The new year is shaping up to be a hectic one for Call And Response, with a lot of new releases planned, including one to celebrate us reaching the 50-release milestone that in theory will mark the halfway point of the label’s existence. We also have a lot of events and tours lined up. Last weekend, Velvet Ants played a fantastic set at Hiroshima Club Quattro alongside DMBQ at an event organised by the fabulous Jailbird Y. It’s rare that a show will bring a tear to my eye, but seeing them at a big venue like that, holding their own on a bill alongside noise-rock big boys like DMBQ was a moving experience. Velvet Ants have a show at Nagoya Bar Ripple on February 9th and they’re visiting Kanazawa for the first time in April.
Next up, there’s CD-R Store Day at Koenji AMPcafe (and later at Green Apple) on January 20th. This isn’t strictly a Call And Response event, since it’s strictly DIY with no real involvement from labels. The idea is that a bunch of people make a CD-R featuring new or previously unreleased songs or remixes and gather together at a CD market to sell them for ¥500 a piece. I organised a similar event just over a year ago that went very well. This time round the response has been much less enthusiastic from artists, so this is probably the last time I’ll do it. There’s a lot of fun stuff involved and a diverse and interesting array of live performances though, so it’s going to be a lot of fun regardless. You can see info on the event’s Facebook page and on our homepage here. After that, the Call And Response Indie Disco is back and punkishly contorting itself with a lineup featuring our very own noise-punk riot grrrls P-iPLE, experimental punk lunatics neccc and fastcore psychos Telepashits. The party will take place on Monday February 4th at Shimokitazawa Three, 7:30pm open/start. Also in February, our avant-pop friends Miu Mau are visiting Tokyo for a slightly more melodic and restrained show at the always lovely Koenji Green Apple on Saturday February 23rd. They’ll be joined by Come To My Party and Kate Sikora, with hopefully one more act to be confirmed fairly soon. Especially big news, though, is that stadium-synth-punks-in-waiting Jebiotto have a 7-inch vinyl single, “Get Down” coming out very soon. It’s coming out in the UK on February 8th, with copies starting to filter through to Japan soon after that, and will be a split with excellent Leeds-based postpunk band Treeboy & Arc in collaboration with Leeds-based label Come Play With Me.
This release is going to kick off a year of loud, fast, heavy or just plain noisy shit from Call And Response — 2019 is going to be all about taking punk and twisting it into all sorts of fun new shapes as we move into the second half of the label’s planned lifespan as our catalogue numbers count down inexorably towards zero. I’m thinking of a new corporate slogan: “The more of our shit you buy, the faster the label can die.”
As the
drummer with the bands Tropical Death and Looprider, who are themselves
releasing the Modern Maze EP and re-releasing the Ascension
mini-album respectively on Cassette Store Day 2017, Sean McGee is probably Call
And Response Records’ loudest cheerleader for
cassettes. However, while he’s an ensemble player in those other
bands, he is the leader, producer and sole full member of Sharkk, whose second
release, the Be That Way EP, joins his other bands on the Cassette Store
Day release roster this year.
Inhabiting a
sonic and musical territory that will sound instantly familiar to fans of
mostly U.S. turn-of-the-millennium indie rock and pop-punk, Sharkk is a way for
McGee to filter and process many of the influences that shaped him growing up.
Sharkk’s first, self-titled EP was in many ways about McGee
piecing together a story of how he got to where he is now. Meeting up to talk
with him about this new release, it’s interesting how much the past
continues to inform and shape the way he takes his music forward.
IAN: So I
thought this time, we’d go through the album track by track
and you could tell me about what’s going on with each song. The first
song on the album is Firelight.
