Call And Response business went on hold for a week over the end of November and beginning of December, as I was away at the fantastic Madeiradig experimental music festival in Madeira, Portugal, which mostly involved drinking beer with Germans, with the addition of a small amount of actual music.
I hit the ground running upon my return, though, heading straight from the airport to a meeting with the guys from Tropical Death and a journalist from an inflight magazine who’s writing a feature on the Japanese underground music scene. I’m not sure what the crossover between underground music fans and inflight magazine readers is, but I guess there must be some. Writing about something as diverse and fragmented as Japanese underground music is an impossible task and I don’t envy him, but at least it’s a good excuse to see some cool shows and get drunk with some cool music people (and us).
The next day, on December 8th, was the latest Tension! event that I organise with Mayumi from P-iPLE. The ideal balance with an event is always a difficult one to pull off, and I’ll take different approaches with different events.
An interesting comparison for me is a show I went to couple of weeks previously at Koiwa Bushbash, where another organiser was holding a release party for a compilation cassette that she’d just released. Her event was broken up into two separate shows, the first opening in the morning and finishing in the afternoon, and the second opening around 6pm and finishing about 9:30pm. Each band at this Koiwa show played around 40 minutes, and they all had the chance to do a proper soundcheck, with the result being that a total of seven bands appeared, spread over about 10 hours, including a long break in the middle. I had to miss the evening show due to another engagement, but was able to catch Nagoya’s excellent Free City Noise in the afternoon show. In any case, this approach of seven acts with longer sets and full soundchecks was a very band-friendly scheduling environment (I’m not sure if the audience were expected to pay individually for both the afternoon and evening shows).
At Tension!, we had 14 live acts and three DJs over the course of eight hours. No one really had time to do a proper soundcheck except the first bands on each of the two stages we’d set up, the sets were all 25-30 minutes in length, and the whole event had a much more intense pace to it, with something going on somewhere nearly all the time. It’s obviously a less artist-friendly setup, although I think it also made for a more explosive (maybe a bit overwhelming for some) experience for the audience as a whole, which brings its own benefits for artists who rarely get to play to a packed crowd of such energised fans.
One of the ways I sometimes describe Tension! is as a space where music of that postpunk/noise-rock type that I like can have its own scene rather than existing as an adjunct to either the punk, noise, indie or experimental scene — the overlapping area of a Venn diagram covering several different scenes. When I was in Madeira talking to people involved in experimental music in Europe, I also realised that what I was trying to do was promote music that has something experimental about it but treat it (and encourage the audience to treat it) as if it was just regular rock music.
While bands are usually excited to be playing outside their usual scenes, one problem with mixing things up in this way is that audiences don’t always follow, wither by avoiding the event or by sticking rigidly to only the bands they’re familiar with. The old alt-rock/underground crowd from places like Akihabara Club Goodman and Shinjuku Motion mostly steer clear of Tension!, although the event seems to be growing to the extent that increasingly we can ignore them without suffering for it. More serious is when people with different backgrounds fall into conflict. Noise and industrial fans are used to freaking out intensely in their own private and personal space, while hardcore fans treat their music as a more communal and aggressive experience, so throwing both these kinds of people together on the same floor without any established common etiquette can sometimes create friction. As a result, during Jailbird Y’s set there was a bit of aggro on the dance floor that fortunately didn’t flare up into anything too serious.
There was also a brief power outage in the main stage area that interrupted Tropical Death’s set, although the excellent Moonstep staff sorted it out swiftly (despite punters needing to pee in the dark for a while). Melt-Banana brought the event to an ecstatic finale, and once again I can’t emphasise enough what fantastic performers they are and what thoroughly nice people.
All in all, the night was a big success, so thanks to Naoki and the rest of the Moonstep staff, big thanks to Melt-Banana for being such fantastic headliners as always, and special thanks to all the bands who travelled so far to take part -- Adrena Adrena from the UK, Lumi from France, Jailbird Y from Hiroshima and Velvet Ants from Nagoya. Also thanks to Soloist Anti Pop Totalization, who played two shows in one day, as well as the "Yokoscum" event in Kanagawa who kindly co-ordinated the schedules of Soloist and some other musicians who were playing at both shows with us despite our two events being rivals of a sort. That sort of intra-scene support and good will always leaves a warm feeling.
Events this packed and intense are difficult to organise and really exhausting, so it’ll be a long time before we do something like this again, but our regular programme of smaller, accessible parties will be back in full swing in the new year. Also, since there aren’t any new Call And Response releases for a while, we’re bringing a few of our friends’ albums into the online store soon, and there are some big discounts planned on CAR releases over the year-end period — more to be announced on that soon.
Thursday, 13 December 2018
Tuesday, 27 November 2018
Season's Beatings
The Christmas and New Year season is a time when a combination of so many other people doing events and a lot of friends going on holiday or visiting their hometowns or home countries makes organising events and releasing new music a bad idea. Even so, the end of every year seems to end up with an overabundance of parties and events despite our best efforts to avoid them.
The next pay-what-you-want Call And Response Indie Disco at Shimokitazawa Three falls on December 3rd, a day when I’m out of the country on the Portuguese island of Madeira for the fascinating-looking MadeiraDIG experimental music festival. In my absence, Rally/Shingo from Tropical Death and Ralouf/Julien from Lo-shi are taking care of the booking and organising for me.
Paris Death Hilton are a duo Shingo in particular has been pushing a lot recently, and their intense, instrumental prog-electro-hardcore is a unique and intense experience in Tokyo right now. Emulsion are another band who combine progressive rock, electronic music and a punk sensibility, although they take it to a different place. Meanwhile La Belles Biologie is a project combining the experimental electronic sounds of Biology of the Future and doll-mutilating noise act Les Belles Noiseuses. I trust those two guys not to mess it up, but as a precaution I’m turning off my phone for the weekend prior.
On December 8th, I’ve got the latest instalment of the postpunk/noise-rock event Tension! that I organise occasionally with Mayumi from P-iPLE. This sixth edition of the event has an extensive lineup running all day at Nakano Moonstep — a very nice venue near where I live in Koenji. The cool thing about Moonstep is that it has two floors, with the bar on the upper floor, allowing us to set up something more easygoing where people can escape from the relentless barrage of chaos downstairs.
The flipside of that is that it’s difficult for just two people to juggle the competing needs and issues of so many participants, so right up to the time doors open, I suspect Mayumi and I will be dealing with equipment and setting issues, timetable queries and last-minute disruptions.
The really good thing about Tension!, though, is how into it so many of the artists we’ve had participate in the past have got, volunteering to help host editions of the event in their own towns and building connections, organising similar events of their own in collaboration with each other. This sort of noise-rock/postpunk music doesn’t quite have a scene of its own in Japan, so it’s great seeing people trying to make one. The support of more well-known bands like Melt-Banana was invaluable in helping us get started back at the beginning of 2016, so we’re very excited to have them back almost three years later for this edition.
Tension! will also be a great chance for people in Tokyo to see Nagoya noise-rock champions Velvet Ants, whose mini-album Entomological Souvenirs I came out this autumn from Call And Response. They tore it up at their Nagoya release party in October and we were able to stitch together this rough & ready music video for the track Cicada from live footage.
Closer to Christmas, we’re keeping things a bit quieter, and for the first time in a long time, there’s no Call And Response Christmas event. Instead, we’re having a more intimate house party — more a “bonenkai” in the Japanese tradition than a Christmas party exactly — at Call And Response headquarters.
That doesn’t mean there’s nothing going on around the year’s end though. Last summer, Gotal/Eric from Lo-shi moved to Tahiti at the end of a triumphant DIY tour of western Japan, but he’s returning for a handful of shows over Christmas and New Year. More info on dates will appear later, but for now, keep December 24th and January 6th free in your rolodexes or Apple Newtons or whatever you kids use to store information nowadays.
New Year’s Eve in Tokyo is usually a bit of a bust in the music scene for me, because so many parties mean that my friends and favourite bands are always fragmented and spread around dozens of different parties. To save the inevitable sense of anticlimax, my wife and I are going to spend a few days in Okinawa and then spend the last two nights of 2018 with our friends in Fukuoka, where I’m DJing two nights on at the venue Utero on December 30th and 31st.
Lastly, while there are no more releases lined up for the rest of the year, I’ve noticed recently that Nakigao Twintail’s wonderful 2016 Ichijiku EP is almost sold out now. There are ten copies left in the CAR office, and maybe one or two floating around in CD stores somewhere. The band themselves disintegrated a long time ago, as all great and promising bands are wont to do, so this CD-R is probably the only chance you’ll get to experience this singular group of lunatics. Check out some of the songs below, and you can buy the CD from our online store here.
The next pay-what-you-want Call And Response Indie Disco at Shimokitazawa Three falls on December 3rd, a day when I’m out of the country on the Portuguese island of Madeira for the fascinating-looking MadeiraDIG experimental music festival. In my absence, Rally/Shingo from Tropical Death and Ralouf/Julien from Lo-shi are taking care of the booking and organising for me.
Paris Death Hilton are a duo Shingo in particular has been pushing a lot recently, and their intense, instrumental prog-electro-hardcore is a unique and intense experience in Tokyo right now. Emulsion are another band who combine progressive rock, electronic music and a punk sensibility, although they take it to a different place. Meanwhile La Belles Biologie is a project combining the experimental electronic sounds of Biology of the Future and doll-mutilating noise act Les Belles Noiseuses. I trust those two guys not to mess it up, but as a precaution I’m turning off my phone for the weekend prior.
