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October 28, 2005
ZAnPon
The first solo Tokyo exhibition of an 24-year-old Osaka artist who calls himself ZAnPon is on at Uplink gallery in Shibuya. Yes, it’s the same place where Tujiko Noriko’s movie is showing, and yes I meant to post this at the same that I wrote about that film.
Anyhow, better late than never, and this guy’s work is simply amazing to look at, and moreover, absolutely worth seeing in person because when you look closely at his drawings, all sorts of details start to pop out at you. Things that could never reproduce in any JPEG you’re going to get off the web. You’ll follow his hyper-energetic linework all over, running into all sorts of small stories, and miniature exotic animals. You could probably stare at one of his large drawings for an hour and not get bored.
Futhermore, If you’re rich and want an investment (I’m sure no one reading this is), at this stage you can still buy his work for as little as ¥80,000 (really, really nice pieces for around ¥150,000). I’m sure it’s going to be worth at least five times that much within a year. If you like Hiropon Factory / KaiKaiKiKi’s shit, you are guaranteed to love ZAnPon. And like Murakami, this stuff is destined to blow up overseas.
Posted by shane at 03:16 AM
Massage Magazine
We have three spreads in a new magazine which I have never heard of before called Massage. It seems to be quite an underground music affair, and beyond that I can’t say much. This is only the fifth issue, I’m not sure where you can buy it, and it has no web presence to speak of.
The cover, and a sweet drawing of an ass.
On the left, a design from the W+KTLab CM. On the right, a screen from the video for Hifana’s Akero.
Posted by shane at 02:53 AM
October 24, 2005
Feels Ephemeral
So I haven’t mentioned any new albums in a while. That’s not because I haven’t got any. I failed to report the new Desormais, Shugo Tokumaru, Broken Social Scene, RATN, Aoki Takamasa+Tujiko Noriko, etc, etc. But now I will report The new Piana, Animal Collective, and Boards of Canada, all of which are pretty good, in order of my level of appreciation:
Animal Collective / Feels
There’s not really much to say about this band that hasn’t been said, other than they sound completely and perfectly unique. It’s quite a rarity, but especially in regard to this album you can’t compare them to much that I can think of. This record leans slighty more towards listenability that the thick textures of Spirit They’ve Vanished, or the highly interesting and challenging Here Comes the Indian side-project. As I’m always one to vote for the voluptous and orgasmic reaction that occurs inside my brain when difficult and abstract music begins to lean ever so slightly toward a pop-like listenability, Feels seems to suit me very well.
Piana / Ephemeral
Shamelessly and lethargically blissful, this second album by Piana wastes absolutely no time in enveloping you in a ridiculously lulling, angelic Japanese female vocal from the 1 minute 30 second mark of the very first song. From there the beauty of this very feminine electronica doesn’t let up through this small collection of pretty songs. The only risk is that you drown in it, in which case everything feels the same by albums’ end.
Boards of Canada / The Campfire Headphase
It’s Boards Of Canada. It’s immediately and extremely listenable from the get-go. It’s the virtually universal electronic music that seems to have tapped everyone’s collective childhood memories. It was a revelation when I first heard it somewhere around the age of 18, and it continues to function today, hypnotic powers slightly dimmed as they might be. That’s not really a great review I guess. I’ve probably just heard too much of them.
Posted by shane at 04:19 AM
October 23, 2005
Sand and Mini Hawaii
Tujiko Noriko’s first film, Sand and Mini Hawaii is showing at Uplink Factory in Udagawa-cho, Shibuya. It just opened today and I went to see it. It’s hard to explain the feeling of this film. It’s more something you need to see, but since it will probably be quite a challenge for most people to see it, here it goes.
Overall I think it leaves quite a strong impression. At this moment I am still carrying quite a tangible sense of how it feels to be inside the world of that film. This is in contrast to the general response I’ve had to films lately where I forget I had even watched anything the day after I see it.