SEAN: Yeah. So
with FirelightI had a simple punk riff and I felt like I wanted
Eugene [Roussin, Tropical Death guitarist/vocalist] to help out. He came
over and was like, “I really want to put synth on it,”
so we
got my wife’s Microkorg out. It was meant to be a simple pop song and
it kind of is – it reminded us of The Get-up Kids. I didn’t have the
lyrics and so he just said, “Let’s do them
now.” My lyrics are usually more personal, but because of the way
we wrote it, there’s more fiction. It reminds me of
things that happened to me, but it’s not real in the same way. It also
has that Eugene, Tropical Death vibe. I’d like to work with him more, maybe
make a new project. Eugene has a very unselfconscious sense of humour and I
think he sometimes likes the idea of, “It's supposed to be stupid,”
but I
can’t always go as far down that road as him. Sometimes I had
to stop him being too funny.
IAN: I think
Eugene likes to write from the point of view of characters, often taking on
positions he doesn’t agree with in order to satirise
them. What’s this song about?
SEAN: Basically it’s the story
of a kid who finally gets the girl. His parents are divorcing and he hears them
through the wall. I’m like, “Where does
that come from?” Eugene likes to create stories out of the air, out of his
imagination, but I like to speak more from experience. I tell people my lyrics
are fiction, but actually it’s usually just me talking directly.
That’s the difference between me and him: he likes to take on
someone else’s perspective in order to say what he really wants to say,
but I like to mask my own voice when actually it’s really me
talking. This song adds some color to the album though by coming from a
different perspective. My voice sounds less confident I think, because I had to
think about how to sing it because it’s not my story.
IAN: I sometimes
find that I’ll write something and then can’t sing it
because the words just don’t sound right with my voice or my
delivery.
SEAN: That
happened with this song too. I had to change some words because my mouth just
moves in certain ways. I had to change words to a different word with the same
meaning so they flow out of my mouth. I don’t relate to
the lyrics in the same way as with my other songs— my parents
aren’t divorced – but I understand sadness! I
wish I’d sung them sweeter, but I think maybe I sang them too
aggressively because I wanted it to fit in with the rest of the album.
Basically I just got to write a cool little punk track with my friend, which
was nice!
IAN: OK, so the
next song’s Tonight. The lyrics from this one are where the
title of the EP comes from really, isn’t it? It’s
interesting how the phrase “be that way”
changes
its meaning when used out of context like that. I initially read it like, “OK then, be
that way, I don’t care!” while in the song, the meaning
doesn’t sound so confrontational.
SEAN: Right. I
mean, here it’s more defiant perhaps, saying, “Be your way,
fuck everybody else.” I didn’t realise
till later, but the way I use “be that way”
in
this song, it’s more vague than I originally intended. What I was trying
to express is that, for example you have these kids who have a problem –
maybe
they’re depressed, gay, whatever – and they’re having a
hard time because of it. When I sang, “It ain’t so hard to
be that way,” what I wanted it to mean is people say “Why are you
complaining? Why can’t you just be normal.”
And
their response is “It’s not so
wrong to be that way! Being my way isn’t wrong. Why can’t you
understand?”
IAN: Thenext
song, Underground, makes me smile a little because of how much time I’ve spent in
what I guess you could call the “underground”. There’s a lot of
mixed emotions that come with that: there’s pride but at the same time being
underground is in some other ways a mark of failure.
SEAN:
Thematically it follows on from the previous track for me. Although beside the
fact that these lyrics suck, there is a bit of a question of why is it called Underground?
Initially it was a demo title that just stuck.
IAN: It feels
like it’s saying something like how because underground is the very
bottom – like, it’s below the lowest point really –
there’s actually a
strange sense of security in that. Like you can’t fall any
further. You’re on solid ground.
SEAN: What it’s about is
that the singer is mad about stuff. There’s this bitterness toward the
resistance you meet trying to do what you want, but there’s some irony
here. You’re not falling down here in the underground –
like,
what are you trying to prove? I wanted it to come across as positive though. I
wanted it to be a fist-pumping song, but when I think about who’s singing
it, which is me, 32 years old and not really amounting to anything, it’s kind of
ironic too.
IAN: Haha, well
we’ll see about that. The next track is Fuse, and it
kind of shifts the tempo down.
SEAN: From my
perspective, I hear the voice of someone afraid of growing old and being
irrelevant. This song is a feeling I can only recreate in songs. It’s looking
back on a pastsummer love of sorts. The
only way I can write a nice sappy love song that kids can relate to is if I
remember how I felt back then. This song is saying we’re never
going to be able to be together again, so we have to enjoy it while it lasts.
