Our favourite releases of 2020

2020 is over, and it was a strange year for us here at Call And Response. We’ve always relied so much on the live music scene as a place to build a community, and while some gigs were able to take place, we were mostly left to distribute and enjoy music from the dull safety of home. With that in mind, we asked some of the artists from the label to send us their personal favourite 2020 releases, together with a short comment.

I’ve added Bandcamp links where they exist. Where they don’t, you can generally find them on Spotify if that's your thing, or dig out the physical release if it's available near you.

BIG.O (illMilliliter)

2020年は総じて意気消沈気味だったので、歌と言葉の強いロックバンドに鼓舞される事が多かったなと言うことで個人的な2選。

In 2020, I was mostly pretty depressed and what inspired me was mostly rock bands with strong songwriting and lyrics, so I made two personal choices.

SuiseiNoboAz - 3020

こんな世の中にあって真っ直ぐに未来を歌っていて、それがこんなに様になるバンドというのも中々いないんじゃないでしょうか。"それから"という曲の「この希望には必ずパート2があるぜ」というフレーズの力強さに随分助けられました。

I don’t think there are many bands in this world that can sing about the future as honestly and purely as this. The power of the phrase "There is always part 2 in this hope" in the song “Sore kara” helped me a lot.

Discharmingman - POLE & AURORA

これだけキャリアのある人がこんな衝動剥き出しのアルバム作ってくれたというだけで2020年という年にも意味があったなと思えるくらい。バンドって良いぜ。俺もやるぜ、とそういう気持ちになれました。ありがとうございます。

One of the few things that gave 2020 some meaning was that someone with such a career made such an album with this sense of raw motivation. Good band. It made me want toi do this too. Thank you very much.

JON (illMilliliter)

SHINER - Schadenfreude

19年振りに新譜って、それだけ長い時間が経過したにも関わらず今も変わらず当時の衝撃を受けることが出来る。心掻き毟られるよう。

OGNX (illMilliliter)

サブスクで音楽聴くようになって、国外作品は殆ど古いのしか聴いてないことに気づき反省しています。

As I started listening to music on subscription services, I realized that I was only listening to foreign music and nearly all old stuff, which I kind of regret.

WONK - Rollin'

無機質なトラック上に突然出てくる有機的なギターソロがカッコよくて、これはコピーしたいと久々に思った（してない）

The organic guitar solo suddenly appearing on an inorganic track was cool, and for the first time in years I got the feeling of wanting to do a cover version (I didn’t do it).

GROUNDCOVER. - ib/ack/tom/ars

全編リモートで制作し、そのまま配信のみでリリースされた意欲作。複雑なクロスリズムの本楽曲を必死で再現している様は最近のライブの見どころの一つ。

An ambitious work that was produced remotely and released as it is. One of the highlights of recent live performances is the frantic reproduction of this complex cross-rhythmical song.

SuiseiNoboAz - 3020

作品の内容にコロナ禍の状況が後追いでマッチした、東京インディーズバンドの鬼滅の刃。1000年単位で歌を歌えるのはハイロウズとボアズだけ。

The Demon Slayer of Tokyo indie bands, in a year when the corona catastrophe caught up with the content of their work. Only the High-Lows and Suiseinoboaz can sing in terms of 1000 years like this.

Oonishi Kazumasa (TG.Atlas)

BAMBARA - Stray

今年は家でこればっかし聞いてました。アルバム通して湿度が高くて好き

I listened to this a lot at home this year. I like the sense of humidity that runs through it. 

ICEAGE - lockdown blues

ラストひと展開ゾワゾワする

買うと国境なき医師団に寄付されるそうです

The last movement in this made the hairs on my arm stand on end. If you buy this, they will donate the money to Doctors Without Borders.

Sato Motoi (TG.Atlas)

Trash Talk - Squalor

熱くて格好良くて押しのバランスも最高の8分

Eight minutes of hot and cool with a fantastic balance of tension.

Thurston Moore - By the Fire

新しいことは何も無い、Sonic Youthのニューアルバム

There’s nothing new here. It’s a new Sonic Youth album.

METZ - Atlas Vending

聞くほど脳に残り、残り始めたらもっと欲しくなるやつ

The more you listen, the more it sticks in your brain, and once it sticks, you just want more.

Sean (Tropical Death, Sharkk)

Alchemist, Boldy James - The Price Of Tea In China

This is not a very good album. This is a very, very good album.

Killah Priest - Rocket to Nebula

Pairs well with a bottle of gin and a serviceable couch.

Sa-Roc - The Sharecropper’s Daughter

Every now and then there is an artist that you really enjoy listening to. I enjoy listening to this artist.

