Looprider "Umi" Interview

With the release of Umi, Looprider’s third album in less than two years, Ian from Call And Response and Ryotaro from Looprider met up for one of their biannual discussions about music and band life. A single, largely instrumental, 25-minute long song, the album sets itself up as a challenge to the listener, but as some reviewers have already pointed out, it’s a rewarding one.

We start out reading the transcript of an earlier interview with Ryotaro’s former bandmates Tropical Death, laughing at lame attempts by Ian and Tropical Death guitarist/keytarist/vocalist Eugene Roussin to stoke some kind of fake Blur/Oasis-style rivalry between the bands.

IAN: With these interviews, we often seem to have a few musical reference points that we can use to kick off the discussion. Last time, when Ascension came out, you even brought a stack of CDs for me, so what song should I listen to to understand your album this time round?

RYOTARO: From another band?

IAN: Well, obviously. I’ve already heard your band.

RYOTARO: Maybe Mono, or Yes, Close to the Edge…

IAN: OK, Close to the Edge. That’ll keep us going for a while. It’s eighteen minutes long, so you beat it by seven.

RYOTARO: There are other songs on that album though! No, but really the reason Umi was 25 minutes is because in Tokyo, bands always play for 25 minutes. That’s a typical live set, and I wanted to make something we could play as one set.

IAN: It’s interesting that even an album that you worked the studio so hard to make is still tied to the format of a live performance. I’ve always thought that’s the reason the mini-album format dominates in Tokyo indie scene.

RYOTARO: I think that’s a fair assessment. I mean, the 25-minute thing was only partly because of doing it as a live set. I also just thought it was a cool idea. And another thing was if we ever did a one-man show, the encore could be Umi.

IAN: A 25-minute, one-song encore!

RYOTARO: I just thought it would be funny. That’s where most of my ideas start from!

IAN: Close to the Edge has more vocals than Umi as well.

RYOTARO: Yeah, it has maybe three minutes of vocals or something. I knew I wanted to do this kind of record when I started the band though. It’s a natural place I wanted to go to.

IAN: So even at the time of your first album, My Electric Fantasy, you were already thinking this direction?

RYOTARO: I had some of it written. Not all the sections in their current form, but I had the concept.

IAN: You’ve also been pitching it as a kind of semi-concept album

RYOTARO: Yeah, about the sea, the ocean.

IAN: And also the origin of life, right?

RYOTARO: Well the artwork is this long piece, and it starts dark and gets lighter as it goes up, and the album’s the same. It starts chaotic, and then it gets brighter. I described it to the band as like you're rising out of the water, into the sky, and out into space, like the Star Child in 2001: A Space Odyssey. That was kind of an afterthought though — it just seemed that way to me after it had been put together.

IAN: So it wasn’t called Umi from start?

RYOTARO: The first demo I think was called Autumn, because I wrote it in autumn. The first part I wrote was the quiet part after the opening section.

IAN: You guys also don’t have as much glitter as Yes. No spangly cape.

RYOTARO: That might be a way to go.

IAN: I don’t think you can really go there until you’re already playing stadiums.

RYOTARO: It was a really hard album to make, though.

IAN: Why was that?

RYOTARO: We couldn’t learn it as one song, even though it’s supposed to be listened to in that way. It was written in parts and then we learned and practiced it in parts, but it had to seem like one song. Then there was the double drummer thing, plus all these layers of guitars and other instruments we don’t usually use.

IAN: Like what?

RYOTARO: Well, there were bells, keyboards, synths.

IAN: I always thought you didn’t like keyboards.

RYOTARO: Oh, it was a, what would you call it, a "knobby synth”! Not a keyboard synth: a modular synth. We worked with [engineer] Graeme a lot. I really have to talk about how important he was to this album. He’s the guy who’ll do whatever the album needs. Not everyone thinks like that. I remember saying, “If we need the throw a piano from the second floor of his house to make the album sound better he’d probably do it.” He was a good foil and he became really invested in the record, as much as I was, and hopefully we both learned a lot about recording and how to put together something like this. And also just hanging out with him, having coffee and biking around, talking about Werner Herzog, the feeling of all that is on the record — I don’t know if anyone else can hear it, but it's there! We did it in the summer and there are cicadas, so he recorded some of them and if you listen really carefully, you can hear it. It brought a kind of character that I don’t think I would have got if I’d just asked a typical studio guy. It would have been more calculated and cold, I think.