On December 8th, I’ve got the latest instalment of the postpunk/noise-rock event Tension! that I organise occasionally with Mayumi from P-iPLE. This sixth edition of the event has an extensive lineup running all day at Nakano Moonstep — a very nice venue near where I live in Koenji. The cool thing about Moonstep is that it has two floors, with the bar on the upper floor, allowing us to set up something more easygoing where people can escape from the relentless barrage of chaos downstairs.
The flipside of that is that it’s difficult for just two people to juggle the competing needs and issues of so many participants, so right up to the time doors open, I suspect Mayumi and I will be dealing with equipment and setting issues, timetable queries and last-minute disruptions.
The really good thing about Tension!, though, is how into it so many of the artists we’ve had participate in the past have got, volunteering to help host editions of the event in their own towns and building connections, organising similar events of their own in collaboration with each other. This sort of noise-rock/postpunk music doesn’t quite have a scene of its own in Japan, so it’s great seeing people trying to make one. The support of more well-known bands like Melt-Banana was invaluable in helping us get started back at the beginning of 2016, so we’re very excited to have them back almost three years later for this edition.
Tension! will also be a great chance for people in Tokyo to see Nagoya noise-rock champions Velvet Ants, whose mini-album Entomological Souvenirs I came out this autumn from Call And Response. They tore it up at their Nagoya release party in October and we were able to stitch together this rough & ready music video for the track Cicada from live footage.
Closer to Christmas, we’re keeping things a bit quieter, and for the first time in a long time, there’s no Call And Response Christmas event. Instead, we’re having a more intimate house party — more a “bonenkai” in the Japanese tradition than a Christmas party exactly — at Call And Response headquarters.
That doesn’t mean there’s nothing going on around the year’s end though. Last summer, Gotal/Eric from Lo-shi moved to Tahiti at the end of a triumphant DIY tour of western Japan, but he’s returning for a handful of shows over Christmas and New Year. More info on dates will appear later, but for now, keep December 24th and January 6th free in your rolodexes or Apple Newtons or whatever you kids use to store information nowadays.
New Year’s Eve in Tokyo is usually a bit of a bust in the music scene for me, because so many parties mean that my friends and favourite bands are always fragmented and spread around dozens of different parties. To save the inevitable sense of anticlimax, my wife and I are going to spend a few days in Okinawa and then spend the last two nights of 2018 with our friends in Fukuoka, where I’m DJing two nights on at the venue Utero on December 30th and 31st.
Lastly, while there are no more releases lined up for the rest of the year, I’ve noticed recently that Nakigao Twintail’s wonderful 2016 Ichijiku EP is almost sold out now. There are ten copies left in the CAR office, and maybe one or two floating around in CD stores somewhere. The band themselves disintegrated a long time ago, as all great and promising bands are wont to do, so this CD-R is probably the only chance you’ll get to experience this singular group of lunatics. Check out some of the songs below, and you can buy the CD from our online store here.
Wednesday, 31 October 2018
Foreign angles
Growing as a band or as a label in Japan
can be a difficult and often dispiriting experience. Bands rehearse, write
songs and play shows week after week and yet never seem to get a foothold. The
paths to something greater seem few, and distant. However, looking overseas can
be one way of breaking this sense of inertia.
This brings its own set of difficulties,
since the cost of physically travelling overseas and the short amounts of time
most Japanese musicians can take off work mean that foreign tours are only for
the very wealthy or very dedicated. Embarking on something as logistically challenging
as a tour isn’t the only way to reach out and keep things fresh though, and some
of us here in the CAR family are working on a few different projects at the
moment.
The most immediate one is a tour by US band
Pregnant, starting November 1st and which Shingo from Tropical Death
has (among others) been working hard to help set up and support.
Pregnant (from USA) Japan Tour:
11/1 Tokyo, Shimokitazawa Basement Bar, w/
Tropical Death, Bonstar
11/2 Tokyo, Akihabara Studio Revole, w/
1000s of Cats, Mekare-Kare
11/3 Tokyo, Shinjuku Ninespices, w/
Loolowningen & The Far East Idiots, Windowz
11/4 Tokyo, Kunitachi Chikyuya, w/ Tropical
Death, / Loolowningen & The Far East Idiots, Suppa Micro Pamchopp
11/7 Osaka, Namba Bears, w/ Los Oxxo Sexos,
Tokiyo (And Summer Club), Sou + Kanchenjunga
11/8 Fukuoka, Kokura TBA
11/9 Hiroshima 4.14, w/ Usagi Bunny Boy,
Uma-darake, Le Film, Shyboy
The other angle we’ve been working is
setting up releases of a couple of split singles/EPs with overseas bands, although
as always with projects like this that have so many moving parts, it’s
difficult to know when is a safe time to announce any details. For now I’ll
just say that one is a vinyl single that we’re producing in collaboration with
a UK-based label, while the other will probably be a CD EP with another Asian
band. In both cases, releases early next year are most likely. As far as tours
supporting the releases go, they’re both under discussion and we’d love to do something
if possible, but let’s just see how that goes, alright?
Other news from CARland is that I’ve given
notice to quit one of my jobs in order to spend more time with writing and the
label – two activities that are becoming increasingly difficult to separate,
with all the problems that entails. Meanwhile, I’m DJing at about a hundred events
over the weekend (well, three), so if you’re not catching the Pregnant tour on
that particular day, by all means drop by.
11/3 (evening) @ Koiwa Bushbash – Excellent
noise-rock event featuring Jailbird Y, In The Sun and more great bands.
11/3 (night) @ Shibuya Lush – Another event
with a great looking lineup, which I’ll be joining at some insane hour of the
night/morning.
11/4 (evening) @ Roppongi VARIT. – A ‘90s-themed
DJ night featuring a pretty eclectic-looking range of DJs, at which I’ve
threatened to play a set composed entirely of Guided By Voices but probably won’t follow through.
Thursday, 25 October 2018
Experimental Cocktails
To celebrate the release of the Velvet Ants’ debut album Entomological Souvenirs I, I took a trip to Nagoya the other weekend for the release party at Spazio Rita. Rita is a really nice venue — just a simple, open space with no raised area for the stage, so you can move around freely, without feeling cramped in the way you can in a place like the differently lovely Bar Ripple, where Call And Response’s last event in Nagoya was held in 2017.
The lineup Joe from Velvet Ants put together was superb as well, with the Sonic Youth-esque Free City Noise kicking the party off ferociously. Osaka-based experimental electronic duo Nehan were an interesting follow-up, while the always entertaining new wave/postpunk band Compact Club were visiting from Tokyo and the excellent Noiseconcrete x 3chi5 held things up from the Nagoya end.
Hiroshima noise-rock maniacs Jailbird Y were also visiting, although they brought most of their band from Tokyo, including guitarist Mayumi from punk/no wave band P-iPLE, playing what I think might have been her first gig since having a baby in the summer. Mayumi is also my main collaborator on the Tension! events that we’ve been running on and off for the past couple of years, and the first thing she said to me after not seeing her in three months was, “Let’s do Tension! in Taiwan!”
I’ve written on here before about how, maybe even more than the music, the thing that determines what artists I work with is whether they’re someone who is going to be a good experience to work with. With 95% of the people I know, when you suggest something to them, the first thing they start thinking of is reasons why they can’t do it, but with people like Mayumi, and Anndoe from Jailbird Y is like this as well, if you suggest something to them, the first thing they start thinking of is ways they can make it happen. I’m probably a bit more cautious than either of them, and I’m certainly very selective in who I choose to be enthusiastic with, but at least with people who are feeding me good energy, I try to respond positively in return. “OK, let’s go to Taiwan!”
Also joining me on the trip to Nagoya was Julien from Lo-shi, who I coaxed into coming by telling him, “It’s not a gig: it’s an adventure!” The day after the show, we went to Hamamatsu in Shizuoka prefecture to visit Sone Records — a really nice little record shop that’s been supportive of Call And Response in the past. I was pretty hung over and generally feeling icky, but Julien went straight for the chu-hi at the first convenience store we passed in the morning. We arrived in Hamamatsu only to find Sone Records wouldn’t be open for another four hours, and we quickly realised that Japanese cities with populations of less than one million people are wastelands on a Monday afternoon. The only place we could find that was open was Saizeriya, a cheap family restaurant mostly frequented by schoolkids, so we parked ourselves in there for a couple of hours and made experimental cocktails with the drink bar and the disgusting wine they serve.
The record store was a productive experience in the end though, and with the Velvet Ants heading to Hamamatsu the following weekend, it was good to get their CD in stock. Meanwhile, I came away with a trio of releases from excellent local Shizuoka bands Towel, Half Kill and Qujaku.
The other useful thing I was able to take away from this trip was a lot of video footage of the Velvet Ants live, which I’ll soon hopefully be able to cut together into a music video. I’m also working on an music video for Sea Level, whose album came out on CD in July and who have recently made it available via various online and streaming outlets. While the Velvet Ants video should come together fairly quickly once I start, the Sea Level video is all being done with animation, which is inevitably a slow, tedious process. At the same time, though, there’s something calming about all the mechanical repetition it involves, and it gives me an opportunity to listen to a lot of music in the background, which is something I don’t usually feel like doing when I’m at home.
We’re also working on a couple of new releases, both of which are trapped in a spiral of interminable delays, but which I’ll hopefully be able to talk more about soon.
The lineup Joe from Velvet Ants put together was superb as well, with the Sonic Youth-esque Free City Noise kicking the party off ferociously. Osaka-based experimental electronic duo Nehan were an interesting follow-up, while the always entertaining new wave/postpunk band Compact Club were visiting from Tokyo and the excellent Noiseconcrete x 3chi5 held things up from the Nagoya end.
