PARDON?

A year ago I damaged my hearing while attending a Shonen Knife gig in Osaka. While I couldn’t really think of a nicer bunch of ladies to lose my ears to, it was a bit of a blow to someone whose life has revolved around music for the last thirty-two years.

Back home, after a series of frustrating visits to non-English speaking doctors, and with no real idea of what had happened or what the prognosis was, one thing was very clear – I could no longer listen to music.

That’s right, goodbye iPod.

For three months I couldn’t listen to any kind of music at all, not even on speakers. It was painful and distorted. And not only my Napalm Death albums: I mean everything.

I had to use my noise-blocking Sennheisser earphones to block out the piercing shrill sounds of everyday urban life that hurt my ears, rather than for music.

Raging tinnitus twenty-four hours a day. Even the voices of interlocutors sometimes caused me to wince in agony.

Imagine that, for a man with 18,653 songs in his iTunes library and a passionate desire to create music as a major driving force and means of expression in his life.

Twelve months later and things are immeasurably better.

I am rarely troubled by the horrendous distortion that previously afflicted me, and the tinnitus in my left ear is barely noticeable, even at night.

Recently I’ve found I can listen to the iPod again, albeit at the lowest volumes.

Some chart thingy designed to show something about hearing loss...

I can sit down and enjoy music on speakers again. The first time I found I could do that I cried like a baby.

My hearing is still not as it was – I suppose it has been permanently damaged in some ways. I can never go to concerts again. I still have to put earplugs in at the cinema. Some frequencies, particularly bass ones, are still problematic.

One surprising, and positive, consequence of my sonic difficulties has been my return to the techno genre as my main channel of musical creativity.

Stephen Patrick's astute observation...

See, like Beethoven, there was no way hearing damage was going to stop the muse from visiting me. And fortunately just before my ears were shredded, I’d started to get serious about learning Apple‘s superb Logic Pro 9 music software. Beats Beethoven‘s old Bechstein any day.

Even at its worst, I found that I could still compose using this software without having to use headphones, with just the minimum of volume over the iMac‘s internal speakers.

Recording the kind of alternative rock I’d been doing for the last decade or more was out of the question, since this necessarily involves headphones and relatively high volumes to enable backing tracks to be audible over amplified guitars or bellowed vocals.

And so I was forced out of necessity to return to techno, a genre I had been an early convert to, but had not dabbled in since 1997.

And so do old deaf bastards...

How great, then, to be able to discover once again the sheer joy in the organic process of creation that is in many ways much more fluid and open-ended than the composition and creation of guitar-based rock.

What’s the difference? Well, in rock you are pretty much bound by the need to fully shape the song before you begin recording. Only then can you begin to program the drums, followed by the rest of the instruments and vocals track by track. Once arranged, there’s little scope for experimentation.

Not so techno. Here, the composition is simultaneous with the recording : you actually write the piece as you go along, taking whatever twists and turns you feel like along the way.

Logic Pro's ES2 synth, not a spaceship's control panel...

The starting point is different, too. Instead of working up from a set of lyrics or a melody, in techno your inspiration could be anything from a particular synth sound, a drum beat, a bass line or a sample.

You record a bar, then loop it, then think what else would go well with it. Rinse and repeat, and the piece unfurls almost magically, new sonic ideas and discoveries sparking the imagination to further experimentation, cutting and pasting to taste.

Rinse and repeat - you dirty long-haired fuckface

Rather than a formal composition, the techno track is more like a free-form collage unbound by rules or convention, spontaneously created, morphing as it grows, finally reaching completion at that mysterious moment when it just suddenly feels ‘right.’

Does that mean I’m done with alt rock?  No way! The ears can now perhaps stand a bit of headphone usage, but for the time being I’m happy to remain within the anarchist-friendly medium of electronica.

KANSAI QUICKIE

Sitting back on the splendid bullet train now as we power out of Kyoto after a lightning two-day one-night visit of epicness to the great Kansai region of jolly old Nippon.