That’s what I like about songwriting, and I’ve talked
about this with my wife, who’s also a songwriter: it’s a way I
can talk about memories, feed off past memories and have it not become
something destructive or unhealthy – because they’re nice
stories that are good to share.
IAN: Sometimes
it feels to me that the nature of rock, pretty much since the 1970s when it
reached its maturity as a genre, is to look back. It’s the
mainstream popular musical form that deals most powerfully with nostalgia. Some
might suggest that makes rock less relevant than dance music or hip hop, but
having a relationship with the past and being able to link that in with how you’re feeling
or what you’re experiencing now seems like a valuable role for pop
culture to play as well.
SEAN: Yeah, that’s why I like
it! Deathcab For Cutie’s new album is really his divorce
album. It’s looking back nostalgically, but it’s really
about now. He’s only going to be able to write that once. I’d have to
divorce [my wife] Madoka to write that album!
IAN: Or get
Eugene to write the lyrics.
SEAN: It’s also my
limitations as a lyricist that I have to have these experiences I can feed off.
I’m not a
poet, not a storyteller; I just do what I can. Talking about lyrics can be so
lame, like, “Look at these great feelings I have!”
but it’s also fun
just trying to put it down and make sense of it. I was watching a cheesy film
with my wife and the girl was saying, “No more secrets, OK?”
and my
wife asks me “Do you have secrets?” I mean, of course I do! Do you
want me to tell you everything? That’s what lyrics are for!
IAN: So the last
song on the album is Hanging On, which is another slower paced song but
much heavier.
SEAN: I don’t think I
could write another song like this. It’s very minimal. I thought about
calling it “Cicada” because they’re born,
they sing their hearts out and then they die – “Is this
really all there is? I don’t want to leave yet.”
It’s about
death and directed at a dying person saying, “I know I’m never
going to see you again, but I don’t want to lose you.”
At the
same time, the dying person is the one who taught the narrator that they need
to hang on. It’s kind of simple. It’s also a nice parallel with the first
EP, because the first one ended with Doe, which is saying “We’ll make it
there somehow,” but this is ending with death and the message is “Hang on.”
IAN: Are there
some themes like that you find yourself returning to again and again?
SEAN: If I could
narrow my songwriting down to three themes, which are on the last EP and this
one and which I’ll continue writing about, I think they’re firstly
these love songs looking back on sweet, naive past romances. Then there’s the
fist-pumping “fuck you” songs, and then there’s death –
the
numbing feeling of “we’re going to
die and this is all we have”. Those are the cheesy things that
really get me going!
IAN: You always
seem to collaborate with a bunch of other people, despite this really being a
solo project. How did the various contributions pan out on Be That Way?
SEAN: Basically I wrote the songs, but Eugene was a part of the process of Firelight. He added keys which changed the vibe. Eugene
wrote his synth and guitar parts. Yoyo [Looprider guitarist/vocalist Ryotaro
“Yoyo” Aoki] played on
the last track, although I kind of directed him in what to play, then he
improvised the noise section at the end. On Underground my friend
Machida wrote one of the guitar parts, and he and Eugene also helped record
Tonight. Panther Lau was part of the process of Fuse, sending demos of his
ideas for parts back and forth. He played guitar and keys. Machida helped on
Fuse as well.
IAN:
Production-wise it’s also a bit of a change from the first
EP.
SEAN: The process
was a bit strange, because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do a DIY album
or a well-recorded pop-punk album. I think it went more the latter way in the
end, and because I was heading in that direction, I listened to a lot of pop-punk,
especially when I was thinking about lyrics and vocal delivery. I was listening
to the song Gone by Pulley a lot when I was trying to make Underground
to try to get some inspiration.
IAN: How about
the overall texture of the sound – the recording and mixing? I
really like the way the music sounds.