IAN: Alright, so maybe now’s a good time to listen to Umi then. Usually I like to listen to a few other songs for a while before going into the album we’re talking about, but since we’re talking about the recording process.

RYOTARO: You want to wait?

IAN: No, Close to the Edge is as long as eight normal songs anyway. As long as nine songs on your last album.

[Umi comes on the stereo]

IAN: There are some Eno-ish bits near the beginning that remind me of the instrumental tracks from My Electric Fantasy. On that album, because everything was so disparate, so diverse, it was hard to know where they came from, and that’s partly what made that such an interesting album. But here, hearing this helps makes sense of what was happening then — it contextualises it.

RYOTARO: Yeah, I wrote some of this album at the same time. The Boredoms were a big influence in this bit.

IAN: Although you do it with 98 fewer drummers than they did! Was it difficult working the twin-drums thing? When you play parts of Umi live, you do it with Sean on drums and Haruka hitting a floor tom.

RYOTARO: It was designed to work with just Sean, but the other drum is important to add a layer you can’t get with just a floor tom. Visually it’s exciting, seeing two drummers play in sync. I didn’t realise how much of a pain in the ass it would be, but it’s been worth it.

IAN: So the visual impact is also important. That again seems to reflect the way you see a link between the recording and the live rendition of it.

RYOTARO: When I’m writing the music, I like to visualise the band actually playing it, yeah.

IAN: In some ways, I think there’s a disconnect growing between live and recording. They’re consumed so differently, especially with the way so much music is listened to quietly on tinny laptop speakers and crappy Apple earbuds. To make music work like that, musicians and producers seem to have gravitated towards sounds and styles of working that don’t play to the strength of a live environment.

RYOTARO: Yeah, but at the same time, I’m suspicious of the idea that live is the only authentic version of a band. Live and recording exist in parallel.

IAN: Sometimes something that’s interesting on a record can also be interesting live, but there’s still a disconnect in how they’re interesting. Like, in some music, especially pop music, so much of the music happens inside a computer that to make it work as a live thing, a whole kind of theatre abstracted from the music needs to grow up.

RYOTARO: I think rock people tend to be more enamoured with atmosphere, with how it feels, rather than if it’s played well, if it’s catchy or whatever. They enjoy the swagger, that sort of thing.

IAN: The attitude, maybe? Although you don’t see so much “attitude” in the Japanese indie scene.

RYOTARO: I think people are more neurotic. More “brainiac".

IAN: Also, because of ow small the scene is, if you give it all that rock swagger, people just going to think, “You wanker! You were just down here a minute ago, drinking at the same bar!” With Looprider, you’re obviously very enamoured with “rock” as a thing, but I guess you have to walk a line between acknowledging that you exist in this indie world but not downplaying your ambition to rock.

RYOTARO: Yeah. I don’t want it to be arty: I want it to rock. You get what I mean right?

IAN: I noticed you like rock!

RYOTARO: But some people are so shy about liking rock: they don’t want to admit to liking Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones.

IAN: I’m not sure I agree with that. I think I’m the only person I know who actually doesn’t like those bands — certainly in Japan. I wonder if the shyness more in how they don’t let it into their own music.

[Looking at the album covers in his iTunes, Ian notices that the Looprider albums don’t show up in chronological order, and this annoys him.]

IAN: iTunes insisting on listing them alphabetically kind of bugs me. I want to see them in the order they came out.

RYOTARO: Maybe I should make a narrative around it, like in Star Wars where the release order wasn’t the same as the narrative order.

IAN: You often seem to decide the meaning of things you do after having made them.

RYOTARO: It’s interesting though. Lots of people think the girl on the album covers is the same girl. I never really thought about it that way.

