will also be on.
I'm just captivated and I dance my ass off and, for the first time in Japan without any inhibitions to their sets and also to Mimetic who follow them. I'm a bit aware that my dancing might come off a little extreme but for some reason I don't let it inhibit me.
Mimetic has a great set and puts his laptop up on two huge red painted steel drums which looks fantastic with his mostly white costume..............I find another red barrel and I ask Jerome if it would be okay for me to perform with him on one of his songs. To my delight, he says yes and in the middle of his set I drag the steel drum up flush with his and borrow two huge drum sticks from the drumset for Sins of the Flesh. I am so inspired and I play really minimalist but powerful industrial taiko-esque parts over Mimetics'really funky and heavy groove electronica. I'm really in a theatrical mood and begin to incorporate ritualistic dance into what I'm doing. The crowd isn't huge but they are totally into it and i just have the time of my life. Later, I dance like crazy to a tune of his in five four.............subdividing my dance movements in groups of five eighth notes and ultimately in really quick five sixteenth notes. It's really challenging to do this and I'm quite aware that it must look a little bizarre but I'm into it. I feel really happy and am a little tipsy from drinking beer. A good place to be in (if one isn't in it always).
It is so inspiring to see these two bands that I want to come home and start experimenting with doing much heavier and more rhythm-based sets of live looping. I'm high as a kite with inspiration and I realize that I want to jump back into my drumming roots. When Jerome tells me that he is a trapset drummer too and still plays kit it just sews it up for me. Soooo, for my set, I drag one floor tom off of the drumkit and the steel barrel, grab a pair of large rock and roll drumsticks from the drumset and do a lot of drumming over my grooves. I have a great set and am really inspired.
Sins of the Flesh round out the night and I dance some more but I am really exhausted and look forward to the ride home from Kobe.
(return to the top of page)May 23rd, Loop Night Volume 2, Kyoto
Loop Night Volume 2, produced by 6-string solo bass looper Ryusei Hattori, occured in Kyoto tonight. Because of language barriers and the sad fact that Loopers Delight is dominated by the English language I had only known of Sunao Inami and the numerous looping events that he has produced in Kobe. I wasn't prepared for the great sophistication and depth of really great loopers I've heard so far tonight and it is still only soundcheck.
The evening starts out and is special to me because it represents my good friend and host Aci's debut as a live looper. He plays a duo improv set with guitarist Masato Kawatani who is a fascinating and pretty "outside" stompbox effects looper. Aci, by contrast, plays violin with a very classical approach. Aci acquits himself very well for a first looping gig and I am proud of him. He sticks mostly with fairly consonant and untreated violin, as opposed to his soundcheck, when he was running his violin through a lot of fascinating and even disturbing effects. I look forward to his next foray into live looping.
Next up is Hideki Nakanishi, who is a wonderfully creative electric mandolinist who uses Lexicon Jammans and a plethora of DSP effects to create fascinating mini symphonies of sound. He falls into the school of solo loopers who like to use processing and the physical properties of their instruments to simulate an entire rhythm section, and he is as good at doing this as anyone I've seen so far anywhere in the world. Sometimes inside and consonant musically and then displaying a breadth of harmonic and timbral sophistication, he coaxes deep sub basses, ambient pads, searing electric distorted guitar-sounding leads, blistering rhythm mandolin parts and even drums out of his electrified acoustic instrument. He even plays on a fascinating small invented instrument made out of a bowed section from a piece of bamboo, which sounds like a group of moaning children if they had a sophisticated avante garde sensibility. I can't convey in words how eerie this effect is and he uses it as a beautiful and disturbing ambient pad to his piece. Damn!!!!! I want one. I'm very impressed with Hideki's musicality and the sophistication of his looping techniques. I immediately invite him to come play at Y2K5 and truly hope he can make it in October in Santa Cruz.
It's artists like he and festival producer Ryusei Hattoria that make me wish the National Endowment of the Arts or the Hewlett Packard foundation would give me $10,000 a year to bring artists to the Y2K5 Festival!