Hiroshima noise-rock maniacs Jailbird Y were also visiting, although they brought most of their band from Tokyo, including guitarist Mayumi from punk/no wave band P-iPLE, playing what I think might have been her first gig since having a baby in the summer. Mayumi is also my main collaborator on the Tension! events that we’ve been running on and off for the past couple of years, and the first thing she said to me after not seeing her in three months was, “Let’s do Tension! in Taiwan!”
I’ve written on here before about how, maybe even more than the music, the thing that determines what artists I work with is whether they’re someone who is going to be a good experience to work with. With 95% of the people I know, when you suggest something to them, the first thing they start thinking of is reasons why they can’t do it, but with people like Mayumi, and Anndoe from Jailbird Y is like this as well, if you suggest something to them, the first thing they start thinking of is ways they can make it happen. I’m probably a bit more cautious than either of them, and I’m certainly very selective in who I choose to be enthusiastic with, but at least with people who are feeding me good energy, I try to respond positively in return. “OK, let’s go to Taiwan!”
Also joining me on the trip to Nagoya was Julien from Lo-shi, who I coaxed into coming by telling him, “It’s not a gig: it’s an adventure!” The day after the show, we went to Hamamatsu in Shizuoka prefecture to visit Sone Records — a really nice little record shop that’s been supportive of Call And Response in the past. I was pretty hung over and generally feeling icky, but Julien went straight for the chu-hi at the first convenience store we passed in the morning. We arrived in Hamamatsu only to find Sone Records wouldn’t be open for another four hours, and we quickly realised that Japanese cities with populations of less than one million people are wastelands on a Monday afternoon. The only place we could find that was open was Saizeriya, a cheap family restaurant mostly frequented by schoolkids, so we parked ourselves in there for a couple of hours and made experimental cocktails with the drink bar and the disgusting wine they serve.
The record store was a productive experience in the end though, and with the Velvet Ants heading to Hamamatsu the following weekend, it was good to get their CD in stock. Meanwhile, I came away with a trio of releases from excellent local Shizuoka bands Towel, Half Kill and Qujaku.
The other useful thing I was able to take away from this trip was a lot of video footage of the Velvet Ants live, which I’ll soon hopefully be able to cut together into a music video. I’m also working on an music video for Sea Level, whose album came out on CD in July and who have recently made it available via various online and streaming outlets. While the Velvet Ants video should come together fairly quickly once I start, the Sea Level video is all being done with animation, which is inevitably a slow, tedious process. At the same time, though, there’s something calming about all the mechanical repetition it involves, and it gives me an opportunity to listen to a lot of music in the background, which is something I don’t usually feel like doing when I’m at home.
We’re also working on a couple of new releases, both of which are trapped in a spiral of interminable delays, but which I’ll hopefully be able to talk more about soon.
Friday, 28 September 2018
People are the weather
While I tend to describe the range of activities I do with Call And Response collectively as “doing music”, obviously I’m not personally making music most of the time. Most of the work with this label is dealing with people, and the extent to which I’m ever able to get anything done is really down to my ability to coax other people in a foreign language into doing things, usually for no money.
After nearly 15 years of putting on events in Tokyo and around Japan, the process is smoother and better-organised than it used to be, but it’s not always like that. These days, most of the vents I’m involved with run on a more or less regular timetable, with the Fashion Crisis DJ parties in Koenji happening on the first Friday of every odd-numbered month when possible, and the Call And Response Indie Disco nights happening in Shimokitazawa Three on the first Monday of every month. The advantage of a regular schedule is that you always know when you’ve got something coming up and you can fall into a rhythm, but the downside is that it’s a fixed deadline constantly bearing down on you.
One of the things I really appreciate about organising music events in Japan is that when someone says they’ll do something, they nearly always will. I remember trying to book some shows for a Japanese band in the UK and one London venue cancelling the event a few days before simply because someone else had offered more money — that would never happen in Japan. Bands, too, are usually pretty reliable about following through on commitments and if a band cancels, it’s usually because of extreme sickness or a family death.
The next Call And Response Indie Disco, which is happening on October 1st at Shimokitazawa Three, wasn’t a smooth process. Partly this is because I got overwhelmed by dealing with new releases and plans for a big event in December. Partly it’s because two of the bands I invited were people I knew would take ages to get back to me with what would probably be a negative answer. Partly it’s because one of the bands I did confirm managed to cancel, then sort of un-cancel, and then cancel again, leaving me desperately floundering around for a replacement with the clock rapidly running out.
In situations like these, you have to be zen about the situation. Bands being unreliable or flaky isn’t something you as an organiser can control, so you have to sort of take a deep breath and repeat to yourself, “People are the weather.” You can recognise the signs and dress appropriately, but you can’t prevent it from raining if that’s what it wants to do. Part of the problem I had with this event is that I didn’t dress appropriately and thus got caught in the downpour.
Another part of the problem is that musicians will usually give you the most polite excuse (work, schedule conflicts, etc.) and never tell you if the real underlying reason is simply, “We’ve judged that your party isn’t high enough status for where we think we should be at this time,” or just, “We can’t be bothered.” I was talking with another event organiser the other week and I remarked to her that if the same artist turns me down three times in a row, I basically won’t invite them a fourth time (at least not for a very long time) and she responded enthusiastically, “Yes, exactly that. I know exactly how you feel.” Another organiser I spoke to last weekend said something similar. On any given day, there might be very good reasons why someone can’t play your show, and second time might be bad luck, but if it’s three times, an artist probably just isn’t serious about the kind of thing you’re offering. If you’re a musician, you should probably know that this is how a lot of organisers think.
On the other hand, if someone is easy and smooth to work with, and treats organisers with respect and without bringing a lot of ego to the table, they’ll get a good reputation that will spread (organisers talk to each other, and we absolutely talk shit on bands who dick us about). After the cancellation for the October 1st show, I was rescued by the fantastic Transkam, who make this kind of groove-centred post-rock with psychedelic layers of delay loops. Joining them will be postpunk duo Demon Altar, who have recently emerged from the ashes of the excellent You Got A Radio, and minimal synth/EBM/industrial artist Soloist Anti Pop Totalization. DJs m87 aka Everywhereman and Yuko Araki from tribal psychedelic trio Kuunatic are joining me spinning tunes, so finally, after all the hassle, it’s shaped up very satisfyingly for me. I’m glad the process isn’t always like this though.
In other label news, the Velvet Ants album Entomological Souvenirs I is now up on the Call And Response online store after a short delay, and we’ll ship it anywhere in the world. The band are playing a release party in Nagoya on October 14th and they’ll be in Tokyo on December 8th for that big show I mentioned earlier, so mark that in your diaries if you’re in the area.
We’ve also got all the tracks in for a very cool new EP that should be out before the end of the year, but I’ll keep that under my hat for a while and make an announcement soon.
After nearly 15 years of putting on events in Tokyo and around Japan, the process is smoother and better-organised than it used to be, but it’s not always like that. These days, most of the vents I’m involved with run on a more or less regular timetable, with the Fashion Crisis DJ parties in Koenji happening on the first Friday of every odd-numbered month when possible, and the Call And Response Indie Disco nights happening in Shimokitazawa Three on the first Monday of every month. The advantage of a regular schedule is that you always know when you’ve got something coming up and you can fall into a rhythm, but the downside is that it’s a fixed deadline constantly bearing down on you.
One of the things I really appreciate about organising music events in Japan is that when someone says they’ll do something, they nearly always will. I remember trying to book some shows for a Japanese band in the UK and one London venue cancelling the event a few days before simply because someone else had offered more money — that would never happen in Japan. Bands, too, are usually pretty reliable about following through on commitments and if a band cancels, it’s usually because of extreme sickness or a family death.
The next Call And Response Indie Disco, which is happening on October 1st at Shimokitazawa Three, wasn’t a smooth process. Partly this is because I got overwhelmed by dealing with new releases and plans for a big event in December. Partly it’s because two of the bands I invited were people I knew would take ages to get back to me with what would probably be a negative answer. Partly it’s because one of the bands I did confirm managed to cancel, then sort of un-cancel, and then cancel again, leaving me desperately floundering around for a replacement with the clock rapidly running out.
In situations like these, you have to be zen about the situation. Bands being unreliable or flaky isn’t something you as an organiser can control, so you have to sort of take a deep breath and repeat to yourself, “People are the weather.” You can recognise the signs and dress appropriately, but you can’t prevent it from raining if that’s what it wants to do. Part of the problem I had with this event is that I didn’t dress appropriately and thus got caught in the downpour.
Another part of the problem is that musicians will usually give you the most polite excuse (work, schedule conflicts, etc.) and never tell you if the real underlying reason is simply, “We’ve judged that your party isn’t high enough status for where we think we should be at this time,” or just, “We can’t be bothered.” I was talking with another event organiser the other week and I remarked to her that if the same artist turns me down three times in a row, I basically won’t invite them a fourth time (at least not for a very long time) and she responded enthusiastically, “Yes, exactly that. I know exactly how you feel.” Another organiser I spoke to last weekend said something similar. On any given day, there might be very good reasons why someone can’t play your show, and second time might be bad luck, but if it’s three times, an artist probably just isn’t serious about the kind of thing you’re offering. If you’re a musician, you should probably know that this is how a lot of organisers think.