IAN: It’s a more interesting reality if they are all the same girl. Now you bring it up, I’m already starting to imagine a richer world by thinking about how she might be the same. It’s interesting how on this album it feels like you can start to hear everything from the previous ones. You talked before about how the fourth was where everything was supposed to come together, but it seems to be happening here already. They already make a trilogy.

[Ashes in the Snow by Mono comes on]

RYOTARO: I’d never thought of it like that. It helps make the band more cohesive though. I’m very committed to the idea of these four people: our next one will be the first album that’s just the four of us — no guests, no elaborate production, just four people in the room, playing. Hopefully that’ll finally bring it all together.

IAN: So who was on this album?

RYOTARO: There was me, Haruka, Sean, the bassist was a different guy from Wookie, who plays with us live, and then there was Kazuya, who’s the drummer from Day And Buffalo and Start of the Day, and then Eugene from Tropical Death.

IAN: Who was talking shit about you in the interview I did with his band!

RYOTARO: He loves me! So what this album has helped to is that it makes it easier for us as a band to see what we’re going for and helps tie everything together. The idea of a guitar band that mixes shoegaze and metal in a Japanese and American context. There are different things on each album, and with just two, the first might seem like us and the second a detour, but by changing again for the third one, it establishes the second as not just a detour.

IAN: It tells people you’re on a journey.

RYOTARO: And it tells people it wasn’t a joke. Also, putting them out in a short timespan was important.

IAN: Yeah, you made three albums in one and a half years. Most bands wait three years between one album and the next.

RYOTARO: I think this is one of the ways you and I are similar: We keep having ideas and want to see them to end. I'll get dispirited and think, "Why am I doing this?” but then I'll see film or something and, “Oh, maybe if I do that!”

IAN: And the same cycle of disappointment continues!

RYOTARO: I’m getting into the habit of putting out stuff quickly. This is more for the band — well, more for me — just to keep it exciting. To me, albums are a record of that time, so why wouldn’t you want to make as many of these records as you can?

IAN: That’s why they call them records.

RYOTARO: Touche! But this really is a record of that time, and of the relationships that have been born and evolved as the band has grown into being a real band. Like, our bassist couldn’t play, which had an impact on the shape the album took. And then there was the drummer Kazuya, who I met through Sachiko, who I worked with on Ascension. It’s the first album Haruka’s on. And also working with [engineer] Graeme and being in Fukiage out in Saitama for a long time. When I listen, I can still smell his house and remember biking around Fukiage. It’s a record of time, with everything in flux, so it’s interesting moment in time. It’s going to be interesting to see how it looks later when hopefully we’ll have albums with the four of us.

IAN: Bands often lose by waiting so long before making their first album. They lose that record of themselves in development — of themselves in flux.

RYOTARO: If someone told me to make this album now, I’d tell them no.

IAN: Pretty sure I told you not to in the first place, but you didn’t listen!

RYOTARO: Another thing is that I just don’t think a lot of bands don’t really consider what the stuff they’re doing will look like 10 or 20 years down the line.

IAN: Maybe they’re more concerned with the immediate problem of, “Is anyone going to actually care enough to buy this now?"

RYOTARO: But when I’m fifty, it’s not going to matter how many records we sold or how many people came to our gig. What’s going to matter is what we made — what we have to show for ourselves. I think that’s what being in a band’s about though.

IAN: What do you mean?

RYOTARO: A band will go through a set of experiences, meet people, go places, and then the band will have an opportunity to preserve that in some form, which is a record usually, and that record will be a catalyst for the next step, which is more experiences, meeting more people. That’s all a band does, so why wouldn’t a band want to keep records as much as they can.

IAN: Lots of bands just stop. They get the record and then, “OK, that’s done. What next?” and they split up.

RYOTARO: Well, that’s their problem.

Looprider "Ascension" interview

With Looprider releasing their second album in less than a year this May, the band's mastermind Ryotaro Aoki and Call And Response Records' Ian Martin got together to talk about this latest phase in Aoki's ongoing musical odyssey. (The interview serves as a follow-up in some ways to the one we did last year around the release of debut album My Electric Fantasy).