If I had to compare it to the work of any director within my knowlege, I think the closest I could come would be Tsai Ming Liang, but with more dialogue. In this film, Chloe Fabre is to Tujiko as Lee Kang-Sheng is to Ming-Liang. The film is a meditation on that one character; the obsession and eccentricity of their unglamourous life in an urban setting. Beyond that however, Sand and Mini Hawaii is entirely more surreal than Ming-Liang (whose films are surreal, but in a realistic way), meaning more things that are literally impossible happen.
Noriko mentioned before that her lead actress did not want to speak, so one thing that sets the film apart is that all of the dialogue is done in voice over. She voices the main character herself, with various friends filling in the other roles. In fact, none of the actors actually speak, although they all have voices. This fact in itself makes for something of an interesting experience, as well as the fact that it consits of all French actors dubbed over in Japanese.
An overview of some memorable scenes in this film: The opening, in which the main character watches pornography with the man next to her, gently stroking the lump in his pants. A scene soon after, in which she is sitting in some kind of restaurant where she had bought lotto tickets, goes into some kind of dream state and is suddenly naked, desperate to crawl under the table. A strange birthday party in an all-black room, full of people eating hamburgers at what I think was a ping pong table. A scene of elation in which the main character walks through a fashionable part of town imagining fireworks going off, someone dancing in a stupidly cute pink pig costume, and my personal favorite, an overly joyful man dressed as a bunch of french fries that say “French Fries” across the front.
This film has an obvious roughness to it that perhaps convolutes what it is actually about, but adds a certain soul and charm as well. Given a first film I think it shows a whole lot of promise. Also I should add there are singing parts in it (naturally) which basically turn into Tujiko Noriko songs. I’m quite interested to see how sound and music will figure into her future films, as I think it could really play a major role and bring a unique take on things.
I know she learned a lot of things making this, and she’s said the next one will be ten times as good. If you know and understand her music, you probably already have a much better idea than you think as to what this film is like. If this film was one of her albums, I think it would be ハードにさせて。 It is perhaps a hard truth to learn about anyone, but Noriko is the kind of person who has such a unique worldview, it seems that anything she creates is quite worthy of consumption just by virtue of the fact that a little bit of her personality is in it. It just hit me that that statement sits somewhere close to my definition of a pure artist.
Posted by shane at 03:18 AM
October 22, 2005
Wamono vs. Nagi Noda
The centerpiece of Hifana’s Channel H DVD, the music video for Wamono, is a featured event on pixelsurgeon. I used to read the site religiously as an alternative to K10K about five years ago. When I was invited to OFFF 2002 in Barcelona for a winning flash movie in the experimental category, I even saw the Pixelsurgeon team lecture at the event, and they seemed like an extremely lively, kind and friendly bunch of people that I would have loved to hang out with had I ever lived in London. Well, now in late 2005, the more important issue is actually not that our video is featured on their website, but more that our video is featured as a part of Antenna, screening on the 27th of this month. To tell the truth, I had never heard of this “exciting, bi-monthly series showcasing the most creative, lesser-seen music videos,” but it’s startlingly lofty, showing at London’s National Film Theatre, and with previously featured high-profile pieces such as one of my personal favorites by Alexander Rutterford, Autechre’s Gantz Graf video.
On a more ambivalent note, it seems Wamono has been featured just after revered rip-off artist Nagi Noda’s video for (obnoxious) J-pop artist Yuki. As far as I can tell, these are the only two pieces from Japan that have ever been featured in Antenna. How do they compare to each other? That is an interesting question. In a sense, I see them as diametrically opposite. One is looking inward toward a sampling, hybridization, and modernization of Japanese culture and then projecting it outwards. One is taking a confluence of outside-Japan influences (New York fashion culture? Some vague notion of a Japanized-European art aestheitc?) and projecting them inwards toward a Japanese audience who probably look at it and utter nothing more than a superficialkawaii.
Just thinking about these two positions gives interesting insight into Japans’ creative culture. Vast success comes to Japanese artists and designers once they have lived overseas, come back, and then started making work for a domestic audience (Nagi Noda was in New York from ‘83 to ‘87). But what’s the point? Why seek to become international–to open oneself to global influence and become versed in a foreign culture–only to take shelter back in your own country, revered solely in a domestic sense?
