Asakawa Maki | 18 albums

[Re-upped once more on April 25, 2015, at a reader's request]

When I was in Tokyo in mid-2010, I spent a couple of full days wandering around almost all of the 9 floors of the massive Tower Records superstore in Shibuya. 

When I got off the escalator at floor 2, which houses Tower Shibuya's extensive J-Pop and J-Indies stock, I was immediately struck by a kind of mini-shrine made up of of the CDs of Asakawa Maki, most of which seemed to feature grainy black & white photographs of the singer on the cover, often smoking.

I had no idea who this mysterious enshrined singer was, but after a bit of YouTubing and Googling, I was able to figure it out. Asakawa Maki was born on January 27, 1942, in Nagoya--she'd have been 70 years old this month had she not died in 2010, just shy of her 68th birthday. She got her start singing in U.S. Army bases, but got her big break in a series of concerts organized by avant-garde poet and playwright, Shuji Terayama in 1968. (Terayama would write lyrics for a number of her early songs.)

Over the next 40 years, Maki (as she was often referred to) released some 30 records, only slowing down in the aughts. She continued to perform live up until her death. She was one of the greatest, most expressive singers of all time, not just in Japan, but in the world.


Listen to "House of the Rising Sun" live

FILE ONE
Asakawa Maki II
Asakawa Maki no Sekai
Black
Blue Spirit Blues
Cat Nap

FILE TWO
Darkness I
Darkness II
Darkness III
Darkness IV

FILE THREE
Hitomoshigoro
Live
Maboroshi no Onna-tachi
Maki
Nothing at All to Lose

FILE FOUR
One
Rear Window
Ura Mado Maki V
Yami No Naka Ni Okizari

Guitar Vader | 5 albums, 2 EPs

Reupped again on March 26, 2015, at a reader's request, here.

If someone put a gun to my head and forced me to choose just one Japanese rock band to listen to until my retirement years, my first impulse would be: "Just kill me." For, how could I--how, indeed, could anyone--choose just one? My second impulse, tempered by the desire to continue living, would be to flip a coin: Heads = Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her; tails = Guitar Vader.

Formed in 1998 as a male-female duo, Guitar Vader was largely influenced by the Beatles and the Pixies, though they also learned and/or borrowed from every late 20th century act from Guitar Wolf to Beck. Their first album, Die Happy!, was released on cassette and never had a proper CD (or LP) release. (It is, I would argue, the single most perfect example of Japanese pop rock ever recorded.)

In 2000, they added a drummer and a couple of years later added a(n American) keyboardist. They broke up in 2007 when their drummer began to have serious health issues related to his heart; they had been working on a sixth studio album, which was abandoned. So far as I know, none of them seem to have pursued solo musical careers.

I found most of these albums on other, now-defunct sites, wiped out in the Megaupload action. They are, so far as I can tell, all out of print and impossible to find.

Included here are:

Die Happy! (1999)

Wild at Honey (2000)

From Dusk (2001)

Baby-T/GVTV/Shimanagasgi (2001)

REMIXES_GVR (2001)

Dawn (2003)

Happy East (2004)

Watch an interview with Guitar Vader's Ujuan Shozo and Miki Tanabe:

Girls Sazanami Beat! | Vols. 1+2

Listen to "Chou Gutsu Terrorist" by The Let's Go's

Listen to "Yeah Yeah" by The Portugal Japan

Make off with Vol. 1 here

Listen to "Hello!Hello!!" by The Helloes!


Listen to "Yes, No Blues" by Gaijin

Get your paws on Vol. 2 here

Nobody does retro like the Japanese. Which is to say: Whatever it was, whoever invented it, they'll play it like they own it. 

Sazanami, a Tokyo-based label that celebrated its 10th anniversary last year, is one of the archipelago's leading purveyors of backwards-glancing garage, go-go, pop, rock, surf and pseudo-punk, and these two high-voltage volumes focusing on contemporary girl-group grooves are must-haves for all of you retrophiles out there -- as well as anyone seeking a musical alternative to caffeine. 

Little Fujiko | White Peach Jellyfish (1996)

Dare you eat a peach? [Reupped b/c you simply can't live w/out it.]

The radiant prayer of steel bursts between your ears. There it is, outside of sorrow. Inferior to the click beetle. 

Things that have poured, of light. That were born in soft legs and the rain that no longer rains. Into the arc lamp above, the "crazed moon." When it arrives and wraps.

Wraps the ocean? The shape of a poem. And horses, larvae. The dung peacefully eating its surroundings. 

The water of mayhem wrapped in the palm of your hand, twisting itself. FOR THE FIGHTING SPIRIT OF THE WALNUT. Nipped by the air creatures everywhere, bewildered, nut-cracking. Able to melt this cloud like a ringing ear.