Shingo (Tropical Death)

Sam Gendel - Satin Doll

高級ホテルのラウンジでコーヒーを飲みながら聴きたいスモーキーでムーディな一枚。今年聴いた中で1番スムーズでジャジーなエレクトロニカアルバムです。近年盛りあがっているニューエイジ、オブスキュア感も程よく含まれていて、室内でリラックスしたい人に超オススメ！

A smoky and moody piece that you want to listen to while drinking coffee in the lounge of a luxury hotel. This is the smoothest, most jazzy electronica album I heard this year. It also has a new age and obscure feeling that has been gaining momentum in recent years — highly recommended for people who want to relax indoors!

Thiago Nassif - Mente

リオデジャネイロ出身の新世代変態ギターリスト・コンポーザーによるボサノバニューウェーブアルバム。アートリンゼイがプロデューサーとして参加との記載があり、気になってジャケ買いしたら大当たりでした！ノーニューヨークのD.N.Aを受け継ぎながら、トロピカリア、ミュータントディスコ感もありブラジルという土地柄の陽気な感じか出ていて最高な一枚！最先端のワールドミュージックをご堪能あれ。

A bossa nova new wave album by a new generation metamorphosis guitarist composer from Rio de Janeiro. I saw a statement that Arto Lindsay would participate as a producer, which made me curious curious enough to buy it just from the jacket and it was a big hit! While inheriting the DNA of No New York, there is also a feeling of tropicalia and mutant disco, and the cheerful feeling of Brazil is the best piece! Enjoy cutting-edge world music.

Bananagun - The True Story of Bananagun

脱力系オルタナトロピカリアバンド、バナナガンのニューアルバム。1曲目からキラーチューン。ゆるゆるでトリッピーで何度も聴きたくなる。ワウペダルを使うバンドっていつもダサいとずっと思っていたけど、これはあり！こんなバンドやったら楽しそう。シルバーアップルズとかムタンチス等のサイケバンド好きにおすすめ。

The new album by Banana Gun, an easygoing alternative tropicalia band. It’s all killer tunes from the first song. Loose and trippy, I want to listen to it over and over again. I've always thought that bands that use wah pedals suck, but then this comes along! I think it would be really fun to do a band like this. Recommended for lovers of psychedelic bands like Silver Apples and Os Mutantes.

Eugene (Tropical Death)

Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Like a Call and Response Quarantine 2020 album, except made by someone with talent. 






Coriky - Coriky

I’ve often thought “What is the natural maturation process for aging post-hardcore musicians,” and, as with most genres, the answer is “make it jazzier.” This might not be one of the best albums of the year, but for the last time will you stay off my lawn you fucking kids?

Haruka (Looprider)

LINKIN PARK - Hybrid Theory: 20th Anniversary Edition

LINKINPARKが好きなので

Because I like LINKIN PARK.

藤井風 /Fujii Kaze - へでもねーよ / Hedemo Ne-Yo

実はほんとについ最近知って聴きはじめたんだけど天才すぎて衝撃だった。アルバムももちろん良かった。多才。

I only just found out about him recently, but I was shocked at how much of a genius he is. His album was great too. Very multi-talented.

Deftones - Ohms

とにかく聴きまくった。deftonesあんまりハマったことなかったけどこれは聴いた瞬間やられた。ギターのリフもグッとくるのが多いけどとにかくリズムが最高。そしてドラムのサウンドが美しい。下半期こればかり聴いてた。

I listened to this album a lot. I was never really super into Deftones but this drew me in as soon as it started. The riffs are great but the rhythms are amazing. The drum sounds are beautiful. I listened to this all throughout the second half of the year.

Ryo7 (Looprider)

Mark Jenkin - Bait

I love it when directors make their own film soundtracks and this drone/ambient album is a damn fine accompaniment to a damn fine film. Serene soundscapes are interrupted with an overwhelming sense of dread - something bad is going to happen; it’s just a question of when.

Bob Dylan - Rough and Rowdy Ways

Yeah, a bit of a cliche to think that every Dylan album is some sort of messianic scribe, but seriously, this period of Dylan’s output will be studied just as much as Johnny Cash’s last few albums were once he’s left us.

Third Man Records - Southeast of Saturn

A compilation?! That can’t be on a top album list, surely? Well, yes it bloody well can be. TMR’s collection of shoegazer/dreampop lost heroes, fronted by one of the best bands who ever walked the planet, Majesty Crush, shines a spotlight on some truly unknown aural pioneers. Fun fact: Majesty Crush once supported Curve and the Verve in their shoegaze days and I cannot think of a better reason to try to build a time machine that to see that gig.

Ryotaro (Looprider)

Anna von Hausswolff - All Thoughts Fly

For whatever reason, this was the album I kept coming back to in 2020. Entirely instrumental featuring just pipe organ, the sonics and drones on this album are at times lush and beautiful, and then sometimes feel like you are peering into the voids of death itself.

Ai Aso - The Faintest Hint

An appealing part about Ai Aso’s music is the space she creates. When watching her perform, she never brings that chord or vocal line in exactly when you expect it to. Stripped down to the core but never feeling bare, the lack of sounds is what’s carefully constructed here.

Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full

The combination of the funeral/sludge doom of Thou with the ethereal vocals and melodies of Emma Ruth Rundle is perfect here. The behemoth riffs blanket the haunting but beautiful songwriting in a fuzzy haze that just works.

Onuki Makoto (Sea Level)

石原洋 / Ishihara You - formula 

ALSO: Oscar Jerome - Breathe Deep | Blank Banshee - Gaia | Anthony Moore - out (re-issue) | John Carroll Kirby - conflict | Sam Gendel - DRM | Frankie Reyes - originalitos (re-issue) | Villaelvin - headroof | Jeff Parker - suite for max brown | G.I.S.M. - detestation (re-issue)

石原洋がダントツ後は気分的な物でした。

The Ishihara You album was by far the top one, and I picked the rest based on how I was feeling in the moment.

Yamamoto Takeshi (Sea Level)

Sam Prekop - Comma

Sam Gendel - DRM

Sam Wilkes - Live on The Green

Chihei Hatakeyama - Autumn Breeze

John Carroll Kirby - Conflict

ニューエイジやアンビエントなどの余白がありイメージを想起させるような音楽がフィットする一年でした！

It was a year suited to music like new age and ambient, that bring an image of space in the margins!

Soejima Takuma (Sea Level)

Amaarae - The Angel You Don’t Know

ポップでアフリカン。今年一番聞いていて気持ちいいアルバムでした

Pop and African — this album was the most comfortable liste for me this year.

anndoe (jailbird Y)

neccc - yabatopia

ようこそ ヤバトピアへ の一言でぶっ飛ばされる尊さ溢れる一作 ブッとびました

2020年ブチギマりで賞 受賞

ヤバさとPOPさがヤバトピアの扉を開く、、

満州候補者ectで活動する mori、yocoscumらによるカラフルな犯罪的音響記録。ゲスト共犯陣もカラフル。

Welcome to Yabatopia, a precious work that will blow you away in one word! This takes the award for most fucked-up high of 2020! “Yaba” (“dangerous”/“super”) and POP open the door of Yabatopia:

Colorful and criminal acoustic recording by Mori, Yocoscum and others who are active in the band Manchurian Candidate ect. — The guest accomplices also make a colourful contribution. It was released on cassette by Soloist Anti Pop Totalization’s Instant Tunes label.

ANISAKIS - 大いなる

ユニークなのに刺してくる歌詞と曲の合い方がすごい 世界観が完成されている…

めっちゃ素晴らしい作品 泣きそうになる。LPもしっかりした作りだし。後世に残る作品だなって思いました。ライブもめちゃかっこよかったです

There’s a complete worldview here in how the unique lyrics and the the songs are all tied up together. Very nice work; I almost cried. The LP is also very well made. I thought this is a work that will stand the test of time. They were really cool live too.

OOPS - out of pictures

Voの等身大な歌とオルタナティブなハードコアサウンドがカッコよすぎました。ライブもめちゃかっこよかったです 泣きました。新譜ももうすぐ出るみたい めちゃくちゃに楽しみ 生き様を感じるバンドだなって思います

The vocalist’s life-sized songs and alternative hardcore sound were too cool. Their live performance was also really cool - I cried! It feels like they’ll have a new album coming out soon.

tentative four - tentative four

ドープ…！！！！！！！！

宇多田のスクリューで幕を開けたかと思いきや冷たい音色のネガティヴポストパンクハードコアサウンズがはじまった時はマジでビビりました すごい世界観 刺しまくりです。

ロウなトラップやエクスペリメンタルノイズ(?)インダストリアル的(?)なリミックスもおり混ぜてもうやりたい放題で最高！Z世代感じる！！！Voのタキシタ君はBushBashで定期にパーティーオーガナイズをしています！広島でライブやりたがってくれているので何とかしたい…！

This is doooope!!!!!

I thought the curtain was rising with a screwed Utada, but when the negative post-punk hardcore sounds with a cold tone kicked in, I was really freaked out. It was an amazing feling of being stabbed with this band’s worldview.

There’s low traps, experimental noise, industrial, remixes, so you can mix them as much as you want! I git a real feeling of Generation Z!!! Vocalist Takishita regularly organizes parties at Koiwa BushBash and he wants to do a live show in Hiroshima, so I want to do something about that!

YOCOSCUM - Last Month's Music

necccにも参加しているYOCOSCUM君のソロ音源。Aaron Dillowayばりのノイズエレクトロニックサウンドを奏でながら自由奔放に己のチャントをシンギングしてて最高だなって思いました！かっこいいです！魂は自由！って思った。すごい世界を描いてると思う

This is a solo release by YOCOSCUM, who’s also in neccc. I love how he sings these chants so freely while playing this Aaron Dilloway-esque noise electronic sound! I thought “The soul is free!” creating an amazing world with sound.

Saeki (jailbird Y)

SACOYANS - Yomosue

染みます。

This touched me deeply.

