Trinitron have finished mixing their latest mini-album, which is available in its entirety to listen to or download for free on Soundcloud.
Trinitron: Après Garde (CAR-81)
Matt Schley took the lovely photo of Kaname that we used in the sleeve, so thanks to him for letting us use it. There are six tracks on this release and it was mostly written and recorded in the usual frantic just-before-Miha-and-Zana-leave-for-Slovenia-again circumstances. That's not an excuse, that's how the group does its best work. Actually it's the only way they do any work. 1. My Boring Feelings This is at its heart one of those typical elitist indie songs lambasting the blandness and meaningless of mainstream pop. In this case the trigger was the way so many Japanese pop songs seem to insist on singing about how great friends are. Now friends are mostly boring and tend to be people we take for granted most of the time, so the lyrics focus on that aspect. Originally it was meant to be a more aggressive, glam rock-influenced track, but we could never quite get that to work (although the rhythm still has that sort of "schaffel beat" swing to it) and it ended up just sounding like us, i.e. something electronic happening and two girls with funny accents talking over it. 2. Music to Watch Boys By This one came out of listening way to much to You Know It's True by Milli Vanilli, so the challenge was taking this pretty definitively late-80s/early-90s beat and bringing the song back into some sort of world at least slightly consistent with our new wave-influenced way of doing things. The spoken word intro was a parody of the way CL from K-Pop quartet 2NE1 always does these really sassy intros to their songs. The lyrics pretty much describe exactly what vocalists Kaname K and Zana C get up to when they're in India or out at festivals and things in Japan, but I thought there was an interesting wrinkle in there in that feminism and orientalism are sort of opposed in the kind of dynamic they're describing. 3. One Great Year in Tsukuba This was an attempt to do a full-on acid house track, plus we'd been listening a lot over the past year to capsule's ridiculous World of Fantasy album, so we sort of challenged ourselves to something that would match it for sheer crassness and idiotic simplicity. The "one great year in Tsukuba" of the title was the year Zana C's sister spent as an exchange student in the Japanese countryside, all of whose stories seemed to begin with people drinking too much and end in someone being sick. 4. Liquidi Liquids This is probably the strangest song on the album, and it was influenced by the mad, stick-it-together-and-see-what-comes-out approach that seems to characterise German new wave band Liaisons Dangereuses' excellent self-titled album. The title is from a sign at Venice Marco Polo Airport and the lyrics are probably the most abstract but also the most political, coming out of some thoughts about Eurozone economics, the rise of nationalism in economic crises and Italian football. It's the combination of something ostensibly silly concealing something quite specific and serious that interested me about it. 5. Kids and Girls It's kind of a tradition for Trinitron albums to have one song that the two girls do as a sort of romantic duet. This one plays out on a TV screen between two pop idols doing a saucy, lesbian-themed photo shoot or music video, ostensibly for the benefit of the male audience, but what they've noticed is that the world inside the TV, with its obsessive fetishising of youth and femininity is the real world, while the audience outside the TV set don't really exist. They're just eyes on stalks, doomed only to watch. It's probably the only song on the album that we approached completely straight, without joking around. We still tried to fuck it up a bit with some noise, a la Orange Zero by Movietone or anything by Japan's excellent Extruders, but we were still honestly trying to make something genuinely eerie and pretty. 6. Aus With the Ausgang This is another NDW-influenced track, and it's a celebration of Tokyo's indie/underground nightlife. There's a classic old mod song that goes, "I'm in with the in crowd..." and you know, we have our little group of weirdos we hang out with but we're definitely not in with any "in crowd", so we figured we must be aus with the ausgang instead. The beat's one of those fierce, driving, DAF style drum and sequencer combos, and the lyrics are a deliberate jumble of images ripped out of context into a sort of chaotic mess that mirrors what my brain often feels like at the end of another long weekend. There are shout-outs to a lot of the live venues and bars we hang out with, especially in Koenji (One, Studio DOM, 20000V, Enban, the UFO Club, Bamii) but also other places (Echo in Shibuya and Ausland in Berlin) and mates' bands or events (Youth is Wasted, Twee Grrrls Club, Zibanchinka). I know it's self-indulgent to talk about this here, but they all deserve credit for being awesome.
A quick note that in advance of the release of idiolectual synthwave collective Trinitron's forthcoming Apres Garde mini-album, all their earlier releases have been made available to download for free from Soundcloud. To be honest, we should have done it earlier, but that's the way these things go sometimes. You can get it all, including the More Real Than News EP, the Subsidence mini-album, and two idol pop covers that were done for Call And Response Valentine's compilation projects. Get it all from the Trinitron Soundcloud page.
We had a going away party at Koenji One last night for Miha (a.k.a. N'toko) and Zana (a.k.a. Kaki), with the Fashion Crisis crew and members of Trinitron on the decks. Kaki did a live guest appearance on N'toko's DJ set, and he then returned the favour on her set later. I played a trashed-up set of bubblegum electro, Japanese technopop and shrieking noise punk that veered between tracks like Perfume's Jenny wa Gokigen Naname and Kyary Pamyu Pamyu's excellentPonponpon, and The Mornings' harsh, blood-and-sweat-drenched cover of The Dead Kennedys'Drug Me. Kaname K also made a rare DJ appearance playing an excellent set that took in Girls Generation, The Strokes, The Go! Team and sadly missed dystopian Tokyo indie-synth
shamblers Mir.
