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Otomo Yoshihide live on stage at Milk in Tokyo, April 28th 1997 or so.  He was playing records and then he was playing bits of broken records as illustrated in the picture.  This was an event I helped organize featuring two groups of turntablists  - Otomo + L?K?O in a group that was called ExTxC, vs. Kuranaka and Ari from Zettaimu in a group called 1945.  Also on the bill that night were VJ Ikunishi, and DJs Moodman and Quietstorm. An awesome show!

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Asteroid Desert Songs, mid 1990s at Milk in Tokyo.  I just heard that Muromatsu Takahiro, aka Magic Alex, the man on the mic pictured here, has passed this week and I wanted to recognize his greatness.  This was a band of rebels, pushing buttons, stretching what was considered the domain of a band to become a sect of knob twiddlers and artistic musical scientists, testing the boundaries of what could legitimately be called music.  And still, they rocked.  The cover of their first CD is below, on the MOOD label - “Pre Main E.P.”  

From the liner notes:  “Introducing - Asteroid Desert Songs - Three talented, mysterious young-adult men coming into prominence with their first great pre-main e.p.    To introduce them individually we have....

Koichi Matsunaga: His zodiac sign is Aquarius.  6 feet talls with dandy beard.  Brown eyes and haircolor’s gold. Writing all Lyrics on this record and singing on BASS part.  Convinces that a great new poetic talent has been discovered.

Takahiro Muramatsu: Virgo.  He is known as MAGIC ALEX.  The percussionist who contributes the high falsetto voice called “Rockin’ Robin style” which can be identified in so many of the arrangements.  Loving wife and C. Schulz’s famous comic strip “Peanuts.”

Koki Takai: Sagittarius. Considered to be one of the finest guitarists around, also fills in many of the vocal background parts.  He is youngest in the group and having a appeal of great importance to you.  “Hi girls I’m just single!!”   ... Uhh... he’s so fresh.”     MOODMAN <M.O.O.D.>

And here is what Magic Alex himself wrote as Liner Notes for this E.P., which I personally consider to be some of the best liner notes ever.  With these written words alone the reader gets a complete sense of the aesthetic of the artists, without listening to a single note of the music.  

“At that time, however other members might be, I was absorbed in miami bass and the likes of that.  My first 7″ single was released and I was on top of the world. And almost always my haircut was poor-looking.  Ahh! Folly Jet (as far as I remember, Koki had already taken this stage name) was earnestly saving money to get a Nagura, this supreme open-reel tape deck was his heart’s desire, to replace his Nakamichi’s Dragon, though the dream has yet to come true.  And Kochi, alias Oscillotron, was putting whimsical catchwords onto the charge of new age music section on the fifth floor of a big CD shop in Shibuya, and was pleased with himself.  And Akira made windbreakers with the logo of ADS ATHLETIC OF SOUND and we four would wear them when we hung out, stupidly you could say.  That’s the way we lived in 1995.  

“It was in the winter of 1994 when Asteroid Desert Songs began.  This single CD was released in the middle of 1996, so we made our debut after about one and a half year activity as a group.  I remember well that we visited the house of Moodman, who was the label runner of “Mood,” about discussing details for releasing our first CD.  We clubbed together and we bought a box of imported chocolates and a bottle of cheap wine for him.  I think I wore Kenzo’s suit, my favorite at that time.  Moodman didn’t come at the appointed time so we got anxious, while his wife treated us to cakes of Pertie, a patisserie at Paris.  It was as like yesterday that we chatted and selected the photograph for the sleeve of the CD together with the designer Ukawa.  

“As you can understand when you listen to the CD, re-released after an interval of ten years, we ADS played an enthusiastic kind of electro hip hop but to my regret in retrospect I can’t find any merit in that, i.e. that we did electro hip hop ten years ago.  Smart listeners would not even give a glance to such a thing then.  Even in 1995 and 1996, there were record shops which sold disks such as “Smurph Across the Surf” by Micronawts at a premium prices of 8,000 yen and I had the impression that several small independent labels including Clear in London tried to revive electros.  Some journals with sharp ears and who were novelty hunters even spoke of an “Electro Revival” and things like that.  But actually it has taken about ten years since then for electros to achieve its certain breakthrough (I think you can say that).  If anything appears ten years earlier than expected nobody notices nor cares.  Koki would often sigh and say, “Electro can’t make me a hero.”  Of course ADS had no reputation for being ahead of the times. 