I think I might have been introduced to Nagi Noda at one point. If so, it must have been one of those dreadful incidents where the introducer says of you, “this is so and so who works on such and such,” and the other person just looks the opposite direction. In any case I definitely witnessed her spectacle: showing up with an entourage in a flowing kimono, she certainly stood out at the 2004 (or was that 2003?) Tokyo ADC awards festival. And then at last year’s Tokion Creativity Now event she built up the suspense by showing up late after all the other panelists were already long-settled in their places. She later said that she loved working with Hakuhodo (or was it Dentsu?) because the whole staff would be telling her how smart she was on a daily basis. I call bullshit on this individual.
In the opposite case is my AD at W+K, +cruz, and our team at W+KTokyoLab. We cannot be truly successful in Japan–or perhaps I should say the work itself actually can become successful and revered to Japanese people, known by it’s attachment to an authentically Japanese entity such as Hifana. As an individual however, +cruz could never be a superstar within Japan the way Nagi Noda is, because he is a foreigner producing work inside the country. Moreover his work is striving for a new kind of Japanese-ness that transcends Japan and seeks to unite a pan-asian creative culture. To be a celebrity level foreign artist or designer in this country, you cannot work within the country itself, you have to become idolized from afar, and then imported in, invited in a sense, after which you may eventually attain the status of a god. (I must admit that on a fantastic level this does make a lot of sense to me, as I am certainly no stranger to romanticizing and obsessing over the unknown, the mysterious, and the other). This was the case with Tomato, revered as the creative Jesus in Japan, and perhaps on a smaller scale, TDR, and even Hi-Res, who I recently noticed has a mixi community (which I admittedly and unashamedly joined).
Our work will never be regarded in this kind of way. It has been, and will continue to be regarded more abroad, through circuits such as res and onedotzero, than it is within Japan. It’s interesting to think of all the people who are seeing this work out there, identifying it as an authentic Japanese cultural output, perhaps even letting it shape their view of the contemporary climate within Japan, when really it is in some kind of cultural grey area around which Japan is simply a frame. We are doing the job of selling a contemporary Japanese cool to the world, and we are not Japanese. We are promoters of this nation, not so much to itself as to other foreigners. And perhaps we’ll always be behind the scenes, a place that I am quite comfortable operating from.
Posted by shane at 02:17 PM
October 17, 2005
Okinawa Reprise
As the RATN show occupied most my thoughts on Okinawa before, I hardly (or didn’t) even mention that it was an utter paradise, as the following photographs from the island of Tokashiki prove:
Posted by shane at 03:39 AM
Channel H Release Party
Hifana’s Channel H release party was held this previous friday, and it was a huge hit, completely sold out with people lining up outside in the off chance that they might somehow be able to get in. All of the guest musicians, singers, and MCs appeared live in their respective featured tracks from the album, keeping the whole performance interesting throughout, and keeping the kids going crazy the whole time. It was by far the largest, liveliest and best show I’ve seen them give, and as it’s often been my job, I’ve seen them perform a whole lot.
On that note, I’d like to go ahead and make a declaration that Hifana is poised to hit it extremely large in Japan, in a major pop way I think, and I find this to be a very positive thing. With charts in this nation chock-full of utterly tasteless, uninspired and superficial music, Hifana is (conceivably) part of some new force of popular Japanese music that isn’t terrible, and moreover, that is culturally relevant.
With a large percent of the youthful masses turning toward pot-smoking, reggae, slow life, and generally having fun as a serious lifestyle, Hifana–who embody all of these things–are in a perfect position to assume the role of the musical and cultural symbol of said qualities, wrapped in a ridiculously cool contemporary Japanese image which builds on and promotes it’s own culture, referencing things Japanese and doing so proudly.
Immediately after it’s release, Channel H was mentioned in a slew of media (Plus 81, Relax, etc.) perhaps the most telling of which was the free english-speaking expat magazine, Metropolis. I’m paraphrasing here, but if I remember correctly, the author basically placed Hifana and their new album as something of a crown jewel of current Japanese GNC. Okay, so that’s a catch word that’s been thrown around enough already–in fact I’ve now heard Japanese using it themselves to define their own culture and how it relates to the rest of the world (explanation to come in a later entry). Anyhow, the point is there is certainly a truth to it.