Tagesu (jailbird Y)

Meridian Brothers - Cumbia Siglo XXI

Los piranas, Frente Cumbiero 等でも活躍するコロンビアの鬼才ギタリストEblis Javier Alvarezさんのプロジェクト。この人の腰が砕けたみたいな放屁サウンドが大好きです。

A project by Colombian genius guitarist Eblis Javier Alvarez, who is also active in Los Piranas, Frente Cumbiero, etc. I love his sound, like a laid-back guy farting.

Mayumi (P-iPLE / jailbird Y)

AOL - GOLD PLUS

すき

Like.

Mariah Yonic (The Buildings, ex. The Male Gaze)

Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Our lord and savior Fiona is back once again with a brutally transcendental album that reminds me that life is still worth living. 

Irene and Seulgi (Red Velvet) - Monster

This was the year of my Kpop enlightenment. Honestly thought pop music had grown stale over the past few years, but it turns out that the best of it had been happening in South Korea.

Kubo Masaki (former_airline)

山本精一 / Yamamoto Seiichi - CAFÉ BRAIN

近づき過ぎず離れ過ぎず。そことここの絶妙な境界でふわり漂い遊ぶ無意識の脳内音楽は、現実の外気から身をそらして繭の中で陶酔するにはすこぶる多機能な音景色であり、誰もが接続可能でひたすら居心地が良い。極めて清らかなコロナ時代のアヴァンBGM。何周もしたしこの先何周でもイケる。

Don't get too close, don't get too far. The unconscious music in the brain that floats and plays on the precise border between here and there is an incredibly diverse sonic scenery that’s extremely versatile in how it distracts from the real outside air, lets you get euphoric in your cocoon, and anyone can connect and earnestly. It's cosy. Extremely pure Corona-era avant-BGM. I've done many laps with this album and it'll be cool for many laps in the future.

Joe (Velvet Ants)

Idles - Ultra Mono

I hadn’t been aware of the existence of this band from Bristol called Idles who’ve already put out two full lengths, several singles and EPs before this record, full of not only anger and anxiety for the environment we are living in, but also energy and attitude going forward. 

Most of all the songs from Ultra Mono will be our anthems for the future. It’s everything.

Metz - Atlas Vending

Their collaboration with Steve Albini looked like kind of a success, so my expectation was like, "What’s next?" Their aggressively constructed guitar riffs got more constructive. That’s the point. But there’s more notable things there. Their songs sound almost the same because of the style of the singer. I think no one who likes Metz cares about that, but here you go, he sings and the songs have tons of hooks that, with the guitar riffs affect each other, which made me so surprised.

The Strokes - The New Abnormal

Who would have been looking forward to this veteran band’s new stuff? Me, never. 

When I was in a car, the lead track from The New Abnormal was aired on the radio and I thought it was interesting but I didn’t dig it at that moment. A few weeks later, I tried to listen to the whole album on Spotify and I was so shocked. The first track titled The Adults Are Talking sounds exactly how they've kept doing, but something is slightly different. I don’t know what it is. Then the second track, titled Selfless, which is my favorite one from this record, is totally awesome. The rest is also great to have a listen. I think they spent 20 years to make this masterpiece. You may think this is not The Strokes but this definitely is. 

Disq - Collector

First I thought from its cover art and the name of the band that Disq was post punk/new wave somehow. It was all wrong I know. Disq is absolutely like something I’ve already known but the additional tone of synthesizer makes it a little bit different than what I know. Although their guitar driven emotional songs easily remind me of Weezer, they are very unique. If I was a teenager, Disq could be my heroes.

Kayoko Yoshizawa - Service Area

She’s simply my muse. This is her long awaited fourth single.

Mariah and I listening to the new David Berman song in my living room, May 2019

“Can I listen to the new David Berman song again?”

When I first heard the news of David Berman’s death, my mind jumped back in time to May this year. I’m lounging around the living room of my house in Tokyo with my friend Mariah, who’s on tour in Japan at this time with her band The Male Gaze. David Berman has just released the song All My Happiness is Gone from his new project Purple Mountains, and Mariah wants to listen to it over and over again.

“Sure, if you want, but why do you need to listen to this one song so much?”

“I’m trying to decode its lyrics.”

Mariah, like many people on and around Call And Response Records, is a massive fan of David Berman. When we’re out as a group, little clusters of them geek out in private conversations composed largely of Silver Jews lyrics, used in- or out-of-context, repurposed like memes towards the purposes of the topic at hand. I’m by no means a deep or hardcore fan, and it’s not necessarily an influence that finds its way onto the label’s output in any obvious formal way, but Berman’s music is part of the fabric that binds many of our artists and friends together on a human level. It’s impossible not to feel a share of their sadness at his death, because he is embedded in what makes us us as a group.

Back again in my living room, May 2019.

“What do you mean, ‘decode the lyrics’?”