On the other hand, if someone is easy and smooth to work with, and treats organisers with respect and without bringing a lot of ego to the table, they’ll get a good reputation that will spread (organisers talk to each other, and we absolutely talk shit on bands who dick us about). After the cancellation for the October 1st show, I was rescued by the fantastic Transkam, who make this kind of groove-centred post-rock with psychedelic layers of delay loops. Joining them will be postpunk duo Demon Altar, who have recently emerged from the ashes of the excellent You Got A Radio, and minimal synth/EBM/industrial artist Soloist Anti Pop Totalization. DJs m87 aka Everywhereman and Yuko Araki from tribal psychedelic trio Kuunatic are joining me spinning tunes, so finally, after all the hassle, it’s shaped up very satisfyingly for me. I’m glad the process isn’t always like this though.
In other label news, the Velvet Ants album Entomological Souvenirs I is now up on the Call And Response online store after a short delay, and we’ll ship it anywhere in the world. The band are playing a release party in Nagoya on October 14th and they’ll be in Tokyo on December 8th for that big show I mentioned earlier, so mark that in your diaries if you’re in the area.
We’ve also got all the tracks in for a very cool new EP that should be out before the end of the year, but I’ll keep that under my hat for a while and make an announcement soon.
Wednesday, 26 September 2018
Sound is a weapon
The Tokyo neighbourhood where a lot of the
Call And Response scene live and where we mostly hang out is Koenji, a few stops
to the west of Shinjuku. It’s got a reputation as a cool area with a lot of
interesting stuff going on, but it suffers from the same problem that cool
areas everywhere have in that it’s an attractive area for property developers
and all the destruction they bring.
On a micro level, my wife and I moved house
last year and already the two beautiful, old houses next door to us have been
torn down and replaced with ugly, anonymous flats. On a far larger scale, the
local authorities are using the issue of access for emergency vehicles as an
excuse to rear a gaping wound through the centre of the town’s north side,
destroying many of the local shops and oddball culture that thrives there.
Needless to say, the form of this development was not decided in cooperation
with residents or local business owners, but builders of luxury condos are
happily eyeing the destruction.
As a result, I joined a small crowd of
local weirdos in a protest march on Sunday, beginning with speeches by local activists
and politicians, plus sympathetic voices from similar local protest movements elsewhere
in Japan and throughout Asia and a star appearance from philosopher/critic
Kojin Karatani. The second stage was a march together with live punk and psychedelic
bands on the back of a truck, jostled and shoved by an extraordinary and highly
excessive turnout of cops.
One friend of mine remarked on how the freaky
fashion and style of most of the protestors wasn’t going to change any straight
folk’s minds about the issue being addressed, but I suspect that’s not the
point. The sound trucks that blast right wing music through Tokyo or the trucks
endlessly repeating politicians’ names at election time aren’t trying to
persuade anyone either. Their only function is to say, “We are here and this is
our turf: notice us.” The kind of music the bands on the truck were playing is
usually banished to soundproofed basements, so hearing it blasting out proudly
through the streets was a powerful experience for many of the people involved.
It was our time to come out of the shadows and remind the world of our
existence, and maybe even power. The massing of cops had the same function: it
was to make a statement of power and control over us and let the neighbourhood
know that they had us outnumbered and outgunned. Towards the end of the march,
as we returned to the staging ground in Koenji Central Park (for Haruki
Murakami fans, that’s the park from 1Q84), the cops took to shouting out their
instructions of “Three in a row, move on!” on mass, like a mantra, attempting
to drown out the chants of the protestors and the band. Sound is a weapon.
The protest organisers, the Shiroto no Ran
collective, pitched the protest partly as a way of protecting the central appeal
of Koenji to foreign visitors, but there were few foreigners involved in the
protest. That’s probably for the best, since people who are visibly (and
therefore voters) really should be the most visible face of the movement.
Still, some of us started plotting things the foreign community in the area
could contribute by way of propaganda or fundraising. I dropped by a local art
space called TKA4 that recently opened up near my house and where a protest
after-party was happening, where I to the owner and some other jubilant
post-protest revellers, and even if we lose, the connections these protests help
forge can in the long term be their most important benefit.
The protest was also pitched very strongly
as a protest against gentrification, and one of the concerns I’ve had over the
years is that the presence of me and people like me here has been in part a
gentrifying one. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why, but perhaps in internationalizing
the area we’ve diluted some of its own weird culture. Hopefully, I’ve been able
to mix it in with enough weird culture of my own, and it remains a guiding
principle that I always try to make sure I contribute at least as much as I
gain from my neighbourhood.
Tuesday, 25 September 2018
A bit of an edge
Last Thursday was a rare day where I was absorbed entirely with music, as I’d been asked to give a series of talks about Japanese music to my friend Matthew’s students at the university where he teaches. My book and some of my articles are used as course texts by his students, and they often engage in interesting ways with the subject. On this occasion, I was talking to three different classes and spent most of the first couple of classes playing videos of old idol music and picking apart things like the costumes, choreography, musical style and fan dynamics to build up a story about how this aspect of pop culture has developed. That said, the first class started at 8AM, so I decided to wake them up by blasting a minute or so (which is to say, basically a full live set) by Osaka noise weirdo Masonna. By the end of the day, I was sick of the idol stuff, so I looped back round to oddball underground and noise material, probably boring the students stupid with my meandering rambling.
One of the topics that came up was the way idols use indie/alternative musicians to give their garbage music a bit of an edge, with a recent example being former Number Girl guitarist and current Toddle main person Hisako Tabuchi, who is all over some new song by BiSH. I’d come across it a few days before when I found my wife listening to it online, and it's fine but didn’t really do anything for me. I just find the whole way the idol scene uses people like Tabuchi kind of parasitical and gimmicky. I wonder what would happen if someone offered a Call And Response act the chance to work with an idol group, and I guess my own position would be that they’re free to do whatever they want, but it’s not something I’d be comfortable with.
A few years ago, it was pretty common for indie organisers and bands to invite idol groups onto the bills of their events, but that seems to happen less often now. One reason for that is that idol groups’ fans don’t really engage with other kinds of music. They’ll come to the show, watch the act they came for, doing their creepy coordinated dancing and chanting, and then go outside to queue up and get photos with the girls. Yeah, the event gets their money, but it’s a relationship that doesn’t leave any positive lasting mark on the indie scene. I can understand why indie musicians collaborate with idols, but I nearly always lose a little bit of respect for them when they do. If you’re going to work with an idol group, just do like Yasutaka Nakata and Perfume, write a great pop song and leave it at that — spare me the bullshit fauxternative trimmings.
After the class, I dashed off to Shindaita to see a terrific trio of bands — DMBQ, Crypt City and Panicsmile. I unexpectedly ran into Kaz from Velvet Ants, who had taken the bus up from Nagoya just for the gig, and since Shinji from DMBQ had recorded the Velvet Ants album, we met up with him afterwards to give him a copy of the CD. Meanwhile, Crypt City bassist Kentaro Nakao (also formerly of Number Girl) was one of the people I interviewed for my book, and this was the first time we’d met since then. Ryotaro from Looprider was there as well, so he, Kentaro and I had a brief chat about the state of the Netflix corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (I’m a snob about idols, but have no shame about comicbook crap — season 2 of Iron Fist was good, so shut up!) I’ve always felt Crypt City are a good example of the kind of thing a band like Looprider could look towards in the sense that they’re doing something vaguely similar in taking metal influences and approaching it with an alt-rock sensibility, and the fact that they’re achieving a certain level of success that usually escapes people in our scene. Just being able to look at someone doing something similar to you, with no obvious creative compromises, and see them escaping the underground ghetto even slightly gives you a bit of hope.
For me, meanwhile, Panicsmile are one of the bands I admire most in Japan. It’s cool, intelligent music with raw, jittery, awkward dynamics. They’ve been around for ages in various incarnations, but they’ve always been interesting and satisfyingly strange, like a postpunk Captain Beefheart. They contributed a song to the Throw Away Your CDs Go Out To A Show compilation Call And Response released last year (sold out from our online store, but there are still a few copies knocking around record shops and among the bands), as well as the Post Flag Wire tribute album we released ten years ago (I keep surprising myself at how long this ridiculous label has been going!) A student attending one of my talks earlier had asked who my favourite Japanese band was and I’d answered, without pause, “Hikashu,” but I could just as easily have said Panicsmile.
One of the topics that came up was the way idols use indie/alternative musicians to give their garbage music a bit of an edge, with a recent example being former Number Girl guitarist and current Toddle main person Hisako Tabuchi, who is all over some new song by BiSH. I’d come across it a few days before when I found my wife listening to it online, and it's fine but didn’t really do anything for me. I just find the whole way the idol scene uses people like Tabuchi kind of parasitical and gimmicky. I wonder what would happen if someone offered a Call And Response act the chance to work with an idol group, and I guess my own position would be that they’re free to do whatever they want, but it’s not something I’d be comfortable with.
A few years ago, it was pretty common for indie organisers and bands to invite idol groups onto the bills of their events, but that seems to happen less often now. One reason for that is that idol groups’ fans don’t really engage with other kinds of music. They’ll come to the show, watch the act they came for, doing their creepy coordinated dancing and chanting, and then go outside to queue up and get photos with the girls. Yeah, the event gets their money, but it’s a relationship that doesn’t leave any positive lasting mark on the indie scene. I can understand why indie musicians collaborate with idols, but I nearly always lose a little bit of respect for them when they do. If you’re going to work with an idol group, just do like Yasutaka Nakata and Perfume, write a great pop song and leave it at that — spare me the bullshit fauxternative trimmings.