You can get the CD from Call And Response's online store here.

IAN: So, less than a year after making My Electric Fantasy, which was a mix of metal, shoegaze and pop, you’re followed it up with a punk record.

RYOTARO: Yeah, or hardcore.

IAN: What’s the difference?

RYOTARO: Basically it’s just faster. My favourite punk band is The Germs, so that’s where a lot of it comes from.

IAN: You’re not fan of The Sex Pistols?

RYOTARO: They’re better than The Ramones — The Ramones were too happy. With The Pistols it all seems like they’re just having a big joke.

IAN: British punk was often like that I think. There’s a lot of cynicism and irony in it.

RYOTARO: What you got with The Germs was really all at face value — there was nothing tongue-in-cheek about it. It feels more… real isn’t the word.

IAN: It approaches you with more of an open heart maybe.

RYOTARO: Anyway, Darby Crash killed himself to make the band famous, but unfortunately at the same time John Lennon died, so no one gave a fuck. And they just couldn’t play music.

IAN: Isn’t that sort of how punk should be?

RYOTARO: Up to a point.

IAN: So when you were making this album, did you feel the need to sort of unlearn a lot of what you know in terms of technique and songwriting?

RYOTARO: We set lots of rules. We had to write the album and record it at the same time — don’t think about what you’re doing, and do everything in no more than three takes. We had to play fast and play loud, and (drummer) Sean couldn’t play any dancey rhythms.

IAN: As soon as you start bringing in dance rhythm, it’s postpunk.

RYOTARO: We recorded it while we were still working on My Electric Fantasy. It was taking so long, and I was getting frustrated, so I wanted to do something really quick. And of course I then ended up tweaking it for a year!

IAN: [Looking at The Germs’ album’s track list] Lexicon Devil — nice title!

RYOTARO: If you listen to the later version of the song, you can really hear that this is where Black Flag came from.



IAN: I can hear a bit of Wire in there too. A bit of 12XU.

RYOTARO: Wire are more sophisticated though.

IAN: Yeah, listening to them back to back you can hear the restraint. Wire are very aware of what they’re doing.

RYOTARO: So The Germs is much more simple and direct. That’s what we wanted to do, but we had to sort of reverse-engineer that.

IAN: You’re doomed to failure then!

RYOTARO: Yeah! But at the same time, this music is fundamental part of my musical roots. When I was first getting into music, the popular music was that pop-punk stuff and the issue of authenticity was a big conversation, it seemed to me. Kids with Anarchy patches saying, “That’s not punk: this is punk.” Sometimes we talk about how maybe there’s no real difference between indie and pop these days — indie just as bad. So I started thinking about authenticity: I wanted to be real, I didn’t want to be called a poser, because that’s the worst thing you can be called as a punk. Anyway, there was a kid in my neighbourhood who had these CD books full of loads of Bad Religion, Dead Kennedys, that sort of thing, and he burned me everything. That’s how I got into “real punk”.

IAN: I had a phase of being into punk, but I sometimes think you should only be really into punk for about six months. After that, if you still like it, sure, that’s OK, but you need to get into something else: you need to take it somewhere.

RYOTARO: At the same time though, a lot of the seeds were planted at that time. This album is a way of recapturing that.

IAN: In a way, My Electric Fantasy was a very meta album: it was almost wilfully inauthentic, adopting different positions, stances and characters in relation to the music scene. After that, this feels a bit like a sort of cleansing experience, just focusing in on one thing and going all-in on that.

RYOTARO: I’m actually worried people will just think I’m taking the piss.

IAN: There’s definitely a precedent for punk not taking itself seriously — that brings us back to The Sex Pistols again, I guess.

RYOTARO: Also since I was starting from a metal-influenced background, there’s the whole thing of punk and metal not getting on. Although I guess grunge made that OK.

IAN: We’ve talked before about Bitch Magnet — they combined influences from punk and metal.

RYOTARO: And they were recorded by Albini, and you can hear that in a lot of his stuff. Here, let’s listen to Minor Threat.