To me, the broad meaning of All My Happiness is Gone is pretty clear. It’s there in the title and repeated over and over again in the chorus. Mariah gives a kind of vague answer, but the underlying meaning is that she and I listen to music — and lyrics in particular — in different ways.

Obviously, there’s more to the song than just the title, and so I start wondering what it is that she is looking for. What it is that she’s trying to decode. To do this, I pull up a transcript of the lyrics and read them, and of course it’s much more richly layered — not obscure, but sometimes opaque, abstract, fragmentary, but all the while shot through with a tangible sense of melancholy, fear and loss.

It makes me think about how I listen to music.

Living in Japan suits my way of listening to music, I think. It’s a place where most lyrics are foreign sounds that I need to make a conscious effort to translate, but which it’s much easier to simply let fall back into the texture of the music. Even with songs sung in a language I understand instinctively and without need for effort or translation, I rarely consciously engage with the lyrics unless they are either exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. That’s not to say I don’t pay attention at all though. Rather, it’s that I let the words find me, often as individual phrases that fade briefly into clarity and then vanish. Music is constantly dragging me away from a place of consciousness and focus and into a liminal space between awareness and dream, so lyrics that demand my attention are often going to be at war with their own music in their fight for control of my mind.

This is probably reflected in the kinds of lyricists I most enjoy — Mark E. Smith, Robert Pollard, Graham Lewis, Laetitia Sadier jump most quickly to mind. Their songs rarely insist on a meaning, or even seek explicitly to communicate one. They’re all lyricists whose talent lies in opaque yet evocative imagery, and an instinctive poetic sense of the power of this word over that to express something intangible through language. David Berman has a similarly deft hand with imagery as well, of course: it’s there on All My Happiness is Gone in phrases like “snowcloud-shadowed interstates” and “the icy bike-chain rain of Portland, Oregon”.

The idea of focusing my will on a single song in a granular way and trying to decode feels in a way like an affront to the way I use and consume music. In order to engage with David Berman’s lyrics in anything like the way Mariah is, I needed to see them written down in front of me — that’s the division of labour between listening and reading in my brain (it's also the reason I never listen to radio, podcasts or voicemails).

That’s not to say Mariah is wrong. That sort of intense focus on a song also includes an insistence on experiencing the music and lyrics together as something indivisible. It’s a very pure way of listening, and in a way it’s one I agree with — after all, it’s where my own habit of listening passively and waiting for the words to find me ends up eventually anyway. Lyrics on paper alone are rarely great poetry: they are meant to be heard aloud, and often it is the singer’s ability to sell a line that completes its meaning. The structure, tempo, time signature, arrangement and production of a song can also help fill out or illuminate the words’ meaning — or undermine them, if that sort of tension is what the artist wants.

The mode of listening to a song over and over again, obsessing over its details, is an old fashioned one in a way. It’s the mode of listening to a 7-inch record, attention rapt and hand always ready to move the stylus back to the start. It’s ironic that the archetypally millennial Mariah is listening to the song in this way, while increasingly middle-aged me struggles to consume a song in a way other than the mode of an Extremely Online Twitter nerd, letting information flow through him passively.

While that’s a neat little ironical flourish, it perhaps also obscures what these two ways of extracting meaning from music are really dealing with, and that’s the problem of music and time.

Music is fundamentally linear. It can underscore meaning or draw connections between different points in the song by repeating lyrical or musical phrases, but these are just mirrors and echoes: they do not fundamentally alter the inexorable passage of time that a song dances you through. Words on a page flatten time. Written in a linear fashion though they may be, we don’t really read them in that way. Our eyes jump back and forth, making and breaking connections between places all over the text, constructing meanings in a nonlinear fashion. Poetry is, in a sense, hypertextual in that words are not only words in themselves but also links to other places. In this sense, Mariah’s repeat listening of the song and my instinct to leap straight to the text are both recognitions of the deficiencies of time in how we decode meaning in music: she by keeping the text pure and whole and simply looping time over and over, immersing herself in the narrative as a function of time; me by detaching lyrics from the music and flattening out time in order to experience their meaning in a blast of interconnected words and images, then recombining with the music and thus restoring them to time.

It feels strange that a line of thought that began with the news of David Berman’s death ended up wrapped up in ideas about the relationship between music and time. A little trite even, like it’s too neat a metaphor. Time is flat, and even if Berman is gone, his music is still here, “hardships like yardsticks” left in the ground. Time is a loop, and the music continues to cycle through, over and over again, accruing new meanings as we experience and share it in new and different contexts. Time is a straight line, and David Berman will never make another album.

Happy New Year 2019!

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.”

Tension!

Call And Response business went on hold for a week over the end of November and beginning of December, as I was away at the fantastic Madeiradig experimental music festival in Madeira, Portugal, which mostly involved drinking beer with Germans, with the addition of a small amount of actual music.