After the class, I dashed off to Shindaita to see a terrific trio of bands — DMBQ, Crypt City and Panicsmile. I unexpectedly ran into Kaz from Velvet Ants, who had taken the bus up from Nagoya just for the gig, and since Shinji from DMBQ had recorded the Velvet Ants album, we met up with him afterwards to give him a copy of the CD. Meanwhile, Crypt City bassist Kentaro Nakao (also formerly of Number Girl) was one of the people I interviewed for my book, and this was the first time we’d met since then. Ryotaro from Looprider was there as well, so he, Kentaro and I had a brief chat about the state of the Netflix corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (I’m a snob about idols, but have no shame about comicbook crap — season 2 of Iron Fist was good, so shut up!) I’ve always felt Crypt City are a good example of the kind of thing a band like Looprider could look towards in the sense that they’re doing something vaguely similar in taking metal influences and approaching it with an alt-rock sensibility, and the fact that they’re achieving a certain level of success that usually escapes people in our scene. Just being able to look at someone doing something similar to you, with no obvious creative compromises, and see them escaping the underground ghetto even slightly gives you a bit of hope.
For me, meanwhile, Panicsmile are one of the bands I admire most in Japan. It’s cool, intelligent music with raw, jittery, awkward dynamics. They’ve been around for ages in various incarnations, but they’ve always been interesting and satisfyingly strange, like a postpunk Captain Beefheart. They contributed a song to the Throw Away Your CDs Go Out To A Show compilation Call And Response released last year (sold out from our online store, but there are still a few copies knocking around record shops and among the bands), as well as the Post Flag Wire tribute album we released ten years ago (I keep surprising myself at how long this ridiculous label has been going!) A student attending one of my talks earlier had asked who my favourite Japanese band was and I’d answered, without pause, “Hikashu,” but I could just as easily have said Panicsmile.
Tuesday, 18 September 2018
Getting fresh
Last Saturday saw a couple of CAR bands stepping out live on opposite sides of Tokyo, so I headed out east to Akihabara to see synth-punk trio Jebiotto in the afternoon, who were playing a memorial event to the melodramatic, ultra-glam synth-kayokyoku nonsense of Techma, who died suddenly and unexpectedly a couple of summers ago.
I wasn’t particularly close friends with Techma, although we certainly knew each other, and he had played at one of my events many years ago. Tsuchi, the guitarist from Jebiotto, was a big fan though, and you could tell he was affected by it, so it was nice of the organisers to invite Jebiotto to play the event. Most of the lineup was composed of Techma’s old friends going back 20 years, though. When I started going to Goodman regularly around 10-12 years ago, I was a late arriver to a scene where the network of friends and relationships was already established, so the party was very much about people who are now deeply immersed in middle age wrapping themselves up in memories. Obviously, as a memorial to a dead friend, it was entirely appropriate that a powerful sense of nostalgia hung over the event.
I didn’t stay long though, because over on the other side of town, at the new venue Jam in Nishi-Eifuku, Tropical Death had an event, so I dashed over there as soon as Jebiotto departed the stage.
Actually, Jam isn’t strictly a new venue, since there was an old Jam in Shinjuku that closed down several months ago. The new venue feels like a completely different place with different staff, a different system, a totally different layout, and much bigger. It really just felt like the owners, rehearsal studio chain Rinky Dink Studios, were just leveraging the brand and reputation of the old venue for a completely unrelated venture.
What Tropical Death seem to have been aiming for with their event, entitled “Fresh off the Boat”, was to try to point a way forward, looking for a way of breaking the sense of stalemate that can pervade the Tokyo music scene. They were joined as co-organisers by Fukuoka post-rock band Macmanaman, whose bassist Takeshi Yamamoto also plays guitar in Sea Level, who put out the excellent album Dictionary (Handwritten) through Call And Response in July. The Sea Level release party and the Macmanaman/Tropical Death show last Saturday had a few things in common, in that they both sought to mix electronic and more conventionally “rock” music (sometimes within the same band, as in Paris Death Hilton's explosive electro squalls), and put varying emphasis on DJs as an important part of the overall mix of the event.
Of course “freshness” and “youth” aren’t necessarily the same thing, and I think we ought to be wary of conflating them. Young musicians produce some of the most derivative music out there, and it can take a long time for them to really find their own voices. Still, as we get older, we tend to bring a crowd of our contemporaries with us, and breaking through generational boundaries should be part of keeping a scene lively.
Breaking through national boundaries should as well, so having the excellent Escuri from the Philippines playing, both solo and as part of a session including turntable-noise maestro DJ Memai, and members of progressive rock collective Musqis and Kansai-based art-punk band LLRR, was great. That said, I get a lot of emails from foreign bands asking for my help with their Japan tours, and, while I do listen to everything people send me, my main priority is still finding new local bands I can form a long-lasting relationship with. As a result, most of the overseas requests that land in my inbox fall by the wayside.
With the release of the first Velvet Ants album, Entomological Souvenirs I, tomorrow, I’ve naturally been fretting about that a lot too, sending out emails to record stores, media and suchlike. As I’ve mentioned before, getting taken seriously by record stores is a painful and usually futile struggle, but the only way that situation is going to change is if people actually go to stores and buy the stuff we (and other small labels like us) release. You’re helping keep record stores alive, and you’re also helping keep a vital lifeline open for artists and labels to reach outside their immediate circles of friends or the quid-pro-quo circle of purchases that goes on among musicians themselves.
If you’re in Nagoya, where the Velvet Ants are from, File-Under Records is a great record store and is I think the only place in town carrying the album. In Tokyo, my distributor tells me Disk Union ordered it although I have no information on which specific branches. Hopefully, there will be a couple more outlets soon.
I wasn’t particularly close friends with Techma, although we certainly knew each other, and he had played at one of my events many years ago. Tsuchi, the guitarist from Jebiotto, was a big fan though, and you could tell he was affected by it, so it was nice of the organisers to invite Jebiotto to play the event. Most of the lineup was composed of Techma’s old friends going back 20 years, though. When I started going to Goodman regularly around 10-12 years ago, I was a late arriver to a scene where the network of friends and relationships was already established, so the party was very much about people who are now deeply immersed in middle age wrapping themselves up in memories. Obviously, as a memorial to a dead friend, it was entirely appropriate that a powerful sense of nostalgia hung over the event.
I didn’t stay long though, because over on the other side of town, at the new venue Jam in Nishi-Eifuku, Tropical Death had an event, so I dashed over there as soon as Jebiotto departed the stage.
Actually, Jam isn’t strictly a new venue, since there was an old Jam in Shinjuku that closed down several months ago. The new venue feels like a completely different place with different staff, a different system, a totally different layout, and much bigger. It really just felt like the owners, rehearsal studio chain Rinky Dink Studios, were just leveraging the brand and reputation of the old venue for a completely unrelated venture.
What Tropical Death seem to have been aiming for with their event, entitled “Fresh off the Boat”, was to try to point a way forward, looking for a way of breaking the sense of stalemate that can pervade the Tokyo music scene. They were joined as co-organisers by Fukuoka post-rock band Macmanaman, whose bassist Takeshi Yamamoto also plays guitar in Sea Level, who put out the excellent album Dictionary (Handwritten) through Call And Response in July. The Sea Level release party and the Macmanaman/Tropical Death show last Saturday had a few things in common, in that they both sought to mix electronic and more conventionally “rock” music (sometimes within the same band, as in Paris Death Hilton's explosive electro squalls), and put varying emphasis on DJs as an important part of the overall mix of the event.
Of course “freshness” and “youth” aren’t necessarily the same thing, and I think we ought to be wary of conflating them. Young musicians produce some of the most derivative music out there, and it can take a long time for them to really find their own voices. Still, as we get older, we tend to bring a crowd of our contemporaries with us, and breaking through generational boundaries should be part of keeping a scene lively.
Breaking through national boundaries should as well, so having the excellent Escuri from the Philippines playing, both solo and as part of a session including turntable-noise maestro DJ Memai, and members of progressive rock collective Musqis and Kansai-based art-punk band LLRR, was great. That said, I get a lot of emails from foreign bands asking for my help with their Japan tours, and, while I do listen to everything people send me, my main priority is still finding new local bands I can form a long-lasting relationship with. As a result, most of the overseas requests that land in my inbox fall by the wayside.
With the release of the first Velvet Ants album, Entomological Souvenirs I, tomorrow, I’ve naturally been fretting about that a lot too, sending out emails to record stores, media and suchlike. As I’ve mentioned before, getting taken seriously by record stores is a painful and usually futile struggle, but the only way that situation is going to change is if people actually go to stores and buy the stuff we (and other small labels like us) release. You’re helping keep record stores alive, and you’re also helping keep a vital lifeline open for artists and labels to reach outside their immediate circles of friends or the quid-pro-quo circle of purchases that goes on among musicians themselves.
If you’re in Nagoya, where the Velvet Ants are from, File-Under Records is a great record store and is I think the only place in town carrying the album. In Tokyo, my distributor tells me Disk Union ordered it although I have no information on which specific branches. Hopefully, there will be a couple more outlets soon.
Thursday, 13 September 2018
Insects
After a hectic weekend, it’s been a quiet few days here at Call And Response, with me mostly focusing on writing some articles and making preparations for the new album by Nagoya-based noise-rock band Velvet Ants.