SEAN: It was recorded by Graeme Mick, who has also worked on recent Tropical
Death and Looprider releases, and it was mixed by Mike McGovern, who I worked
with before on my split cassette for Cassette Store Day 2016. Carl Saff
mastered it. You
know Epitaph Records? I think their stuff is really nice sounding. I wanted to
be like this. I was talking to Graeme and played him Millencolin’s No
Cigar and he was like, “Yeah, we can totes do this.”
I
think that level was a bit out of my reach really, but Modern Baseball and the
album Holy Ghost was maybe more like something I could get close to.
(We start
listening to the song Wedding Singer)
SEAN: It sounds
organic, like some kids in a room. If you hear overly produced pop-punk, it
sounds terrible, but if you hear well-produced, organic sounding stuff, it
sounds great. I think that’s what I wanted on this album: in a
way to sound like a band, I guess. Be That Way is available from SHARKK directly via Bandcamp or from the Call And Response online store. For more information about SHARKK, there is a Facebook page here.
This interview was carried out on a Sunday evening in October 2016, at Tropical Death Guitarist Eugene Roussin’s apartment in Tokyo. Bassist Shingo Nakagawa, Drummer Sean McGee and guitarist “Tete” are also there, as is Ian from Call And Response Records, who’s doing the interview. The Thunder Island cassette EP had just been released on Cassette Store Day, the band were fresh from a rehearsal and already a few beers ahead of Ian. Barack Obama was still president of the United States of America, and no one seriously believed Donald Trump was going to win the upcoming election for his successor.
[As Ian arrives, Eugene and Shingo are already deep in discussion, trying to agree on an official history of the band]
EUGENE: Our show at (the event) Hot Freaks was the last one with Yoyo (Ryotaro Aoki, now of Looprider) in it, right?
SHINGO: So when did the band start?
IAN: You sound like criminals trying to get your story straight before a court appearance.
[All members go outside to smoke. Ten minutes passes.]
[We start listening to Looprider’s forthcoming album Umi]
IAN: So shall we start by talking shit about your ex-guitarist?
TETE: This is cool.
EUGENE: Shut up, Tete!
TETE: This sounds like Luna Sea.
SHINGO: It was 2014, April, that I met Sean for the first time. Yoyo introduced us and he gave me a card that just said “Sean, Drummer”. Yoyo wanted jam, so that might have been the first time the band started to exist in its earliest stages.
EUGENE: Before that, me and Shingo used to hang out and get wasted and make stupid music. I lived in this party house and we used to just go to the studio and do absolutely nothing.
SEAN: So we decided to jam and Shingo brought in Eugene. We were just jamming, then at the end of the session, Shingo was like, “When are we rehearsing again?” and we were like, “‘Rehearsing’? So are we a band then?” and we sort of followed along.
EUGENE: The first time we really became a band was when we wrote the skeleton for Commence, and there’s a bit of audio in recording we made in the studio where Shingo’s saying, “That’s like tropical death metal!"
SHINGO: At that time, I’d been out of The Mornings for a while and I wanted a real band. We started doing it and we all felt it was cool, that it worked.
IAN: The way you talk about it sounds a bit like describing a sexual encounter.
EUGENE: He just grabbed us by the pussy! I was playing in Human Wife at the time, and our drummer was leaving so I needed a new band. It was pure selfishness.
SEAN: And we started writing songs.
IAN: So how did Tete come into the picture?
SEAN: Yo, Shingo, tell him how you brought him in.
SHINGO: Well, there’s this convenience store in Kunitachi that I always go in to buy booze, and I started to recognise him. He just looked like he was either on drugs or he was a musician.
TETE: I’ve never seen Shingo come into that convenience store sober.
SEAN: He was like, “Are you a guitarist?” and he said “Yeah,” so we recruited him.
EUGENE: The first time I saw him, I thought he wasn’t a real guitarist. I was still looking for someone who’d be a replacement for Yoyo, but it’s actually worked out better and he suits the band.
TETE: You thought I was shitty at first?
SEAN: No, we were just worried!
IAN: So he helped you become yourselves as a band?
SHINGO: It balanced us out.