The quick leaps have a fire!

You would like to stand yourself up, as humans did, long ago. Without gazing and is not here. To think poems are always thunderclouds with our blind eyes and folded branches. Fog descending stairs? 

Wonder what kind of deranged scratch marks resist dyed "Chinese" signs, food displays,  the right to read in any order? Shy twitch where the leaf mulch spreads.

Poetry continues to differ from what people believe the bar tilts, a cheerful hustle, the spirit torn apart by the swirl it's just lived through.

Little Fujiko | Little Fujiko (1998)

Freshly reupped here.

Just then I noticed the thin edge of words thinly glowing of wood. They stumble around with fingers rooted in the ducts of these creatures everywhere, hanging between branches of mistakes. Little Fujiko, little bolt of lightening, lease this illusory space closing in on you.

You believe you really saw this, these vacant bolts randomly passing you by, these blocks of cloud hanging from shoulder. We are all unexploded shells, wrapped around an inner field of nettles. You can't even listen as much as has been sung. You can't even sing as much as has been heard.

They pass it now from their lips to yours.

Unemployed Drifter | I Wanna Be Your Beatles!!!

I have reupped this upsettingly great CD here.

[Originally written and posted on June 6, 2010.] Back in Brooklyn after two weeks in Japan. Found the thrilling CD above not in a bodega but in the last remaining Tower Records on Earth, in Shibuya, Tokyo. An amazing 7-story CD store with a dozen or more listening stations on each floor.

I spent about five hours over three days listening to music from around the world, mostly J-Pop. When I pressed the button to hear the above album by post-punk girl-band Unemployed Drifter, I fell instantly in love.




Too exhausted to say anything more, but the sample song should speak for itself. Will be back when I'm rested to upload a number of other things I found in Tokyo, Kyoto and the mountains of Gunma.

Kojima Mayumi | Me and My Monkey on the Moon

Listen to "セシルカットブルース" ("Cecil's Blues Cut")


Listen to "あの娘の彼" ("That Girl of His")

Get the 21-song retrospective aqui.

Well, lookee here: It's a fabulous collection of 1990s singles and rarities from one of our all-time favorite Shibuya-kei artists, Kojima Mayumi. I found this lovely item in Shibuya itself, almost certainly at one of the smaller indie used CD places dotting the Tokyo neighborhood's outskirts.

I'm currently cooling my heels with family in Corvallis, Oregon, where I'll be boxing up the "literally thousands of" (actually more like 20 or 30) Cambodian, Lao, Thai and Vietnamese CDs I found last week on Foster Road in Portland. If I find any of the covers online I'll go ahead and post while I'm here; but pretty much, if I do manage to post over the holidays, I'll be limiting myself to items like today's offering: Stuff I've already got on my computer but, for whatever reason, haven't yet shared with y'all yet.

Saeko Suzuki | The Law of the Green

A few days after posting this album by Majida El Roumi, where I wrote a bit about the early days of CDs, I received an email from a regular visitor in Japan, Bill Sakovich, who writes about his life in the archipelagos at Ampontan. My off-the-cuff musings prompted Bill to remember his own early experiences with music burned into discs of polycarbonate plastic:

"Your recent post on the advent of CDs made me think of my first purchases. It was in '86, here in Japan. Bought a player and two discs. One was a Thelonius Monk trio disc, and the other was The Law of the Green by Suzuki Saeko.

"Suzuki was trained as a pianist, got involved with all the keyboards (including the Fairlight when that was big in the 80s) and also played drums. In fact, she was the drummer in the first band that Sakamoto Ryuichi formed, before he became famous in YMO and as a solo artist. She composed all her music, also sang.

"In this video, she starts on the marimba and switches to the drums at 4:30. The Zappa influence is apparent. I saw this tour, and this was the opening number:

"The Law of the Green was released to coincide with the tour, though this song was not on the disc. This one was, however:

"I still have The Law of the Green. It is long out of print (though another one or two of her discs have been reissued). Considering its unavailability either in Japan or overseas, and the amount of music you've uploaded that I've taken advantage of, if you're interested ..."

I wrote Bill back and said that I'd be interested, but would mostly be interested if he'd allow me to publish his back story. Bill agreed and sent along a bit more information as well:

"She started out on classical piano when young and got interested in the drums in her second year of high school. Went to a junior college for the arts. Started playing around Tokyo in other people's bands or backing singers, began attracting attention, and then started working as a studio musician.