I’ve started using the term “noise-rock” more these days because all the other words people use to describe the kinds of music Call And Response deals in are such a jumble of overlapping terms and hardly anyone really knows what any of them mean. How is postpunk different from no wave? How much overlap is there between post-rock, math rock and post-hardcore? We end up piling on new terms to the point where it becomes incomprehensible. Noise-rock, on the other hand, is at least pretty simple in comparison: it recognisably contains some of the features of rock music, but it has a noisier, more dissonant take on them. All I need to do now is get the rest of the world, or at least Japan, to join me in making all our lives a bit easier and less complicated.
Anyway, the Velvet Ants album is called Entomological Souvenirs I, named after the series of insect studies by French naturalist Jean Henri Fabre. The band developed the six tracks through a series of jam sessions, but as the album came together decided that each track could be seen as expressing the feeling of a different kind of bug. Perhaps feeding into this is the fact that the band have two guitarists but no bassist, which gives their music a spindly edge, tilted towards treble and mid (although plenty heavy when they want to be). I posted a sample track from it on Soundcloud a couple of weeks ago, initially mis-labelling it Centipede before the band noticed that the track was actually Wasp. It covers a good range of the band’s sound anyway, so I think it’s a pretty solid introduction to them.
Since they don’t have a music video yet, I decided to make a short preview or trailer of the album to give people a sense of what’s going on in it and to give the band something to share. Initially, what I thought of doing was downloading clips of the relevant insects and using them to represent the tracks. I did a quick search of “centipede” and just glancing at the first page of results made it pretty clear that anyone even slightly squeamish about terrifying, many-limbed insects, arachnoids and whatevers was going to have a hard time with a fully bug-focused video.
Instead, I decided to take a more oblique approach, digging out clips of machines that to me evoked in some way each track’s patron insect. The final track, Cicada, was the most difficult one for me, because I suspect a lot of people (at least in the UK, where I’m from, don’t really have a clear image of what a cicada looks like. They’re just sort of oval shaped and their main defining feature is the constant, screeching noise they make, so I went with something that looks like it sounds like a cicada, if that makes sense. Anyway, here’s the video:
The current stage of the process with the album is the most depressing one though. With the release next week, I’m currently at the final stage of hassling uninterested record/CD shops to stock my stuff and feeling every unreturned email and rejection as a personal rejection of Call And Response’s whole project. Anyway, that whole process is an ongoing battle and one I don’t have the option of opting out of, being basically the only staff of the label. If I ever quit music, it’ll be record stores who drive me to it though.
On the positive side, the Velvet Ants release party at Nagoya Spazio Rita looks like being an excellent event. I’m planning on taking an overnight trip there to celebrate with them. The fantastic and brutal Jailbird Y are coming from Hiroshima, spindly new wave oddballs Compact Club are heading over from Tokyo, fantastic local Nagoya bands Free City Noise and Noiseconcrete x 3chi5 are also playing, along with Osaka-based Nehan, who are the only band I don’t know in the lineup and am thus very interested in seeing. Meanwhile, the Tokyo show they’re playing in December is shaping up to be epic.
I’ve started using the term “noise-rock” more these days because all the other words people use to describe the kinds of music Call And Response deals in are such a jumble of overlapping terms and hardly anyone really knows what any of them mean. How is postpunk different from no wave? How much overlap is there between post-rock, math rock and post-hardcore? We end up piling on new terms to the point where it becomes incomprehensible. Noise-rock, on the other hand, is at least pretty simple in comparison: it recognisably contains some of the features of rock music, but it has a noisier, more dissonant take on them. All I need to do now is get the rest of the world, or at least Japan, to join me in making all our lives a bit easier and less complicated.
Anyway, the Velvet Ants album is called Entomological Souvenirs I, named after the series of insect studies by French naturalist Jean Henri Fabre. The band developed the six tracks through a series of jam sessions, but as the album came together decided that each track could be seen as expressing the feeling of a different kind of bug. Perhaps feeding into this is the fact that the band have two guitarists but no bassist, which gives their music a spindly edge, tilted towards treble and mid (although plenty heavy when they want to be). I posted a sample track from it on Soundcloud a couple of weeks ago, initially mis-labelling it Centipede before the band noticed that the track was actually Wasp. It covers a good range of the band’s sound anyway, so I think it’s a pretty solid introduction to them.
Since they don’t have a music video yet, I decided to make a short preview or trailer of the album to give people a sense of what’s going on in it and to give the band something to share. Initially, what I thought of doing was downloading clips of the relevant insects and using them to represent the tracks. I did a quick search of “centipede” and just glancing at the first page of results made it pretty clear that anyone even slightly squeamish about terrifying, many-limbed insects, arachnoids and whatevers was going to have a hard time with a fully bug-focused video.
Instead, I decided to take a more oblique approach, digging out clips of machines that to me evoked in some way each track’s patron insect. The final track, Cicada, was the most difficult one for me, because I suspect a lot of people (at least in the UK, where I’m from, don’t really have a clear image of what a cicada looks like. They’re just sort of oval shaped and their main defining feature is the constant, screeching noise they make, so I went with something that looks like it sounds like a cicada, if that makes sense. Anyway, here’s the video:
The current stage of the process with the album is the most depressing one though. With the release next week, I’m currently at the final stage of hassling uninterested record/CD shops to stock my stuff and feeling every unreturned email and rejection as a personal rejection of Call And Response’s whole project. Anyway, that whole process is an ongoing battle and one I don’t have the option of opting out of, being basically the only staff of the label. If I ever quit music, it’ll be record stores who drive me to it though.
On the positive side, the Velvet Ants release party at Nagoya Spazio Rita looks like being an excellent event. I’m planning on taking an overnight trip there to celebrate with them. The fantastic and brutal Jailbird Y are coming from Hiroshima, spindly new wave oddballs Compact Club are heading over from Tokyo, fantastic local Nagoya bands Free City Noise and Noiseconcrete x 3chi5 are also playing, along with Osaka-based Nehan, who are the only band I don’t know in the lineup and am thus very interested in seeing. Meanwhile, the Tokyo show they’re playing in December is shaping up to be epic.
Tuesday, 11 September 2018
The sweet spot
The next big thing on the Call And Response calendar is the event Tropical Death are organising at the new Jam in Nishi-Eifuku. I met up for some yakitori in Koenji with bassist Shingo and guitar/vocal Eugene last week, along with visiting Filipino sound artist Escuri, who’s staying in Yokohama for a couple of months to do a sort of artist residency.
One of the things we talked about was the perennial issue that dogs event organisers: what order to put the acts in. There are often unspoken assumptions that certain bands by virtue of seniority get the sweeter spots, and you risk offending them if you drop them below a newer band on the bill. At the same time, though, if you’ve got bands travelling a long way to play, you don’t want to bury them in a quiet slot.
There’s also audience behaviour to consider. If the event’s an all-nighter, it’ll likely climax somewhere around 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning and then fade out towards the end, but if it’s an evening event, it’ll tend to build to a climax right at the end.
Then there’s the kinds of bands on the bill. At least chez CAR, we try to avoid putting bands who are too similar on back to back. Especially if a band is doing one thing in a particularly intense way, you’ll often want another band to work as a palette cleanser between them and anything else slightly similar.
Finally, you have to consider all the annoying but inevitable requirements bands themselves will drop on you, insisting that you organise the timetable around their job schedules, or members booking other gigs with different bands on the same day and trying to juggle both shows.
Talking to Tropical Death, the bands at their event seemed pretty cool about what times they played, so it was just a case of shuffling the pieces round like Tetris pieces or a tile game until the picture looked right. However the lineup ends up going, it should be a pretty sweet event anyway, with post-rock lunatics Macmanaman coming down from Fukuoka, local electro-punk-noise duo Paris Death Hilton, progressive rock collective Musqis, as well as the man Escuri. A chaotic-looking agglomeration of artists are going to do a jam session as well, which is usually an absolutely horrible idea, but hey, it might be good this time.
The Fashion Crisis event on Friday the 7th was weirdly well attended, partly due to our buddy Comicbook Sean (not to be confused with Sean Drums and Indiepop Sean) celebrating his birthday at the same event. It passed through several party stages, including karaoke with a random weird old guy we picked up in a bar, and ended with me and Julien from Lo-shi flaked out on my sofa, listening to Deserters’ Songs by Mercury Rev and making bold, nonsensical pronouncements about the death of music.
Naturally Saturday was a write-off, while on Sunday my wife and I let some fashionable young musicians use our house as a photo studio (we have a cinema screen and projector, so they were able to do funky things with video projections). Listening to these kids and their promoter buddy talking afterwards was educational and a reminder that even the faintest connection to the music industry proper puts you in contact with a very different world to the basement-dwelling underground scene that’s my normal. They’d casually drop the names of popular record labels or bands whose names are jokes to most of my friends because their world seems so inaccessible. One of them asked me what sort of music I’m into and I said something contrarian like, “In an ideal world, all music would sound like a cross between This Heat and Red Transistor.” They just blinked at me and changed the topic.
There’s a very visible change that happens when music steps into the “music industry” sphere (which includes larger indie labels as well as the majors) and you can see it in the fashion and music videos. You can tell when a band isn’t choosing their own clothes anymore, and often what happens is that suddenly everything in their videos is either in slow motion or shot with all fast cuts with that high-contrast, metallic sheen and maybe a wind machine. It looks like total garbage.
One of the musicians was getting bombarded with offers from record labels and fashion brands but had so far resisted them, preferring to do things themselves, while the other had signed with a large-ish indie. Typically, what musicians who don’t want to fall into the homogenising J-Pop trap aim to do is work with overseas producers and sign with a foreign label — ideally one in the UK or US. It doesn’t always work though, because the bands most enamoured with, for example, British music tend to be the ones who offer the least to a British label that they can’t find from a hundred local bands. Something that conforms to the brightly-coloured, energetic and (sorry) “wacky” Japanese stereotypes that still persist in the west stands a far better chance, as evidenced by how the good but annoying Chai were able to sign with UK label Heavenly recently.