Kyoto's majestic station building

Came up Tuesday morning into Osaka, then braved the Pre-Christmas throngs to meet up with the Williams Nerds in Umeda, the city’s northern shopping area, there to gawp in gigantic music stores at guitars a plenty.

Back down to central Osaka to check in at the wonderful Chisun Inn in the bestest busiest most happeningest part of the city known as Shinsaibashi. There I fell asleep for a couple of hours, but but not before paying (very apt) a quick visit to the Apple Store.

See, even though I’m broke, I decided that I needed to upgrade my Logic Express music software to the full-blown Pro version, weighing in at a cool $340. Now you might think that a software upgrade might entail just a fistfull of DVDs, but no, bugger me lengthways if the product didn’t come in an enormous box weighing (and I kid you not) six kilos. The jolly salesman laughed and said that you could safely chuck most of this baggage since all you really needed were the discs. Indeed, back at the hotel I discovered the box to be comprised mostly of two gigantic manuals in Japanese, the first running to more than a thousand pages! No, matter, it’s not needed, since the software comes with built-in PDF content with the same information in English. I hope!!!

6kg of pure Logic

More guitar shop gawping, then meeting up with the Williams Nerds again for the main event, namely the annual Shonen Knife “Space Christmas” gig at Club Quattro!!

Well, the Knife didn’t disappoint, and armed with a vile free plastic cup of Wild Turkey I headbanged my way through all 24 songs played. The lesser Williams Nerd stole the show, however, by appearing atop his Dad’s shoulders carrying a placard requesting his favourite ditty, a cover of The Carpenters’ ‘On Top of The World.’ Like a masthead he ploughed through the moshpit until singer Naoko spotted him, and granted his wish in the first encore. He was truley a star, gaining applause and approval amongst even the hardest cadres of the assembled punks.

The iPhone totally fails to record Shonen Knife live at Club Quattro, Osaka, December 23rd 2008

After the gig, the band did a ‘meet & greet‘ in the lobby, and like an oik I barged past the bespectled geeks awaiting autographs, grasped Naoko’s hand, thanked her for the great gig and presented her with a copy of my latest STAVKA CD ‘Heavy Casualties in the Charm Offensive,’ which she accepted with bemusement.

Thence out into the night to trawl the streets of Dotombori amid the parrot-headed touts and garish neon, beers and takoyaki in hand. Takoyaki is an Osakan speciality. Chop off the arm of an octopus, boil it, then shove it inside a ball of batter with some chives and coat liberally with mayonaise and a thick pungent brown sauce, and there you have it. Best served so hot that it takes the skin off the roof of your mouth.

Takoyaki, baby!

Next morning we speed off to Kyoto and try to hire bicycles (see, those Williams boys are two-wheel fanatics), but apparently a new law does not allow 3-year olds to be appended to the aforementioned peddle-powered vehicle, so we had to be content with a stroll down Kyoto‘s tranquil Philosophers’ Walk, dropping in at the odd temple and battling in word play with the nascent linguistic skills of the young Williams unit.

Evidence of Bigfoot at Kyoto's Honen-in Temple

Back on the bullet train at six, hurtling homeward to Hiroshima and the impending non-event that is Christmas, and a lid was verily placed on the top of the Kansai Quickie jaunt.

Your humble narrator searches for his bullet train at Kyoto station

DISSECTING KNIFE

OK, the new Shonen Knife album Super Group has been in our clammy hands for a couple of days now, and so it behooves me (don’t you just love that word? Behooves, not me) to apply my razor-sharp critical sonic analysis to the toons contained therein.

First, a bit of background. The CD contains a rather measley ten cuts, clocking in at a lightweight 37 minutes, and is housed in the kitschy 70′s digipac you can see in the previous blog entry. Unusually, all of the songs are in Naoko Yamano’s wonderfully idiosyncratic English, in contrast with previous releases in Japan which were predominantly in her native tongue. Avoiding having to make two versions, or just acknowledgement of a resurgent interest in the West?