The night also featured the premiere of the rather fine new N'toko music video for Superhuman, which will be appearing on YouTube once final tweaking is complete. It's a fantastic achievement considering the entire thing was made for the cost of a single lightbulb, and director/editor Matt Schley has done a brilliant job recreating the late 70s/early 80s Suicide/DAF look we were shooting for.
And on the subject of Suicide and DAF, the tracks are all laid down for the new EP by Trinitron, the band henceforth known as "the coldwave ABBA". We have five new songs as well as a rather sweet sounding cover version of Edge by Perfume. The as-yet untitled EP will be out once Miha finishes mixing it, and it's already sounding rather fine. Think of it as a cloying, sycophantic love letter in musical form to Mute Records legends Daniel Miller and Vince Clarke. I was a bit worried that we'd taken the Clarke homage a bit far on at least one song, but then I listened to LCD Soundsystem again and was reassured. If you ever feel like you've been too shameless in ripping someone off, just crack open the LCD and you can be reassured that no matter how much you love someone, you don't love them as much as James Murphy loves Bowie, Eno, Kraftwerk and The Fall.
The EP ranges from avant-garde synth-noise to insanely catchy disco-pop via dirty electro EBM and some nice, scuzzy Kraut. We're still not sure whether the Perfume cover will make it onto the EP or whether we'll use it for something else. Miha and Zana are adamant that we include it, but I'm opposed. Lyrics-wise, it's a triumph of willful obscurity, fatuous nonsense and ambiguously worded critiques of pop cultural ephemera over, well, everything else really.
Looking at the Japanese pop charts nowadays, with the ugly, airbrushed tedium of Avex Trax and the waxy creepiness of Johnny's Jimusho, it might seem hard to believe, but for a brief period in the 1970s Japan was home to some of the greatest pop music ever made. With its roots in the 60s Showa Pop scene, the 1970s was dominated by a succession of brilliant female idols, from the ambiguous charm of the glorious Yamaguchi Momoe to the spicy, saucy, and outright sexy Yamamoto Linda.
It wasn't just solo stars though. Before the embarrassment of their early 80s U.S. TV series, Pink Lady were laying waste to the Japanese pop charts of the late 70s using a combination of eye-mounted laser beams and goofy yet insanely catchy pop music, and for a period of five short years the Candies were releasing a string of the most extraordinary pop singles Japan has ever seen.
Back in those days the ideal size for an all-girl pop group was two or three members rather than the absurd idol inflation that came to characterise the industry from the late 80s when Onyanko Club went through more than 50 members in the space of about two years, and now leaves us in the dizzying position of seeing behemoth clone armies like the slick, horrifying AKB48 with their cold, dead, fishlike eyes battle it out with the forthcoming, and frankly terrifying sounding, HRJK96. Where nowadays you need a degree in advanced life-avoidance to memorise the names of every member of an idol group, back in the 70s everybody in Japan could name Ran (the romantic one), Miki (a little bit boyish) and Sue (slightly sentimental). Not only that, but every member of your family, from baby sister who's just learned to speak to grandma who's rapidly going deaf, could sing along to songs like Haru Ichiban and Shochū Omimai Mōshiagemasu.
The 1970s was a strange time in Japanese postwar cultural history. The excesses of left wing radical group the United Red Army culminating in the 1972 Asama-Sansō Incident marked the end of ideological student radicalism in Japan, and the initial airing of Mobile Suit Gundam in 1979 helped kick off the explosion of otaku culture that in many ways replaced the unifying narrative and lifestyle offered by radical politics with a safer, fictional narrative and associated lifestyle among awkward, alienated youth. Into the hole dividing these two social movements came the explosion of 1970s pop culture, filling the ideological void with superficialities, confections, and, most importantly, Candies.
With a career lasting from 1973 to 1978 the Candies could almost have been designed to ford this particular Rubicon on Japan's journey into postmodernity, and their combination of innocent charm, simple yet affecting lyrics, and sweet, sweet melodies was the perfect antidote to the turmoil of the dying days of the student movement. They were also the product of an era before pop culture became the Balkanised mishmash of subcultures that we have today, all hiding in their niches, eyeing each other suspiciously, communicating only to shout over the Web at the aliens in the cave next door. This was an age where pop music was a uniting cultural force, not a divisive one.
The group released 18 singles including the posthumous Tsubasa, although only the farewell hit Hohoemi Gaeshi reached number one in the charts. Nevertheless, every one of them is a stark naked, face-melting classic. A few highlights of the highlights (and I can't express strongly enough, every song is a highlight):
Debut single Anata ni Muchū (above).
Sono Ki ni Sasenaide (above)
Heart no Ace ga Detekonai complete with extended intro (above).
Through my label, Call And Response Records, I've been gradually over the last couple of months collecting a number of cover versions of Candies songs by Japanese underground musicians for release on a limited edition compilation CD/R. The results have been fascinating, with fourteen songs now in, from technopop to garage rock to avant-garde electronic music to guitar pop to noise, reflecting the fractured musical times we live in, but also joined in a fierce appreciation of the frivolous-yet-unifying power of pure pop.
V/A 「Valentine's Candies」 Call And Response Records (CAR-91)
Call And Response is a Tokyo-based independent record label and event organiser, specialising in post-punk, new wave and assorted experimental pop trash.