The whole conversation left me a bit dazed though, to be honest. Bands fretting over whether this gig or that gig is the right direction for them, whether such-and-such a band is the right band for them to share a bill with, scheduling out their releases to best manage media interest, planning out their careers like military operations, none of it sounds fun and the deeper involved in the industry an artist gets, the less they look like they’re having fun when you see them play (or if they do, it’s with the glazed smiles of trained salesmen).
All of which sounds quite negative, although these were some cool bands that I’m very fond of. However, as a window into a way of thinking that’s normal for a lot of people, it definitely reminded me of how naive and simplistic the way I and a lot of the artists I work with think is.
One of the things we talked about was the perennial issue that dogs event organisers: what order to put the acts in. There are often unspoken assumptions that certain bands by virtue of seniority get the sweeter spots, and you risk offending them if you drop them below a newer band on the bill. At the same time, though, if you’ve got bands travelling a long way to play, you don’t want to bury them in a quiet slot.
There’s also audience behaviour to consider. If the event’s an all-nighter, it’ll likely climax somewhere around 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning and then fade out towards the end, but if it’s an evening event, it’ll tend to build to a climax right at the end.
Then there’s the kinds of bands on the bill. At least chez CAR, we try to avoid putting bands who are too similar on back to back. Especially if a band is doing one thing in a particularly intense way, you’ll often want another band to work as a palette cleanser between them and anything else slightly similar.
Finally, you have to consider all the annoying but inevitable requirements bands themselves will drop on you, insisting that you organise the timetable around their job schedules, or members booking other gigs with different bands on the same day and trying to juggle both shows.
Talking to Tropical Death, the bands at their event seemed pretty cool about what times they played, so it was just a case of shuffling the pieces round like Tetris pieces or a tile game until the picture looked right. However the lineup ends up going, it should be a pretty sweet event anyway, with post-rock lunatics Macmanaman coming down from Fukuoka, local electro-punk-noise duo Paris Death Hilton, progressive rock collective Musqis, as well as the man Escuri. A chaotic-looking agglomeration of artists are going to do a jam session as well, which is usually an absolutely horrible idea, but hey, it might be good this time.
The Fashion Crisis event on Friday the 7th was weirdly well attended, partly due to our buddy Comicbook Sean (not to be confused with Sean Drums and Indiepop Sean) celebrating his birthday at the same event. It passed through several party stages, including karaoke with a random weird old guy we picked up in a bar, and ended with me and Julien from Lo-shi flaked out on my sofa, listening to Deserters’ Songs by Mercury Rev and making bold, nonsensical pronouncements about the death of music.
Naturally Saturday was a write-off, while on Sunday my wife and I let some fashionable young musicians use our house as a photo studio (we have a cinema screen and projector, so they were able to do funky things with video projections). Listening to these kids and their promoter buddy talking afterwards was educational and a reminder that even the faintest connection to the music industry proper puts you in contact with a very different world to the basement-dwelling underground scene that’s my normal. They’d casually drop the names of popular record labels or bands whose names are jokes to most of my friends because their world seems so inaccessible. One of them asked me what sort of music I’m into and I said something contrarian like, “In an ideal world, all music would sound like a cross between This Heat and Red Transistor.” They just blinked at me and changed the topic.
There’s a very visible change that happens when music steps into the “music industry” sphere (which includes larger indie labels as well as the majors) and you can see it in the fashion and music videos. You can tell when a band isn’t choosing their own clothes anymore, and often what happens is that suddenly everything in their videos is either in slow motion or shot with all fast cuts with that high-contrast, metallic sheen and maybe a wind machine. It looks like total garbage.
One of the musicians was getting bombarded with offers from record labels and fashion brands but had so far resisted them, preferring to do things themselves, while the other had signed with a large-ish indie. Typically, what musicians who don’t want to fall into the homogenising J-Pop trap aim to do is work with overseas producers and sign with a foreign label — ideally one in the UK or US. It doesn’t always work though, because the bands most enamoured with, for example, British music tend to be the ones who offer the least to a British label that they can’t find from a hundred local bands. Something that conforms to the brightly-coloured, energetic and (sorry) “wacky” Japanese stereotypes that still persist in the west stands a far better chance, as evidenced by how the good but annoying Chai were able to sign with UK label Heavenly recently.
The whole conversation left me a bit dazed though, to be honest. Bands fretting over whether this gig or that gig is the right direction for them, whether such-and-such a band is the right band for them to share a bill with, scheduling out their releases to best manage media interest, planning out their careers like military operations, none of it sounds fun and the deeper involved in the industry an artist gets, the less they look like they’re having fun when you see them play (or if they do, it’s with the glazed smiles of trained salesmen).
All of which sounds quite negative, although these were some cool bands that I’m very fond of. However, as a window into a way of thinking that’s normal for a lot of people, it definitely reminded me of how naive and simplistic the way I and a lot of the artists I work with think is.
Wednesday, 5 September 2018
Strasbourg
I was out on the east side of Tokyo again on Monday, meeting up with Julien “Vieux Ralouf” from ambient/post-rock/electronic duo Lo-shi and doing some meandering urban exploration, fuelled by a couple of beers from the convenience store. It took us through the neighbourhoods of Minowa, Uguisudani, Ueno and then finally Akihabara, where there was a show at Club Goodman that evening.
Julien’s co-conspirator in Lo-shi, Eric “Gotal” Fournier moved to Tahiti in July, putting the band in a kind of uncertain place, so ever since then, Julien and I have been recording hours upon hours of synth- and theremin-based “punk-ambient” jams at The Boathouse (my house in Koenji) under the name Citizens Of The Eternal Psychic Strasbourg (just Strasbourg for short). The name is a kind of reflection of the precarious, unmoored state of existence we find ourselves in, firstly as foreigners in a country like Japan, but also more generally as kind of spirits in the immaterial world. Much of what goes on in the Strasbourg sessions is jokes, juxtaposing the pretty-bordering-on-cheesy sonic textures of the music with samples from an eclectic and nonsensical range of sources. At the same time, though, we’ve been watching videos of Iain Sinclair’s discussions of the psychogeography of London and thinking about how that applies to Tokyo — in particular the idea that while each generation has typically left their mark on the fabric of the city, the culture created by the internet age doesn’t carve itself into the physical matter of the city in the same way. Perhaps the two of us, sitting in my living room, making electronic music and stealing samples of old TV shows and adverts off YouTube, are an embodiment of that issue.
Strasbourg itself is a strange city, nominally French but also deeply Germanic, and that dual nature is what attracts us to it. A lot of the work I’ve been involved in recently seems to touch on this sense of being in-yet-not-in, in terms of identity. I did a bunch of interviews with musicians on Call And Response early in 2018 with the idea of synthesising them into a semi-fictional documentary script about the relationship between artist and audience. Whether that comes about is anyone’s guess, but when I was writing the script, it became clear that there was a subsidiary theme of making art while dislocated in some way from the culture in which you’re making it. Bands like Looprider and Tropical Death include musicians who are either Japanese people who have been raised for part of their lives abroad or foreign musicians who have moved to Japan. The members of Lo-shi are both French musicians who moved to Tokyo. I’m another immigrant, of course, and throughout the interviews, it became clear that this sense of being in-yet-out influenced the way many of us use music in order to construct a sense of belonging for ourselves, artificial as that might seem.
The show at Goodman was an interesting lineup, featuring a mutual pal of mine and Julien’s, Marc Lowe — another dislocated foreigner, from the USA via Fukuoka, who was delivering his synth-based, industrial-flecked art-rock dramatics to a Tokyo audience for the first time. There were also excellent sets from noise duo Apocalypto, operatic indie songwriter Mamoru from Nhhmbase, postpunk/post-hardcore agitation from bahAMaba, and theatrical noise from Drugondragon.
The following night I was DJing at a very nice little venue called Varit. in Roppongi. Now Roppongi is one of those places it’s usually pretty difficult to get my friends to come out to, not because it’s a difficult location exactly (although there’s a pretty good general rule that anywhere inside the Yamanote Line rail loop is kind of uncool) but because Roppongi has such a bad reputation for attracting all the worst kinds of people. As I say though, Varit. is a very nice place and I always have a lot of fun DJing there.
I was joined this time by Tsuchi, guitarist from synth-punk trio Jebiotto, and my mate Fidel 500. There wasn’t much of a crowd — even the organiser had to pull a sickie, and a lot of people shied clear in fear of the typhoon that had just destroyed Osaka — but we’ve experienced enough of these ill-attended stormy nights that we know how to make our own fun. I forgot the splitter cable that I usually use to DJ off my iPad (I know DJing vinyl is cooler, but when I can bring 600 albums with me in one little slab of plastic, there’s no comparison) but Tsuchi introduced me to his elaborate-looking DJ controller and it was a lot more fun to use than I was expecting. I took a tour through Nick Lowe, Haruomi Hosono, Throbbing Gristle and ELO, which Tsuchi then blasted into oblivion by opening with a one-two whammy of Bon Jovi followed by more Bon Jovi. Fidel’s set was a hyperactive power blast of indie-rock mega-choons interspersed with weird samples. The other DJs there were pretty eclectic as well, but the best thing was just seeing everyone getting interested in what everyone else was playing, seeing people looking around the room and figuring out how to surprise, trip up and delight the other people there. It was another sparsely attended night, but I think we did a lot with a little.