“Toward the end of 1995, we played at a live-house in Shinjuku (we acted as a kind of opener for Cornelius, a very popular band at that time, and D.M.B.Q. also appeared on the stage that day) but got a very bad response even booing from the audience.   Boys in the seats near the stage deliberately skipped the needle on the turntable and threw cans of beer at us and we were finally pulled down from the stage by a guard.  Such being the case, as you fans of ADS who will listen to this CD can guess, ten years ago maybe we were wrong and the times were wrong, too.  

“The numbers of initial copies of this CD were only 300. Sometimes old acquaintances have asked us, “Do you still keep the master tape of that single?” as though they had just remembered it existed but generally it was a tacit understanding that it’s better to forget about it.  So I am really pleased that we are able to be re-release it.  Possibly, with this opportunity, this single CD (the glorious debut-disk of ADS) may be reevaluated and favorably accepted.  I’d like to sincerely say thank you to all of our dear friends who gave us so much help with this release.  

I hope this CD will become one of the most favorite disks in your CD library.”

Magic Alex note

R.I.P. Magic Alex

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Kirihito (the band)!  Ken Takehisa (@takehisaken) and Shunsuke Hayakawa  @cobheysay sometime around 1996-1997.   Ken first talked to me about the idea of Tokyo People's Music, and they are still making it and living it.    http://kirihito.com/  

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Nasca Car sticker, circa 1997!   They played at Milk in Ebisu in June, 1997 and Surfers of Romantica opened - it was Sawasaki Yoshihiro's "Everything is OK!" event.   I remember a lot of Theremin!  

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Flyer and my photo from Boredoms show at Meiji University Room 2003 in 1996.  The full story that I wrote back then is here.  It was also the first time we saw Moodman and L?K?O and CiciTow who we later found out was also Why Sheep?   The flyer says "all standing" though there are many people horizontal in the photo!

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DMBQ in 1996. #tokyopeoplesmusic @DMBQ_info

DMBQ.  Dynamite Masters Blues Quartet.  This is Shinji Masuko, circa 1996, on stage at Milk.   This show featured multimedia (video) and a naked dancer, back when they were still a power trio.   

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Destroy 2 at Milk in Tokyo. @losapson #tokyopeoplesmusic

In the mid 1990s I started to get into a fascinating part of the Japanese music scene.  This is from a show on March 19, 1996 at Milk in Ebisu, featuring Destroy 2, a noisecore side project of Boredoms frontman Eye and drummer Yoshimi.  The show was presented by Los Apson? a small hyper-eclectic music shop then located in a tiny room on the 6th floor of an office building in Nishishinjuku - they’ve since moved but are still doing it right.  

The original piece I wrote for Addicted to Noise is miraculously still on line here:

Boredoms’ Singer Wants to Destroy Your Mind.

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Fuji Rock 97 - Aftermath

Becky, Ron, and I went to the first Fuji Rock Festival with some other friends in 1997.  A typhoon hit on the first day and the second day was cancelled.  Gen Shibayama helped us out tremendously by getting us backstage where we could stay dry, met Dave Grohl, The Prodigy, Joe Strummer, among others.  My original stories about that day are archived at MTV news;

Part 1: http://www.mtv.com/news/777/soaking-in-the-mt-fuji-rock-festival-literally/

Part 2 : http://www.mtv.com/news/786/typhoon-rosie-overpowers-chili-peppers-at-fuji-fest/

Photo by Becky.  

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In anticipation of Buffalo Daughter.

via flickr.com

This is from the late-ish 90's in Tokyo, I was checking out bands a few nights a week. Buffalo Daughter were cool and fun, I still have their sticker on my guitar. "Pioneer in Sounding."

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Riffing