[We start listening to Minor Threat]

RYOTARO: This represents what the music scene should be — at least, what people say it was like. I don’t know if it ever lived up to the legend. The whole DIY ethos we have going here (in Koenji) is similar I think. People with no real career ambition, making tapes, sending them to each other, making zines, organising shows. Ian McKaye made this label, probably sending everything out by hand. It was a small community, which is what I imagined being in a band would be like when I was a kid. They were really young, these guys: maybe not even twenty.



IAN: In Tokyo we kind of have this, but there are so many scenes to choose from that it’s still capitalist in a way: you select a lifestyle and the market decides which is attractive. It’s a marketplace of lifestyle images. It feels like the challenge is more to break down the barriers between scenes.

RYOTARO: Yeah totally. It sounds cheesy, but if people collaborated more, it might change it.

IAN: Punk tends to be like that: it can be very introverted. The sense of community comes in large part from the strict policing of its borders.

RYOTARO: Punk’s supposed to be a place for the rejects though, but Tokyo seems to rejects the rejects.

IAN: So there are all these scenes that catch the rejects from mainstream, but beneath them there need to be even more scenes to catch the rejects of the rejects — like catching falling pachinko balls.

RYOTARO: There are bands who’ve been working the live circuit for years, and you’d think they’d share some space with each other, but they never meet. They’re just trapped in the same circle of people to gradually diminishing returns because they never step outside.

[We start listening to Ascension, and opening track N.E.C.O.]

RYOTARO: We’ve been talking about punk, but the first track’s actually noise. I’d been wanting to do stuff like this for a long time but never wanted to be in the situation where this was the only thing I do.

IAN: This is what Hell sounds like.

RYOTARO: Can I put that on the obi strip? “This is what Hell sounds like…”

IAN: “…Ian Martin , Call And Response Records”

RYOTARO: Sachiko from Umez is on this track. Doing this and the last album, I was definitely inspired by Umez a lot.

IAN: That’s what was so amazing about Umez really: you had to make two albums to cover the ground they’d cover in one song. I’m sad they’re gone, because no one does that combination of elements now. Until your 4th album at least.

[Fantômas comes on]



IAN: What’s this song about, then?

RYOTARO: None of them are about anything.

IAN: I want to start asking young punk bands this. I think indiepop is losing its momentum and there seem to be more young people making loud, aggressive music now, so I want to ask them, “OK, what are you angry about?” and see how they answer. That’s typical of me maybe: finally people are doing what I like and instantly I’m suspicious of their motives for doing so! “This shit has been uncool for so long: I don’t believe you mean it!”

RYOTARO: Considering how little time we took, I’m surprised at how good it sounds.

 

IAN: There’s metal in there for sure. It goes back to what we were saying earlier about how metal and punk converged a bit in the late ‘80s.

RYOTARO: You can hear the metal comes in more with each successive track, and you can hear how, as the album goes along, we’re thinking more about it. I noticed it as it was happening and I had to cut it off because we were breaking the rule: thinking too much.

IAN: So you had to make a conscious decision to stop thinking. That’s ironic!

RYOTARO: You can hear the songs getting longer now. The title track really is kind of a metal song, eh? I never thought of it like that.

IAN: It’s punk evolving into metal before your eyes over the course of twenty minutes.

[Closing track 667 comes on — seven minutes of harsh noise]

RYOTARO: And then it turns back into noise again at the end. It’s interesting the way we had to think about not thinking.

IAN: It’s like I said earlier about unlearning what you know and how that’s doomed to failure. But even if it’s doomed, the way you fail is what leads you to where you end up.

RYOTARO: It’s the process — right! You called it “cleansing”, but it’s also an important part of my music life that I had to get out. None of the bands I was in before would have let me do My Electric Fantasy and Ascension in a row like this.

IAN: Will this one keep letting you?

RYOTARO: They’re already signed up to do the next one! They’re like movie stars: I have to sign them up for each new release!

IAN: One day you’ll deliver them an acid skiffle album and they’ll be like, “No way: you crossed the line Aoki!”