Ryusei is a very sophisticated 6-string fretless electric bassist who also has an impressive command of his instrument and using it to make many different layers. He also is a very friendly guy with an infectious smile. His pieces have a wonderful density that eschews the typical oversaturation of much less sophisticated live loopers that I have heard. The electric bass can have a limited enough timbre and range that it is very easy to achieve a lot of timbral masking which mars the looping performances of lesser bassists that I've seen. Ryusei is completely in control of his timbres though, and plays another equally impressive and beautiful set. He also has the best faux drum set sound I've heard from any live looping bassists.......all generated by his axe and fingers. Again, my drum-centric approach makes me delighted with what he has come up with, and I can't wait to get home to try and steal some of his ideas on my own cheapy fretless four string bass. I'm not even in the same league technically as Ryusei, who seems like he could probably play with any kind of ensemble. It makes me curious to hear some of his other non-looping output. He also has a cool technique of playing a bassline with his thumb while playing moving diadic and triadic chords over the top with a third melody line. There are literally three things happening at once without a loop being laid down. Wow!!!! His actual sound is enormous and I race up to congratulate him on his performance and also invite him to perfrom at Y2K5.
I am surprised that he knows all about my own work in promoting live looping and producing festivals for this non-genre oriented musical movement. Obviously, he has lurked at Loopers Delight and I find him to be a really nice, very intelligent and extremely kind new friend. I have also asked him to come and play Y2K5 (which I have also done for Sunao and Aci, although timing and finances will probably prevent them from coming this year). It would be a dream to have an all-Japanese Live Looping Mini Tour in Northern California and get all these artists to come.
The gig is at a really cool venue: the Cafe Independent which has a fantastic experimental noise/free improv/electronica CD/LP store. One of the clerks in this really cool and really little store adjoining the stage is a very nice young woman who uses turntables in a very avante garde way. She gives me her CD called Busratch and I want to invite her to a festival of Creative Turntablism that I plan to produce later this year. There are several bay area turntablists who use this instrument in really wild and creative ways other than as dance DJs. Amongst them are Kitundu, who played last year's Y2K4 festival turning his tables into kalimbas and harps that also can scratch records..........Matt Davignon, who can take nothing and create amazing music out of it and a DJ I once heard called PollyWog who just juxtaposed really bizarrely different styles of music using radically altered speeds to create textures. Busratch's CD is really amazing and I've been listening to it a lot. There are times where she just manipulates the noise at the beginning or end of a record in little noise symphonies..........Damn, I wish I could inherit a million dollars so I could fly people like this wonderfully talented but fairly obscure artist to play in California.
In between sets I have a wonderfully stimulating conversation with two Australian singer-songwriters in a group called The John Baker Duo. John (vocals and guitars) and his partner, Gayle Buckby (Piano, Accordeon) and I have one of those cool meetings of the minds of simpatico strangers that I love. They give me their CD which is really nice. John is coming down with a bug though and they can't stay for my set unfortunately, but it was cool meeting them.
I feel fantastic tonight, musically and feel like I can play anything and be the zone. My set goes well and is well recieved by the small but really intently listening audience. I'm at the top of the bill but feel humbled to have that distinguished place on it. Sunao records this one for me but it will be a while before I have a chance to hear it. I wish he was on the bill, but he is not this night. What a great night. At the end, everyone graciously helps me up the long stairs to the street and the air is cool as Aci and I get back into his cool square little car (a Cube, I think it is called) to make the long drive back to his place in Osaka. Aci is a chain smoker and always is very polite about trying to blow smoke out his window but to be honest being a non-smoker I enjoy the smell of his cigarettes and know I will miss that smell when I return home. It is the olfactory signature of my whole tour because of all the amazing driving he does for me...............this and the smell of my favorite late night noodle shop in Osaka that he takes me to twice. ********************
May 23 |
May 24 |
May 25 |
Japan Diary Part 1
photos
(opens in new window)
Otoya concert mp3's |
my goth/darkwave mp3 and the KUF poster