This album also marks the debut of new bassist Ritsuko, whose contributions are suitably Ramones-esque, eg follow the chords in quarter notes and don’t dare to embellish with any runs or links.

Anyway, and now to put the Knife under the scalpel, as it were:

1. Super Group – a fairly unremarkable opener, sounding like several previous SK tracks in its melody, and to these ears lacking in much of a hook. A tribute to all those dreadful conglomerations of badly-coiffured 70′s rock stars.
2. Slug – another tale of domestic woe of the most trivial kind – in this case, a slug appears in a lettuce, slug gets put in plastic bag, slug escapes, Naoko concludes that she doesn’t like slugs. Musically, it’s a run-of-the mill punk rocker, not bad, but not great, either.
3. Muddy Bubbles Hell – Wow! Here it is! At last we get the to the meat! This song is a gem, and I loved it from the first. Lyrically, it’s a description of a well-known Japanese hot spring, but ingeniously dressed in the garb of the kind of 70′s hard rock song that Naoko loves. Powerful, muscular, and sounding different to anything else SK have done in terms of melody.
4. Deer Biscuits – oh dear, the comedown from the previous rock nirvana. This is the obligatory goofy clunker, a tale of getting mobbed by the wild deer that lurk in several famous Japanese tourist spots. Lightweight and melodically forgettable.
5. BBQ Party – what would a Shonen Knife album be without a song about food? Well, here it is, another raucous punk track with nothing much doing in the melody stakes. It’s OK, that’s about all we can say, although the chorus of “Pig out! Pig out! Pig out!” is funny. For a while.
6. Pyramid Power – another familiar SK theme – new age quackery. The song is actually pretty good, with an unusual drum rthythm and more 70′s hard rock overtones than you can throw a sparkly gold Gibson Flying V at.
7. Time Warp – a trance-like predominantly one note dip into slightly misunderstood cosmology, but actually very pleasant and dreamy.
8. Na Na Na – back to clean guitars and a pleasantly cheery-sounding song which juxtaposes climate change worries with the silly meaningless syllables of the title for the chorus. But it’s quite nice.
9. Your Guitar – turn up the distortion again for this mid-paced rocker encouraging middle-aged folk stuck in a rut to pick up their rusty six-strings and relive the dreams of their youth. One memorable line is “here comes the goddess of rock and roll!” – is that you, Naoko? A great song.
10. Jet - Surprisingly the album ends with a rare cover version (at least rare for a studio recording), in the shape of Paul & Linda McCartney‘s old Wings number, and the Knife version is, I have to say, pretty good! Did you pay the licence fee for this , Noako?

Well, there we go – one brilliant song, a few good ‘uns, a few OK, and a couple of clunkers – so in a word, a normal Shonen Knife album. Although that was five words, not one.

Conclusion: the Knife is still sharp, and that’s pretty good going for a band that was formed in 1981.

Long live the Knife!

NEW KNIFE!

Yes, folks, it’s a great today, a veritable torrent of photons in an otherwise dull, uncaring and fiscally dodgy environment.

What? Have I purchased a new bottle of whisky? Well, yes (Glenfarclas 105), but that’s not what I’m referring to, no.

Neither is it a belated political euphoria wafting across the Pacific, uplifting though that is.

No, I am of course talking about the release of the new Shonen Knife album! Yay!

I’ve just purchased my copy from Tower Records here in downtown Hiroshima, and I’m now ensconced in the station Starbucks surrounded by the warm glow emanating from its typically kitschy sleeve and crap title (“Super Group“).

This is going to be the start of a new series of posts entitled, originally, ‘Album of the Week,’ and what better way to kick it off than by giving that accolade to a CD I have yet to hear.

The point is, that Shonen Knife are still going after 27 years, still kick arse live, and are still gloriously underground and alternative here in their native land, a well-needed antidote to the dreadful plastic crap churned out by this year’s Tokyo idols.