RYOTARO: It was only me, Sean and Sachiko on this album, and only me on 667.

IAN: Yeah, there’s clearly no Sean here, unless you’re cutting his spine with a chainsaw.

RYOTARO: I made a noise album when I was eighteen: it was really bad.

IAN: You just heard Merzbow and thought, “I’ll do that!”?

RYOTARO: Kind of. It’s a common criticism that “Noise is easy: I could do that!” so I tried and I couldn’t. Merzbow layers a lot and probably does lots of mixing and mastering too, so when I was eighteen it was a jokey, “Oh, I’ll make a noise music thing,” but by the time I’d finished it was like, “Oh, it’s really hard to make it sound… like Merzbow”. So that’s when I stopped making fun of noise musicians.

IAN: After your show with Sachiko last night (as a noise improv duo) you said it was more difficult than you’d expected. Is the challenge different between recorded and live noise?

RYOTARO: With recordings, you can tweak and edit until it’s just how want it. When you’re in the moment, it’s much harder to take it where you want it to go.

IAN: Like trying to wrangle uncontrollable beast.

RYOTARO: It took a lot more focus than I thought it would.

IAN: I guess you have to listen in very subtle ways to pick up on the direction the sound is going.

RYOTARO: And you really have to know what you’re doing, despite fact it might seem like you’re just making it up as you go along. With Ascension, though, I didn’t want to come over po-faced but I was also worried it wouldn’t be cool enough. I think this is a cool album — maybe not The Wire cool, but still cool. I wanted to be fun though — I mean, the first track is a woman screaming “Neko” for five minutes: that’s at least silly.

IAN: Punk should be fun. I mean, it is basically pop music, at least in terms of the effect it works on the audience.

[We start listening to Struggle For Pride’s You Bark We Bite with its intro by Kahimi Karie]

RYOTARO: I wishi Kahimi Karie would be on my album.



IAN: It can’t be that hard to get a woman to talk like this. I always felt Struggle for Pride sounds like a fascist band name though. Are they fascists?

RYOTARO: I don’t think so. There’s nothing about it on their web site!

IAN: So at least if they are fascists, they’re ashamed of it. I guess that’s something.

RYOTARO: I heard this shortly after entering university. A guy I was friends with because first time we met he was wearing a Germs t-shirt recommended it to me. I’d never heard anything like this before.

IAN: I remember seeing them at Daikanyama Unit. You could hear it three floors up, and by the time you got inside the hall, it was just a wall of sounds all smooshed together and three hundred people going completely insane in front of the stage. There’s something very pure about it, but I think that’s partly what makes me think it feels fascist: that fetishisation of purity is quite a fascist thing.

RYOTARO: For me, the important question is about authenticity. Ascension is in a weird place in that it expresses my roots, but I had to reverse engineer myself into achieving it. It’s supposed to be a stream of consciousness thing, but can it ever really be that if you’re forcing yourself to? Punk was a reaction against the excesses of ‘70s rock, but think about it: it’s bands saying, “We’re not going to play our instruments properly on purpose.” If it was a conscious reaction to something that already existed, how pure could it ever have really been?

IAN: So what you’re doing to yourself, reverse-engineering your musical consciousness, is what the music scene did as a neurotic whole in punk. Like when The Clash sang, “No Elvis, Beatles or The Rolling Stones” — it’s a conscious manifesto to make yourself unlearn music history.

RYOTARO: So it comes back to this idea of cleansing.

IAN: Julian Cope writes in his autobiography about how Richard Hell described his song Blank Generation as being about “fill in the blank” but then when he named his band The Voidoids, Cope felt he’d sold out to this cult of meaninglessness. Cope was a postpunk musician and he felt this cleansing process of wiping the slate clean was in order to build something new. If you stay punk, you’re being wilfully dumb.

RYOTARO: The title Ascension is kind of about that. It’s about building to the next level — the album art also based on that same idea.

IAN: It’s an interesting image: like a depiction of the human ego dissolving.

RYOTARO: Yeah, but at the same time, the artist Nasutakeo, she said that’s how she draws when she doesn’t think and just draws.