Dancing After 1AM update...

Call And Response Records' 2012 compilation album Dancing After 1AM should be available at a couple of our favourite Tokyo indie dealerships at the moment. Shibuya DIY store Violet and Claire has taken possession of a few copies, as has Koenji underground record shop Enban.

Neither of them seems to have the album listed on their web site, so online shoppers might have problems with them. Remember, you can still get hold of it from these online outlets:

-Disk Union
-File-Under Records (Nagoya)
-Tower Records
-Amazon Japan
-Bridge inc.

While the Japanese language press in Tokyo have been conspicuously silent about it, the compilation has been picked up by some of the English language media, with largely positive reviews appearing in a handful of sources.

-Tokyo's Coolest Sound
-Metropolis
-Make Believe Melodies (English/Japanese)

Fukuoka-based listings magazine Time Market also ran a feature on the compilation in their print edition:

There are reports coming in of radio airplay and podcast appearances in the UK and US from various outlets, which has also been heartening, if a little frustrating given the lack of distribution overseas and the frozen state of our online store. Contact me on carrecords [at] gmail [dot] com and I'll be happy to arrange something via PayPal.

Fashion Crisis (December 2012)

This is the last Fashion Crisis of 2012, or the official start of the bonenkai season, as it is sometimes known. Joining us are discopop DJ kittens 3TE1, punk princess Nana Oshima, and tireless blogger/whispertronica expert Patrick St. Michel funk distractor Ryan Erik Williams.

Place: Koenji One

Date: 7th December (Fri)

Time: 8:00pm-last train

Cost: FREE

DJs:

- 3TE1

- Patrick St. Michel (Make Believe Melodies)
- Ryan Erik Williams (NEW!)

- Nana Oshima

- James Hadfield

- Ian Martin

Trinitron: Après Garde (CAR-81) -- Now Online!

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.

Trinitron back catalogue free to download

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.

Dancing After 1AM - Kyushu release tour January 2013

One of the notable features of the Dancing After 1AM compilation was that it was well supported by artists from Kyushu, with five bands in total from the westernmost of Japan's main islands contributing tracks. As a result, in January we're bringing the noise and doing a short release tour in Kyushu.

There are three dates, although the lineups are still to be decided:

Call And Response Records: IMMORAL DISCO TOUR!
(Dancing After 1AM compilation release tour)

1/25 (Fri) Kagoshima IFF Studio:
Open 7:30pm / Start 8:00pm
Cost: ¥1000
LIVE: Hysteric Picnic (Tokyo) / Futtachi / Gesui Maru / The Murder Case / Lopitals + more

1/26 (Sat) Kumamoto Navaro (all-night event):
Open 8:00pm / Start 8:30pm
Cost: ¥1800
LIVE: Hysteric Picnic (Tokyo) / The Mornings (Tokyo) / Futtachi (Kagoshima) / cynicalsmileisyourfavorite / Kobayashi Dorori / Hyacca (Fukuoka) / z/nz (Fukuoka) / Ishiatamazizo / Doit Science / Cultos
DJs: TKC (macmanaman) / Ian Martin (Call And Response)

1/27 (Sun) Fukuoka Utero:
Open 5:30pm / Start 6:00pm
Cost ¥1800
LIVE: Hysteric Picnic (Tokyo) / Mir (Tokyo) / Kobayashi Dorori (Kumamoto) / Nakigao Twintail (Saga) / Hyacca / DELTAS / Gunjouiroyue
DJs: TKC (macmanaman) / Ian Martin (Call And Response)

KILL YOUR SEMPAI - Burning Down Koenji One Vol.1 (November 18th 2012)

A technicolor collision of DJs, moving pictures, live music and idiot art in the dark, beating heart of Koenji, Kill Your Sempai! features a parade of synthesized but by no means synthetic urban alienation and barbed songcraft, eclectic DJ eccentrica and cartoon-situationist antipop-art.

Event: KILL YOUR SEMPAI! - Burning Down Koenji One Vol.1
Place: Koenji One
Date: November 18th (Sun)
Time: 7:00pm-last train
LIVE:
- Mir
- Fidel Villeneuve
- Lo-shi
DJs:
- Soh (Hysteric Picnic)
- Ian Martin
- Gotal
- Arbuste
EXHIBITION:
- Vieux Ralouf
- Ian Martin

Praha Depart Europe Tour November/December 2012

Psychedelic postpunks and friends of the label Praha Depart are back in Europe for a tour this month and the beginning of next, this time finally including some dates in their namesake city of Prague as well as their first ever UK shows. Europeans, for God's sake get out and see them!

November:

• 8th: Gromka (Ljubljana, Slovenia)
• 9th: Kino Udarnik (Maribor, Slovenia)
• 11th: TBA/Internet radio (Prague, Czech Republic)
• 12th: Chapeau Rouge (Prague, Czech Republic)
• 13th: Bazina-Klub (Prague, Czech Republic)
• 14th: Knochenbox (Berlin, Germany)
• 18th: De Onderbroek (Nijmegen, Netherlands)
• 22nd: Autonomes Zentrum (Aachen, Germany)
• 23rd:The Bull & Gate (London, UK)
• 24th: TBA
• 25th: Power Lunches  (London, UK)
• 30th: TBA

December:

• 1st: TBA (Crnomelj, Slovenia)
• 2nd: TBA (Ljubljana, Slovenia)