SEAN: For me, the first thing was that he had to do Yoyo’s part so we could play the songs for the shows. Then, when we started writing new material with Tete, the new material was different but just as good.
EUGENE: Yoyo has a lot of things he wants to do with a band, and he’s already doing that with Looprider. There was a gulf between that and what we would necessarily be able to write now. You Fucking Changed, Man is a very Yoyo song — I love it, but we couldn’t write that now.
SEAN: Tete’s very creative in a different way though.
SHINGO: We talked about a lot of 80s bands like Ippu-do, Strawberry Switchblade, Cocteau Twins…
SEAN: Luna Sea
EUGENE: But at the same time he needs to finish post-hardcore University.
SEAN: But he’s finished his thesis now. He came up with this killer post-hardcore riff in rehearsal today and Eugene graduated him top of his class.
SEAN: But the reason we recorded the EP was because Yoyo was leaving.
SHINGO: We wanted a document to help us pass on to the next stage.
EUGENE: There was also a full year where we did fuck all because we couldn’t find a guitarist.
SEAN: It set a fire.
IAN: And Tete “kept the fire burning”?
EUGENE: EXACTLY!
[We start listening to Fugazi Repeater]
EUGENE: During that period, Shingo freaked out a bit because he felt the band wasn’t serious enough.
SHINGO: Looprider was kicking off so Yoyo was really busy, but I wanted a serious band of my own.
SEAN: We had to organise ourselves and realise it was worth doing, even if it’s not always fun.
EUGENE: When Yoyo left, I lost confidence in our ability to get things going and we lost a lot of momentum.
SHINGO: I was talking about quitting for a while.
EUGENE: So when did you feel we really had something and it was worth continuing?
TETE: At the start, I was doing my own version of the songs, and at some point I felt I needed to just learn the songs properly.
EUGENE: For me, it was when we played Shingo’s wedding and I thought, “We can do this!”
SEAN: For me, it was when we were working on new songs with Tete, and I suddenly thought, “This is great. This kid’s good. We sound different, but we still sound like TD!” Plus we had an EP coming out, and I like it when bands actually do shit and get stuff out. And Eugene’s very sexy.
EUGENE: Who has a very small penis.
IAN: Small hands?
EUGENE: I said penis and I meant penis. But for me, the moment it came together was the second practice with Tete, when he plugged a Strat into a Marshall amp. I’m very small-minded like that.
SEAN: OK, if we’re being honest, I never lost confidence in the band and felt like I wanted to quit, but I did have one day where we were playing Commence and I didn’t like what Tete was doing with the intro, and I thought, “Well, we’ll probably get another guitarist." Then the second rehearsal he nailed it and I thought, “Oh, we’re good!” When we started doing new songs, I was like, “Yeah, now that’s it!”
TETE: With Commence at first I was doing my own thing, but now I’m doing what the original does.
SHINGO: Now I think we’re in a balance.
[Eugene’s girlfriend Anna comes into the room]
EUGENE: Who’s even interested in the minutiae of TD’s history anyway. Even Anna doesn’t care.
ANNA: I already know it!
[Everyone goes outside to smoke. Ten minutes passes.]
IAN: I’ve interviewed Yoyo a couple of times now, with the last two Looprider releases, and it seems his way of handling a band is quite different to yours. With him, the vision seemed to come first, and then he got musicians together to help him realise it. With you guys, it feels like the band comes first, and then then the music sort of emerges organically from that combination of people.
EUGENE: Well, the way we make the music is usually that I’ll come up with riffs. I’ll be like, "Here’s basic idea," but I don’t want to finish it myself, so I bring it in, then you guys take it, work with it, filter it through your own thing, and the result is songs that I’d never have been able to come up with myself.
SEAN: Yeah. That’s what I like about TD.
EUGENE: In my old band, I wrote all the songs myself, and now everything I write myself sounds like that and I hate it. Now, we all work on it and it comes out much better.
SHINGO: With me, a lot of it is that I just don’t like people telling me what to do.