Julien’s co-conspirator in Lo-shi, Eric “Gotal” Fournier moved to Tahiti in July, putting the band in a kind of uncertain place, so ever since then, Julien and I have been recording hours upon hours of synth- and theremin-based “punk-ambient” jams at The Boathouse (my house in Koenji) under the name Citizens Of The Eternal Psychic Strasbourg (just Strasbourg for short). The name is a kind of reflection of the precarious, unmoored state of existence we find ourselves in, firstly as foreigners in a country like Japan, but also more generally as kind of spirits in the immaterial world. Much of what goes on in the Strasbourg sessions is jokes, juxtaposing the pretty-bordering-on-cheesy sonic textures of the music with samples from an eclectic and nonsensical range of sources. At the same time, though, we’ve been watching videos of Iain Sinclair’s discussions of the psychogeography of London and thinking about how that applies to Tokyo — in particular the idea that while each generation has typically left their mark on the fabric of the city, the culture created by the internet age doesn’t carve itself into the physical matter of the city in the same way. Perhaps the two of us, sitting in my living room, making electronic music and stealing samples of old TV shows and adverts off YouTube, are an embodiment of that issue.
Strasbourg itself is a strange city, nominally French but also deeply Germanic, and that dual nature is what attracts us to it. A lot of the work I’ve been involved in recently seems to touch on this sense of being in-yet-not-in, in terms of identity. I did a bunch of interviews with musicians on Call And Response early in 2018 with the idea of synthesising them into a semi-fictional documentary script about the relationship between artist and audience. Whether that comes about is anyone’s guess, but when I was writing the script, it became clear that there was a subsidiary theme of making art while dislocated in some way from the culture in which you’re making it. Bands like Looprider and Tropical Death include musicians who are either Japanese people who have been raised for part of their lives abroad or foreign musicians who have moved to Japan. The members of Lo-shi are both French musicians who moved to Tokyo. I’m another immigrant, of course, and throughout the interviews, it became clear that this sense of being in-yet-out influenced the way many of us use music in order to construct a sense of belonging for ourselves, artificial as that might seem.
The show at Goodman was an interesting lineup, featuring a mutual pal of mine and Julien’s, Marc Lowe — another dislocated foreigner, from the USA via Fukuoka, who was delivering his synth-based, industrial-flecked art-rock dramatics to a Tokyo audience for the first time. There were also excellent sets from noise duo Apocalypto, operatic indie songwriter Mamoru from Nhhmbase, postpunk/post-hardcore agitation from bahAMaba, and theatrical noise from Drugondragon.
The following night I was DJing at a very nice little venue called Varit. in Roppongi. Now Roppongi is one of those places it’s usually pretty difficult to get my friends to come out to, not because it’s a difficult location exactly (although there’s a pretty good general rule that anywhere inside the Yamanote Line rail loop is kind of uncool) but because Roppongi has such a bad reputation for attracting all the worst kinds of people. As I say though, Varit. is a very nice place and I always have a lot of fun DJing there.
I was joined this time by Tsuchi, guitarist from synth-punk trio Jebiotto, and my mate Fidel 500. There wasn’t much of a crowd — even the organiser had to pull a sickie, and a lot of people shied clear in fear of the typhoon that had just destroyed Osaka — but we’ve experienced enough of these ill-attended stormy nights that we know how to make our own fun. I forgot the splitter cable that I usually use to DJ off my iPad (I know DJing vinyl is cooler, but when I can bring 600 albums with me in one little slab of plastic, there’s no comparison) but Tsuchi introduced me to his elaborate-looking DJ controller and it was a lot more fun to use than I was expecting. I took a tour through Nick Lowe, Haruomi Hosono, Throbbing Gristle and ELO, which Tsuchi then blasted into oblivion by opening with a one-two whammy of Bon Jovi followed by more Bon Jovi. Fidel’s set was a hyperactive power blast of indie-rock mega-choons interspersed with weird samples. The other DJs there were pretty eclectic as well, but the best thing was just seeing everyone getting interested in what everyone else was playing, seeing people looking around the room and figuring out how to surprise, trip up and delight the other people there. It was another sparsely attended night, but I think we did a lot with a little.
Friday, 31 August 2018
Doom
Last night, I met up with Ryotaro from Looprider for Melt-Banana's show with doom monsters Nepenthes at Koiwa Bushbash. It was Ryotaro's first time seeing a show at Bushbash, despite it being possibly Tokyo's most reliably good venue in terms of its booking (and, in a nod to the small but important straight-edge demographic it sometimes caters to, serving really good vegan curry) and he dug it there, adding that it's a shame it's too far away.
This is an issue that comes up a lot in Tokyo, where most of the music scene is clustered around the western edge of the city and well-to-do nearby suburbs -- especially Setagaya and Suginami wards. Ryotaro and I both live out west, so going all the way out to the border with Chiba in the east is a long, uncomfortable train ride, and the trip back late at night is worse. Still, I head out to Bushbash pretty often and love the neighbourhood of Koiwa. I have friends out on the east side of town who sneer at west Tokyo as a superficial jewelry box for hipsters -- hey, I'm sorry we have all cool music, but no need to be a Bitter Betty about it! -- but it's true that east Tokyo has a distinctive atmosphere of its own. Places like Koiwa have an atmosphere that reminds me in some ways of Osaka, with a sort of dusty, seedy film over the place.
Anyway, I think people from west Tokyo should make the effort to go over to Bushbash more often because it puts on fantastic shows like the one last night. I was there really to see Melt-Banana because I wanted to talk to them about a show I'm planning to put on, but Ryotaro was interested in all of the bands. I arrived a bit late because of work, but he said the first band, Solvent Cobalt, were really good. Nepenthes include members of fellow doomsters Church and noise-rock maniacs Kuruucrew and featured all the usual growling vocals and Sabbath riffs you usually expect from doom.
Ryotaro is a major metal guy and we were both pretty impressed with the heavy stuff Nepenthes dropped on us, but he remarked he was starting to feel the limitations of doom and wondered if for the next Looprider album he'd have to pour all the doom tendencies he'd flirted with in the past into it just to purge it from his system and give him a clean slate to move on with the band.
As it stands now, Looprider are coming to terms with their new, slimmed-down lineup as a three-piece after the departure of their bass player. They played at one of Call And Repsonse's bimonthly "Indie Disco" events at Shimokitazawa Three at the beginning of August and rocked hard as a bassless trio. This is maybe becoming a thing at the label at the moment, with our next release being from another bassless trio, Nagoya-based band Velvet Ants, and another bassless trio Jebiotto just having finished recording a song for a split 7-inch with a band from the UK. Maybe that's the gimmick the label needs to really stand out in Tokyo's oversaturated underground music scene.
The two of us are putting music aside today, though, and catching the Tokyo opening night of Ant-Man and the Wasp in Shinjuku. Most people we know range from "too cool to be interested" to "ferociously hostile" to Marvel films and I can't be bothered to defend them, but sometimes you need to drop your indie defences and be completely consumed by some aspect of mainstream culture. The long-term plan for Looprider was always conceived as a sort of parallel with Marvel, with the band putting out a series of albums of apparently different genres, where the themes then assemble, Avengers-style, into one epic album. By this reckoning, My Electric Fantasy was Iron Man, Ascension was The Incredible Hulk, Umi was Captain America and then maybe whatever comes next is Thor.
The next Call And Response-related party is next Friday (September 7th) where our old Fashion Crisis DJ party is continuing its revival at its new location of Koenji SUBstore, with house DJs Ian Martin (me) and James Hadfield, plus guests DJ GIF県 (from Hanazono Distance) and Ponta (from hopi, eupholks) and live guest Musuki Aruvavo Lee. Check out the event's Facebook page here.
Making this blog useful
Since I hardly use this blog anymore, using Twitter, Facebook and the label's main website for all release and event announcements, I figured I ought to at least try to make this blog useful for something. As a result, I've decided to use the blog in the old-fashioned way, as a space for mundane chatter about label activities and people involved in them. Obviously no one really reads blogs like that anymore, so I don't know how long it'll last, but for now at least, some people might appreciate a little behind the scenes peek at life inside a basement-level indie label in Tokyo.
Tuesday, 16 January 2018
Call And Response is the Best Record Label in Japan (proof)
Call And Response releases appeared in a lot of different “Best of 2017” lists. This acknowledgment means a lot to us, so thanks to all of those writers, bloggers and vloggers for listening and to everyone at the label for their work and enthusiasm.
V/A - “Throw Away Your CDs Go Out To A Show” - unranked list of 16
V/A - “Throw Away Your CDs Go Out To A Show” - No.32
V/A - “Throw Away Your CDs Go Out To A Show” - unranked list of 38
P-iPLE - “Do Do Do A Silly Travel By Bicycle Bicycle” - Anndoe’s top 5
V/A - “Throw Away Your CDs Go Out To A Show” - No.20
Frontaal Nacht - The Best Albums of 2017
V/A - “Throw Away Your CDs Go Out To A Show” - No.10
V/A - “Throw Away Your CDs Go Out To A Show” - No.10
Tropical Death - “Modern Maze” - No.7
P-iPLE - “Do Do Do A Silly Travel By Bicycle Bicycle” - No.4
Looprider - “Umi” - No.12
(VIDEO) Zach Reinhardt - Top 20 Japanese Albums of 2017 Part 2 (#10-1)
V/A - “Throw Away Your CDs Go Out To A Show” - No.2
V/A - “Throw Away Your CDs Go Out To A Show” - No.2
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