"From the late 70s to the late 80s in Tokyo there was a group of musicians making some unique music, of whom the three members of YMO were the most prominent. (Sakamoto and Hosono Haruomi of those three in particular.) They were not garage bands, but people with musical training, often classical, who worked in the general territory of modern pop music, but got experimental. Another one in that circle was Tachibana Hajime, who did some unique things of his own. Suzuki played in both Sakamoto's band and Tachibana's band roughly at the same time.

"She went solo and released her first disc in 83. That was where Philadelphia appeared. The second was in 84, which I had on cassette, but now can't seem to find. It was called Science and Mystery, but the official title was in some Scandinavian language. This was rereleased on CD five years ago and is still available on Amazon Japan. The Law of the Green was the third, and that came out in 85. In 86 she released a four tune 12" vinyl record, which I bought and taped. I still have the tape. In 87 she released her last solo album, which I didn't know about and never heard, but I got married that year and was otherwise occupied.

"She continued to work in support of other people's projects but tapered off in the early 90s because she had children (She's married to a guy in a band called the Moonriders, which are not as interesting.) She started getting back into things in the early 2000s, probably because her children were getting older, and is still semi-active.

"Reading her Japanese Wikipedia entry, she also did a movie soundtrack long ago that won an award, and three soundtracks in a manga series in the 2000s. She has also had her own radio shows as a DJ on two or three occasions, and wrote a column for a movie magazine.

"Her 55th birthday was Wednesday March 14th.

"Here is the instant ramen commercial I told you about.

"That's her singing, and she also did the music. (She did a few commercial jingles, too.) She's saying Sugu Oishii, Sugoku Oishii (Delicious right away, really delicious)."

Get it here.

Thanks, Bill!

Kojima Mayumi | Omokage

Listen to the title song

Get it all here.

I originally posted this CD in June 2010, soon after having found it at a used CD place in Tokyo. I'm reposting now because I hadn't previously put the whole thing together in a single zip file (or rar, as the case is now), meaning anyone wanting it had to grab each song individually.

Obviously, such a finding is outside the purported parameters of this blog; but I posted it because I had earlier found Kojima Mayumi's Ai No Poltergeist at P-Tunes and Video, the much-alluded-to mom and pop Chinese media store on Chrystie Street in Manhattan's Chinatown pictured in the header image of this blog.

From her LastFM entry:

"Kojima Mayumi’s maturation over the years has been exciting to watch, as she evolved from the cutesy, almost childlike persona of the nascent years of her career to the confident, sultry diva we’ve seen this side of the millennium.

"That it was this cute playfulness that contributed greatly to the charm of her early material cannot be doubted, but gradually she moved away from that as her musical appetite increased in its avidity. It wasn’t just the strengthened influence of jazz, an important element of her repertoire from the very beginning, but also a newfound enthusiasm to incorporate styles as wide-ranging as rockabilly, reggae, Americana, and cha-cha to her own music.

"The girlish elements never disappeared completely of course, and traces can still be heard in albums as recent as 2003’s Ai no Poltergeist (“Koi wa Psychedelic”) or the following year’s Pablo no Koibito (“Chairo no Kobin”). But at the same time it would’ve been senseless to characterize that as her musical centerpiece."

Video from Ai No Poltergeist

Uncreative Genius | Alt Japan

Listen to a mind-blowing remix of James Brown's "Super Bad"


Listen to a fabulous breakcore track


And if those two don't convince you, this will

Get all 50 songs here.

A collection of Japanese covers, remixes, pastiche, breakcore, retro and beyond, culled after reading Simon Reynolds' Retromania.

I was a huge fan of Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up And Start Again, a terrific critical and social history of British and American 80s post-punk. So when Retromania was published, I descended on a copy like the admitted culture vulture that I am.

It's a brilliant book. I think anyone interested in pop music, or more generally, in pop culture, should read it. But I didn't agree with all of it. And I definitely wasn't sympathetic to the book's almost non-existent coverage of non-Western pop. If you've read the book yourself, you can probably guess what chapter raised most of my hackles. That's right, Chapter 5: Turning Japanese: The Empire of Retro and the Hipster International. The one chapter that even acknowledges that other cultures produce pop--in this case, Japanese Shibuya-kei artists.

I'm hardly an expert on Japanese pop music. I've been there twice for very limited visits. I do have, however, a rather fabulous collection of CDs and MP3s of Japanese alt pop that, if nothing else, proves that this music is about something more than mere "consumer affluence." Also, it isn't particularly "Japanese" to mimic others in the creation of one's "own" pop culture. This is something the entire First World is adept at/reliant upon, especially the British, and especially 60s British pop artists.

I'm not going to launch a critique of the book--which you can (and should) read for yourself. Instead, I've put together a sonic riposte that, whether or not you've read Reynold's book, I'm pretty sure you'll love.