SEAN: It’s not just that, it’s the organic process of all of us working together. EUGENE: There’s no example I can think of where a solo artist was better than the band. The Beatles? Paul’s solo stuff is good, John’s is good, but none of it’s as good. You could say Neil Young, but I Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Deja Vu is better than anything Neil Young’s done solo.
[Long pause]
SHINGO: Bjork? Cornelius?
SEAN: Is that a solo project or is that something else entirely?
EUGENE: I’m taking back my Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young comment then, since Neil Young was never the main thing in that.
SHINGO: Namie Amuro? She’s better than Super Monkeys.
SEAN: Kyosuke Himuro’s better than Boowy! No, just as good. Don’t write he’s better, but he’s just as good.
EUGENE: Morrissey and The Smiths.
IAN: Go stand in the corner. Maybe Julian Cope though. His solo career’s longer, deeper and richer than The Teardrop Explodes, and I think that can add up to something better once you take it as a whole.
EUGENE: Anyway, a band should be about collaboration. You’re not session musicians. If you just want guys who play everything you tell them to, you’re not a band.
SHINGO: That’s why I quit The Mornings. They started making music on a machine and I couldn’t do it.
[Blondie, Parallel Lines comes on]
EUGENE: Can we write a song like this?
IAN: What you’re saying about music needing to be something everyone’s creatively invested in, isn’t that partly a function of the way no one makes any money from playing in a band? Like, why would you do it if you’re not getting some creative satisfaction out of it?
SEAN: Yeah.
EUGENE: I’m not going to even say that. I’m just not going to play in a band where I’ve told them what to play. Because if I trust them, it’s going to be better than if I do it all myself.
SEAN: Totally.
EUGENE: I’m not saying that way’s right or wrong. It’s just that I don’t have that image in my head. I envy people who have that fully-formed image in their head, but I have 25% of the image in my head and I need people to fill it out with their own thing.
IAN: Just to be clear, you’re not talking about Ryotaro, right?
SEAN: We’re not talking about Yoyo! We love Yoyo! I love playing in a band with Yoyo!
SHINGO: Do not write this up as if we’re slagging off Yoyo!
[Everyone goes outside to smoke. Ten minutes passes.]
[Blondie, Picture This comes on]
EUGENE: Can we write a song like this?
IAN: So, Tete, the EP was already recorded when you joined the band. What was your route into it? What was your impression of it? What did you like, or what did it remind you of?
TETE: The first song I heard was the Mir cover, 100nengo (from the compilation album Small Lights - A Tribute to Mir). There was a lot of things going on and a big difference between, say, New Age and Murder in the Streets. They’re not a hardheaded band: they’re open to a lot of different things.
IAN: Was there anything in your own background that you found could help you get into what they do?
TETE: With Murder, I liked that Eugene wasn’t playing guitar: he was playing keytar. I realised that they’re not a pure guitar band. I didn’t want to be in a band that had a very specific kind of music, who wanted a very specific kind of guitarist. The fact they did all kinds of music made me feel, “Oh, I don’t have to be this kind of guitarist.” I felt that had a freedom to have my own voice, free from too much expectation of how I should be as a musician.”
[Blondie, Pretty Baby comes on]
EUGENE: Can we write a song like this?
IAN: You’re saying that a lot.
EUGENE: This is pretty much the ideal band that I would like to be in.
IAN: You changed your name from Tropical Death Metal to just Tropical Death.
EUGENE: So obviously we knew about Eagles of Death Metal at the time, and there was that similarity hanging over us the whole time. Also, all our friends hated it — well you did and Graeme (Graeme Mick, engineer who recorded and mixed Thunder Island) did. It’s not a real band’s name: it sounds like a joke. The catalyst for changing it was the Bataclan attack. The first mail I saw that morning was Graeme who just wrote “Bataclan Death Metal”. Next, there was one from somebody replying to our Craigslist ad for a guitarist saying, “Are you serious?”
SEAN: And I remember at the time, I thought, “Man, I don’t want to end up having to explain this in an interview…" which is what I’m now doing anyway!