I hit the ground running upon my return, though, heading straight from the airport to a meeting with the guys from Tropical Death and a journalist from an inflight magazine who’s writing a feature on the Japanese underground music scene. I’m not sure what the crossover between underground music fans and inflight magazine readers is, but I guess there must be some. Writing about something as diverse and fragmented as Japanese underground music is an impossible task and I don’t envy him, but at least it’s a good excuse to see some cool shows and get drunk with some cool music people (and us).

The next day, on December 8th, was the latest Tension! event that I organise with Mayumi from P-iPLE. The ideal balance with an event is always a difficult one to pull off, and I’ll take different approaches with different events.

An interesting comparison for me is a show I went to couple of weeks previously at Koiwa Bushbash, where another organiser was holding a release party for a compilation cassette that she’d just released. Her event was broken up into two separate shows, the first opening in the morning and finishing in the afternoon, and the second opening around 6pm and finishing about 9:30pm. Each band at this Koiwa show played around 40 minutes, and they all had the chance to do a proper soundcheck, with the result being that a total of seven bands appeared, spread over about 10 hours, including a long break in the middle. I had to miss the evening show due to another engagement, but was able to catch Nagoya’s excellent Free City Noise in the afternoon show. In any case, this approach of seven acts with longer sets and full soundchecks was a very band-friendly scheduling environment (I’m not sure if the audience were expected to pay individually for both the afternoon and evening shows).

At Tension!, we had 14 live acts and three DJs over the course of eight hours. No one really had time to do a proper soundcheck except the first bands on each of the two stages we’d set up, the sets were all 25-30 minutes in length, and the whole event had a much more intense pace to it, with something going on somewhere nearly all the time. It’s obviously a less artist-friendly setup, although I think it also made for a more explosive (maybe a bit overwhelming for some) experience for the audience as a whole, which brings its own benefits for artists who rarely get to play to a packed crowd of such energised fans.

One of the ways I sometimes describe Tension! is as a space where music of that postpunk/noise-rock type that I like can have its own scene rather than existing as an adjunct to either the punk, noise, indie or experimental scene — the overlapping area of a Venn diagram covering several different scenes. When I was in Madeira talking to people involved in experimental music in Europe, I also realised that what I was trying to do was promote music that has something experimental about it but treat it (and encourage the audience to treat it) as if it was just regular rock music.

While bands are usually excited to be playing outside their usual scenes, one problem with mixing things up in this way is that audiences don’t always follow, wither by avoiding the event or by sticking rigidly to only the bands they’re familiar with. The old alt-rock/underground crowd from places like Akihabara Club Goodman and Shinjuku Motion mostly steer clear of Tension!, although the event seems to be growing to the extent that increasingly we can ignore them without suffering for it. More serious is when people with different backgrounds fall into conflict. Noise and industrial fans are used to freaking out intensely in their own private and personal space, while hardcore fans treat their music as a more communal and aggressive experience, so throwing both these kinds of people together on the same floor without any established common etiquette can sometimes create friction. As a result, during Jailbird Y’s set there was a bit of aggro on the dance floor that fortunately didn’t flare up into anything too serious.

There was also a brief power outage in the main stage area that interrupted Tropical Death’s set, although the excellent Moonstep staff sorted it out swiftly (despite punters needing to pee in the dark for a while). Melt-Banana brought the event to an ecstatic finale, and once again I can’t emphasise enough what fantastic performers they are and what thoroughly nice people.

All in all, the night was a big success, so thanks to Naoki and the rest of the Moonstep staff, big thanks to Melt-Banana for being such fantastic headliners as always, and special thanks to all the bands who travelled so far to take part -- Adrena Adrena from the UK, Lumi from France, Jailbird Y from Hiroshima and Velvet Ants from Nagoya. Also thanks to Soloist Anti Pop Totalization, who played two shows in one day, as well as the "Yokoscum" event in Kanagawa who kindly co-ordinated the schedules of Soloist and some other musicians who were playing at both shows with us despite our two events being rivals of a sort. That sort of intra-scene support and good will always leaves a warm feeling.

Events this packed and intense are difficult to organise and really exhausting, so it’ll be a long time before we do something like this again, but our regular programme of smaller, accessible parties will be back in full swing in the new year. Also, since there aren’t any new Call And Response releases for a while, we’re bringing a few of our friends’ albums into the online store soon, and there are some big discounts planned on CAR releases over the year-end period — more to be announced on that soon.

Season's Beatings

The Christmas and New Year season is a time when a combination of so many other people doing events and a lot of friends going on holiday or visiting their hometowns or home countries makes organising events and releasing new music a bad idea. Even so, the end of every year seems to end up with an overabundance of parties and events despite our best efforts to avoid them.

The next pay-what-you-want Call And Response Indie Disco at Shimokitazawa Three falls on December 3rd, a day when I’m out of the country on the Portuguese island of Madeira for the fascinating-looking MadeiraDIG experimental music festival. In my absence, Rally/Shingo from Tropical Death and Ralouf/Julien from Lo-shi are taking care of the booking and organising for me.