When I first came to Japan, GNC (though I hadn’t heard of it at the time) to me was Flyrec, Tujiko Noriko, Superflat, Iwai Toshio, Chiho Aoshima, Aoki Takamasa, and the list goes on and on. I soon found out that just as in my own culture, no one (relatively speaking) was really taking note of these people. While I’m quite aware of the fact that the sections of culture I associate with and pay close attention to are overlooked by 99.9% of people, Hifana has the opportunity to transcend this. The beautiful thing is that they probably don’t really care, though if they come to represent the ultimate symbol of Japanese slow life youth culture, their brand could then travel overseas as a portrait of contemporary Japanese cool, defining (and selling) the nation to a new generation of kids internationally.
Posted by shane at 12:00 AM
October 11, 2005
RATN in paradise
Exactly one week ago, I returned to Tokyo from Okinawa. It was purely out of pleasure that I took the trip, missing two days of work, and basically going there just to hang out with and see RATN (Riow Arai+Tujiko Noriko) live. To describe the show will most likely be an excercise in futility, as it was honestly one of the best live experiences I’ve had in my life, and on quite a higher (and cheaper, and smaller) level than anything possible in Tokyo.
What kind of scene could there be on a tiny, heavily US-occupied/influenced tropical island chain at the very south of Japan? Well, probably the warmest, most unpretentious and passionate group of friends and musicians that I’ve ever had the pleasure of hanging around for a continuous three-day period.
Now rather than delve into the profound insights into vitality and art that were confronting me as I watched LoungeRec, Submarine, Riow Arai, Akeybo, and RATN, I am simply going to provide a tiny smattering of photographs (below), and regretably low-quality movies of some of the performances, and you can sort out the sensations yourself. It’s quite a brilliant combination of acts, I’d say.
The fact that Submarine are easily the best and most fun MC-based act in Japan is perhaps the exclusive knowlege of the 30 or so people who were watching this show.
He started out with some shakers, blowing into a kazoo, and two songs later it turns out he’s a tender songwriter, and an utter guitar virtuoso. I think this is Akeybo.
Imagine your bedroom had a bar at one end. Now imagine RATN performing on the other...
Posted by shane at 02:22 PM
October 06, 2005
Podcast Volume One
I am starting my first podcast with this mix. I’m working on getting it to show up in searches in iTunes, but for the moment, you can just go under iTunes’ Advanced menu, Subscribe to Podcast, and enter this URL:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/shanelester
The tracklist for Volume 1 is:
On!Air!Library! / Bread
Brian Eno / How Many Worlds
The Magnetic Fields / All My Little Words
Dennis DeSantis / Cliffs (Remix of Aphex Twin)
Mantler / Togethernest
Mas / Cael Rock
Bruce Haack with Ed Harvey / Child Psychologist
RATN / わらうだけ
Mask (Boards of Canada, I think) / Mask 2
George Harrison / Somplace Else
Momus / The Penis Song
降神 / Finale
Posted by shane at 04:23 PM
Mas Steppers+ Release Party
Mas had the release party for new album Steppers+ from flyrec on Saturday, October 1st at Shibuya On Air Nest. The lineup was Pasadena, 降神 (Origami), Tujiko Noriko, and Mas. I did visuals for Mas’ set which went well, though I was a bit drunk before starting to take the edge off. It seems I could become a regular part Mas’ performance at future shows, which is good because the set should get a whole lot better with practice. Additionally, four friends of mine from Mashcomix did a wicked live painting upstairs.
Alex, Hiro, Gunji, Yo
I don’t have any photos of Mas’ set with my visuals as I was busy VJing, but the VJ itself for the most part looked something like the following images. It is of course much more impactful when being projected onto two large screens behind a five piece band.
As for the performances, we actually had a camera crew which recorded 20 DV tapes worth of the entire show. Someday this will probably get edited (possibly by me) and then possibly put onto a DVD. Needless to say this was an excellent night. One of the most quality live events I’ve been to in Tokyo.
Posted by shane at 01:44 AM