EUGENE: The crazy thing is the way the news cycle works, no one would even think that anymore. They’re all about Donald Trump. We’re in the same situation now now: I wrote this song Summer of Sin earlier this year that talks Donald Trump sexually molesting girls, and now it turns out it’s actually true and it sounds like we’re trying to get on that bandwagon. I was actually thinking about Brexit and the whole tribalist thing, and because I’m American my mind naturally turned to Trump.
SHINGO: So are we a political band?
EUGENE: What I like about Black Flag is that they’re also funny though. The lyrics I write aren’t overly political. There are lots of horrible things in the world and I’m not confident that people are going to be able to overcome them. So what do you do when things are depressing? You have fun! But I also want to show the emptiness of that approach to dealing with the world. I don’t want to be overly political — I couldn’t help it with Donald, but there are lots of things in the world — capitalism has become just vultures picking on bones, marketing and the means of manipulating people has become so refined. People don’t give a fuck, they can’t concentrate on anything anymore, and in that context we have all these problems cropping up and being taken advantage of by governments and corporations, and people can’t even comprehend that anymore because of a hundred years of the refinement of this machine. I’m an economics major and I used to think we we could control it, but I think it’s beyond that now. It’s just taking something, using it up and then throwing it away, and that’s all there is now. Even looking at it from a pure economics theory perspective, it’s just opportunism and there’s no externalities built into the model. Tropical Secrets is a jokey song about a bunch of dudes going to Southeast Asia, but at the same time, the point of it is about exploitation of resources in Third World countries, so what’s the most extreme version of that? Selling your people.
SEAN: I’d rather lyrics have meaning than just be about nothing.
EUGENE: I don’t want to make overtly didactic political statements because I’m not doing anything about it — I can’t change anything. I just feel kind of hopeless about a lot of things and that’s my way of expressing it.
IAN: The tape jacket, with a picture of a dude’s crotch with sexy swimming trunks, was that political?
EUGENE: That was Shinya, the designer, who does this thing called “Tough Guy Attack”. One of the first designs he made was a girl in a bikini, but Anna was like, “Why does it have to be a girl? Why can’t it be a dude?” So that was down to her, and her hyper-feminism.
[The Tropical Death EP comes on, starting with Murder in the Streets]
SHINGO: How did we write this?
EUGENE: We were just jamming.
SHINGO: I was really into disco-punk at this time.
SEAN: How did this heavy breakdown happen then?
EUGENE: That was me. I said, “Make it sound like Envy!”
SEAN: Well I fucked that up for you then!
EUGENE: This was round the time Ferguson happened. The lyrics of this song are way over the top though, because I wanted to have a song about a dystopian future that had a keytar in it.
[Commence commences]
EUGENE: I like the way that with this one you guys came up with it and I just came in and added something rather than me taking the lead.
SHINGO: This song is one where if you listen to the original session, it was all there right from the start, but then later we did the octaves.
SEAN: We talked about just being an instrumental band for a while.
SHINGO: I still think that could be cool.
IAN: That’s a terrible idea.
EUGENE: I think the vocals should be there to add another texture.
TETE: I like the mini-shoegazer part in the middle here.
SEAN: It’s a little too fast. We don’t play it this fast when we play live, because I don’t want it to.
IAN: And you’re the drummer so you get to decide how fast everyone plays.
[New Age comes on]
SEAN (to Eugene): This was your song.
SHINGO: It’s Yoyo’s favourite.
EUGENE: I can’t just write a song though, I have to wait for it. I don’t know where it comes from.
SEAN: It sounds really big.
EUGENE: It has to, because it’s called New Age! It’s a straightforward song.
SHINGO: I hardly do anything in this song. I remember an interview with Kim Deal, where she’s saying about musicians who don’t have the confidence to just play something simple and not make it complicated.
IAN: I think this is the song where someone listening to this album thinks, “Oh, this band can write a proper song”.
[You Fucking Changed, Man plays]
[Everyone sits in silence for a while and just listens. Eventually Sean speaks.]
SE: This was the problem child, but it turned out right.
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.
Call And Response is a Tokyo-based independent record label and event organiser, specialising in post-punk, new wave and assorted experimental pop trash.