Paris Death Hilton are a duo Shingo in particular has been pushing a lot recently, and their intense, instrumental prog-electro-hardcore is a unique and intense experience in Tokyo right now. Emulsion are another band who combine progressive rock, electronic music and a punk sensibility, although they take it to a different place. Meanwhile La Belles Biologie is a project combining the experimental electronic sounds of Biology of the Future and doll-mutilating noise act Les Belles Noiseuses. I trust those two guys not to mess it up, but as a precaution I’m turning off my phone for the weekend prior.

On December 8th, I’ve got the latest instalment of the postpunk/noise-rock event Tension! that I organise occasionally with Mayumi from P-iPLE. This sixth edition of the event has an extensive lineup running all day at Nakano Moonstep — a very nice venue near where I live in Koenji. The cool thing about Moonstep is that it has two floors, with the bar on the upper floor, allowing us to set up something more easygoing where people can escape from the relentless barrage of chaos downstairs.

The flipside of that is that it’s difficult for just two people to juggle the competing needs and issues of so many participants, so right up to the time doors open, I suspect Mayumi and I will be dealing with equipment and setting issues, timetable queries and last-minute disruptions.

The really good thing about Tension!, though, is how into it so many of the artists we’ve had participate in the past have got, volunteering to help host editions of the event in their own towns and building connections, organising similar events of their own in collaboration with each other. This sort of noise-rock/postpunk music  doesn’t quite have a scene of its own in Japan, so it’s great seeing people trying to make one. The support of more well-known bands like Melt-Banana was invaluable in helping us get started back at the beginning of 2016, so we’re very excited to have them back almost three years later for this edition.

Tension! will also be a great chance for people in Tokyo to see Nagoya noise-rock champions Velvet Ants, whose mini-album Entomological Souvenirs I came out this autumn from Call And Response. They tore it up at their Nagoya release party in October and we were able to stitch together this rough & ready music video for the track Cicada from live footage.

Closer to Christmas, we’re keeping things a bit quieter, and for the first time in a long time, there’s no Call And Response Christmas event. Instead, we’re having a more intimate house party — more a “bonenkai” in the Japanese tradition than a Christmas party exactly — at Call And Response headquarters.

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing going on around the year’s end though. Last summer, Gotal/Eric from Lo-shi moved to Tahiti at the end of a triumphant DIY tour of western Japan, but he’s returning for a handful of shows over Christmas and New Year. More info on dates will appear later, but for now, keep December 24th and January 6th free in your rolodexes or Apple Newtons or whatever you kids use to store information nowadays.

New Year’s Eve in Tokyo is usually a bit of a bust in the music scene for me, because so many parties mean that my friends and favourite bands are always fragmented and spread around dozens of different parties. To save the inevitable sense of anticlimax, my wife and I are going to spend a few days in Okinawa and then spend the last two nights of 2018 with our friends in Fukuoka, where I’m DJing two nights on at the venue Utero on December 30th and 31st.

Lastly, while there are no more releases lined up for the rest of the year, I’ve noticed recently that Nakigao Twintail’s wonderful 2016 Ichijiku EP is almost sold out now. There are ten copies left in the CAR office, and maybe one or two floating around in CD stores somewhere. The band themselves disintegrated a long time ago, as all great and promising bands are wont to do, so this CD-R is probably the only chance you’ll get to experience this singular group of lunatics. Check out some of the songs below, and you can buy the CD from our online store here.

Foreign angles

Growing as a band or as a label in Japan can be a difficult and often dispiriting experience. Bands rehearse, write songs and play shows week after week and yet never seem to get a foothold. The paths to something greater seem few, and distant. However, looking overseas can be one way of breaking this sense of inertia.

This brings its own set of difficulties, since the cost of physically travelling overseas and the short amounts of time most Japanese musicians can take off work mean that foreign tours are only for the very wealthy or very dedicated. Embarking on something as logistically challenging as a tour isn’t the only way to reach out and keep things fresh though, and some of us here in the CAR family are working on a few different projects at the moment.

The most immediate one is a tour by US band Pregnant, starting November 1^st and which Shingo from Tropical Death has (among others) been working hard to help set up and support.

Pregnant (from USA) Japan Tour:

11/1 Tokyo, Shimokitazawa Basement Bar, w/ Tropical Death, Bonstar

11/2 Tokyo, Akihabara Studio Revole, w/ 1000s of Cats, Mekare-Kare

11/3 Tokyo, Shinjuku Ninespices, w/ Loolowningen & The Far East Idiots, Windowz

11/4 Tokyo, Kunitachi Chikyuya, w/ Tropical Death, / Loolowningen & The Far East Idiots, Suppa Micro Pamchopp

11/7 Osaka, Namba Bears, w/ Los Oxxo Sexos, Tokiyo (And Summer Club), Sou + Kanchenjunga

11/8 Fukuoka, Kokura TBA

11/9 Hiroshima 4.14, w/ Usagi Bunny Boy, Uma-darake, Le Film, Shyboy

The other angle we’ve been working is setting up releases of a couple of split singles/EPs with overseas bands, although as always with projects like this that have so many moving parts, it’s difficult to know when is a safe time to announce any details. For now I’ll just say that one is a vinyl single that we’re producing in collaboration with a UK-based label, while the other will probably be a CD EP with another Asian band. In both cases, releases early next year are most likely. As far as tours supporting the releases go, they’re both under discussion and we’d love to do something if possible, but let’s just see how that goes, alright?