Is the album going to be any good? No, probably not, but who cares? The fact that another CD hits the shelves a mere year after the last effort, suggests an acceleration rather than the slowing down that might have been expected from a performer (singer Naoko) who is in her late forties. Perhaps this is due to the rejuvenating effects of inducting two younger ladies into the band as sidekicks.

Has the music progressed? Is Naoko writing anything other than songs about cute stuffed toys and food? Is the new AC/DC album a country & western/hip-hop acapella jazz-fusion odyssey?

Shonen Knife‘s new cuts (geddit?) are likely to the same as ever, and that’s the way we like it, right sisters?

My next post, of course, will say what a load of old crap the album is, and how I’ve just flogged it on eBay…

1,2,3,4!

Spent a few days in Osaka last week for the customary ‘get the fork out of here’ end of semester trip. You, know that need I have to vanish and reappear somewhere nobody knows me and I don’t know anyone after an arduous few months of ‘teaching‘ in goldfish bowl Hiroshima – ah, that Anonymity, she’s a fine lass indeed.

Stayed in the Chisun Inn Shinsaibashi – a great central location in Osaka’s ‘Minami’ area, just a hop, skip and a weave your way through millions of slow-moving ant-like natives away from the ‘action‘. Whatever the ‘action‘ is. I don’t know, because I never seem to encounter it. Or perhaps I do, and I just don’t recognize it for what it is. No, officer, I haven’t been drinking. The Chisun chain of hotels are highly recommended, though. I often use the one near Shin-Osaka station and have also frequented the swish one in Tokyo’s Akasaka area. Reasonsably priced, they do a good job of disguising the miserable Japanese business hotel phenomena and make you feel as if you’re staying in a European hotel with tasteful decor, arty colours and sheets that aren’t white.

I arrived on a Friday evening, having come straight from my final classes, throwing teaching paraphernalia to the winds and already eschewing the dreaded badly-ironed shirt and tie for cool street clothes. Despite being somewhat wobbly and sick, as is my wont, I reached the hotel without incident by 4pm, and sallied forth immediately to check out the gaudy baubles on display along Shinsaibashi’s huge covered shopping malls. Umm….fantastical guitar emporiums to dreamily lope around…the same chain stores on display in Hiroshima, only bigger and better and filled with Folk Who Don’t Know Me. And all around the thronging crowds of Osakans, a heady mix of the trendy well-dressed set, both younger and older versions, and a substrata of scummy ruffians and trollops amid the throbbing neon.

Next day I busied myself in that oasis of cool the Apple Store, gawping like a slack-jawed yokel at all the shimmering white and brushed aluminium goodies on display, a heady level of sophistication unthinkable back in the village that is Hiroshima!

From thence to Osaka’s Umeda district, to browse at all manner of electronic wonderment in the unfeasibly huge Yodobashi Camera, which despite the name, sells just about anything with flashing lights and buttons on it, from computer-driven bidets to the latest nerdery in the gadgets department. A veritable home from home!

However, my main purpose in coming to Osaka was not to fritter away time in the pursuit of geeky technology, no sir! For indeed, at 6pm I sauntered into Club Quattro, there to see my favourite J-Band Shonen Knife play their customary Christmas hometown gig. Well, I’d had a larf at their sparsely attended Hiroshima show in the summer, so what better than to see them on their home turf?

The club was packed – a sold-out show, no less, and I arrived during the set of the support band, a rocking combo whose name I can’t now recall. Well, I lasted about 10 minutes in the pit before beating a hasty retreat out into the foyer where I pretended to send an email on my mobile phone. Why? They were shite! It was cabaret more than rock – every cliche in the book trotted out and hammed up for the masses, and the final straw came when the Iggy Pop-wannabe vocalist climbed out onto the speaker rig and suspended himself above the moshpit from some overhead piping while the fans below pulled all his clothes off. Yes, all of them! If you’re going to get naked in public, at least make sure you’re equipped with a reasonably sized todger, but no, this ape’s dong was barely visible through his bush, such were its puny dimentions! So I thought, I didn’t pay 3,500 yen to look at this knob’s diminutive…er…knob, so I buggered off out.