Other news from CARland is that I’ve given notice to quit one of my jobs in order to spend more time with writing and the label – two activities that are becoming increasingly difficult to separate, with all the problems that entails. Meanwhile, I’m DJing at about a hundred events over the weekend (well, three), so if you’re not catching the Pregnant tour on that particular day, by all means drop by.

11/3 (evening) @ Koiwa Bushbash – Excellent noise-rock event featuring Jailbird Y, In The Sun and more great bands.

11/3 (night) @ Shibuya Lush – Another event with a great looking lineup, which I’ll be joining at some insane hour of the night/morning.

11/4 (evening) @ Roppongi VARIT. – A ‘90s-themed DJ night featuring a pretty eclectic-looking range of DJs, at which I’ve threatened to play a set composed entirely of Guided By Voices but probably won’t follow through.

Experimental Cocktails

To celebrate the release of the Velvet Ants’ debut album Entomological Souvenirs I, I took a trip to Nagoya the other weekend for the release party at Spazio Rita. Rita is a really nice venue — just a simple, open space with no raised area for the stage, so you can move around freely, without feeling cramped in the way you can in a place like the differently lovely Bar Ripple, where Call And Response’s last event in Nagoya was held in 2017.

The lineup Joe from Velvet Ants put together was superb as well, with the Sonic Youth-esque Free City Noise kicking the party off ferociously. Osaka-based experimental electronic duo Nehan were an interesting follow-up, while the always entertaining new wave/postpunk band Compact Club were visiting from Tokyo and the excellent Noiseconcrete x 3chi5 held things up from the Nagoya end.

Hiroshima noise-rock maniacs Jailbird Y were also visiting, although they brought most of their band from Tokyo, including guitarist Mayumi from punk/no wave band P-iPLE, playing what I think might have been her first gig since having a baby in the summer. Mayumi is also my main collaborator on the Tension! events that we’ve been running on and off for the past couple of years, and the first thing she said to me after not seeing her in three months was, “Let’s do Tension! in Taiwan!”

I’ve written on here before about how, maybe even more than the music, the thing that determines what artists I work with is whether they’re someone who is going to be a good experience to work with. With 95% of the people I know, when you suggest something to them, the first thing they start thinking of is reasons why they can’t do it, but with people like Mayumi, and Anndoe from Jailbird Y is like this as well, if you suggest something to them, the first thing they start thinking of is ways they can make it happen. I’m probably a bit more cautious than either of them, and I’m certainly very selective in who I choose to be enthusiastic with, but at least with people who are feeding me good energy, I try to respond positively in return. “OK, let’s go to Taiwan!”

Also joining me on the trip to Nagoya was Julien from Lo-shi, who I coaxed into coming by telling him, “It’s not a gig: it’s an adventure!” The day after the show, we went to Hamamatsu in Shizuoka prefecture to visit Sone Records — a really nice little record shop that’s been supportive of Call And Response in the past. I was pretty hung over and generally feeling icky, but Julien went straight for the chu-hi at the first convenience store we passed in the morning. We arrived in Hamamatsu only to find Sone Records wouldn’t be open for another four hours, and we quickly realised that Japanese cities with populations of less than one million people are wastelands on a Monday afternoon. The only place we could find that was open was Saizeriya, a cheap family restaurant mostly frequented by schoolkids, so we parked ourselves in there for a couple of hours and made experimental cocktails with the drink bar and the disgusting wine they serve.

The record store was a productive experience in the end though, and with the Velvet Ants heading to Hamamatsu the following weekend, it was good to get their CD in stock. Meanwhile, I came away with a trio of releases from excellent local Shizuoka bands Towel, Half Kill and Qujaku.

The other useful thing I was able to take away from this trip was a lot of video footage of the Velvet Ants live, which I’ll soon hopefully be able to cut together into a music video. I’m also working on an music video for Sea Level, whose album came out on CD in July and who have recently made it available via various online and streaming outlets. While the Velvet Ants video should come together fairly quickly once I start, the Sea Level video is all being done with animation, which is inevitably a slow, tedious process. At the same time, though, there’s something calming about all the mechanical repetition it involves, and it gives me an opportunity to listen to a lot of music in the background, which is something I don’t usually feel like doing when I’m at home.

We’re also working on a couple of new releases, both of which are trapped in a spiral of interminable delays, but which I’ll hopefully be able to talk more about soon.