No, fear, soon the mighty Shonen Knife appeared and launched into their trademark melodic pop-punk thrash. But alas! all was not well with the sound! After a couple of songs the band themselves noticed that something was amiss and began frantically retuning their axes. However, yours truly, with his expert knowledge of audio engineering, knew at once that it was the mix that was at fault – the bass was way too loud and was distorting horribly. Unfortunately the tossers at the mixing desk (alleged professionals) either didn’t notice or couldn’t be arsed to do anything about it. Still, as seasoned troupers the Knife played on regardless, and had soon turned it around into a great gig despite the sonic shortcomings. The moshpit was wild and your narrator headbanged his merry way through a blistering nineteen song set. Yay!

Long live the Knife!

A SLICE OF KNIFE

On August 20th the unthinkable happened – a decent band came and played in Hiroshima! This is only the second time in 15 years that I have been enticed out to the clubs to view a musical combo (the last being the The Damned’s shambolic Hiroshima debut a couple of years ago). Most bands I like very rarely come to Japan, and when/if they do, it is almost always restricted to Tokyo and Osaka. Unfortunately the same is usually true of Japan’s finest, Shonen Knife, and just as I was contemplating a trip to a major metropolis to catch them on the boards I was overjoyed to find that they had pencilled in a date at Hiroshima’s Club Quattro.

Despite having been a fan of the Osakan trio since 1992, and having actually met them at a Tower Records in-store appearance a year later, I had never seen them play live. I took my mate Dan along, who told me with his usual bluster that he knew all about them, but of course it later transpired that he’d never heard a single song of theirs! Nevertheless, he enjoyed the gig, as did I.

Amazingly, there were no less than three support bands, and in time-honoured fashion we gave them our encouragement by staying in the bar and drinking heavily, occasionally laughing at what we could hear every time someone opened the door to the stage area. In addition, we could see the stage via a couple of ceiling-mounted TV monitors. Indeed, it was these contraptions that convinced us to skip the preliminaries, since we saw the first act shuffle on in furry animal suits and proceed to make atonal bangings and scrapings, driving the few early birds who’d ventured in back out into the arms of an alcoholic beverage like wot we was doing.

Finally, the main event began, and we drunkenly stumbled in and witnessed a fine performance which bordered on the heavy side – indeed, the last few numbers our ladies played were distinctly metal in flavour, with the guitarist and bass player shaking their long hair in time to the beat in a very sexy manner.

I contented myself with some gentle head-banging while Dan remained motionless, only stirring to make an arse of himself during one of the singer’s song introductions. As she told the audience that the next song was about the influenza she’d caught last winter, she happened to mention the drug Tamiflu, which set Mr.Dan off mumbling about ‘Rumsfeld‘, ‘scams‘, ‘world conspiracy‘, etc, forcing me to remind him that Shonen Knife were all about fun and not heavy political comment. Dan then inexplicably countered by shouting out, in the way only Americans can convincingly do, “Give it to me baby!”, which stunned both the singer and audience into a momentary silence before a burst of laughter as I pointed to my good friend and did the old “sorry, he’s just a stupid gaijin‘ gesture. Classic stuff!

After the gig the band members were on hand to sell goodies and sign things – no aloof rock stars here! Dan tried to chat up the diminutive but cute drummer (to no avail) while I shook hands and chatted with the singer and apologised for my drunken cohort.

We were both bemused a while later to spot the singer’s daughter, around 6 years old, slumped on a chair picking lint out of her belly-button – pure rock ‘n’ roll!

Afterwards we ended up in Shintenchi Park, drunk and nauseous, but still enjoying this prime people watching spot where the winos, drop-outs, whores, weirdos, losers and er…normal office workers congregate, oblivious to the stark concrete and filth of the surroundings.

All in all, I fine evening’s entertainment!