I found Takaki Mio's album Nada today, going through some music I'd downloaded awhile ago, but hadn't yet listened to properly. The instrumentation of the first song reminds me of Luna Park Ensemble, but with more conventional pop-song structure. There are songs where, out of nowhere, they put low pass filters over this jazzy bossa-nova-inspired, or where there are crazy electric guitars hiding behind with her voice.
What's fascinating about old J-pop is that even the most "obscure" singers, there are mega-fans making weird mega-fan content about them. Here's a Chinese youtuber's compilation of clips of Takaki Mio lifting her hair.
紅唇族 - 紅唇心願. Red Lips is my favorite 80s Taiwanese girl group -- a world ahead of the much more famous City Girls. I particularly like the song 什麼叫寂寞 ("What is called loneliness") from this album, track number five. The lyrics go something like this:
Time is like my feelings,
Turning every day without stop.
Happiness and anger, sorrow and pleasure,
Joining and parting, leaving and reuniting,
I don't understand it all.
I remember that as a child I never knew that which we call loneliness,
But now I have so many worries.
Why?... I don't know why.
I'll never again be free from anxiety,
Time is always next to me, drifting away.
The melody feels as though its echoing from a place outside of time. It reminds me of reading Sarashina Nikki as a teenager: the deeply relatable descriptions of childhood fascinations that turned into endless loneliness -- contrasted with a setting so removed from my daily life that I couldn't even begin to imagine it. The result was this sensation that I was reading words from outside of time, words that existed before human civilization, and that will continue to exist after every human life has been extinguished. This is a feeling I've often had engaging in art from distant places and time-periods. So it's interesting that I get the same feeling from a Taiwanese song written in the late 80s. It's not like 80s Taiwan is particularly distant. In some sense, there's something realer about this feeling when it comes from a song like this when it comes from some ancient work of literature. Rather than being a product of cultural and temporal distance, it's inherent in the music itself. Or at least I'd like to think so. Perhaps all feelings are merely circumstantial. These lyrics clearly are written by a middle aged man, using teenage girls as a tool to express himself, not unlike how a nerdy man in the 2000s might use the virtual girls existing inside the dating simulation on his DS to express himself. Maybe it's this process of using human beings as musical instruments that creates the space that allows my imagination free reign for projection. It all sounds very sinister when I write about it this way.
For those encountering 80s Taiwanese girl groups for the first time, the other two suggestions I have are 憂歡派對 ("Vexation and Pleasure Party") and the much more translatable 星星・月亮・太陽 ("Stars, Moon and Sun"). As always, I wish I had better words to use when talking about this music, but for now, we'll have to make do with what I've already written.
Last night, for the first time ever, I somehow convinced/tricked Xiaoxi into playing a song I like. Or rather, a song by a band I like: CASIOトルコ温泉 (Casio Turkey Onsen). I didn't have to do much. Her one hour DJ set ended up getting turned into four hours, and she needed material. A few months earlier I'd put some of my own music on her harddrive from when I was messing around with her deck. Last night while she was preparing she happened to open the song 山 because, presumably, it had the right BPM to play between two other songs she wanted to play (both with quirky drum beats). That's all it took. Several hours later on stage, she played the song again. Blue laser lights pulsated on the bodies of all the fashion monsters in the crowd, wearing their big hats, short skirts and massive shoes, taking on an anonymity beneath the darkness, doing the minimal amount of body movement legally necessary to be classified as a dance.
Wednesday nights are free at System, the big club Xiaoxi frequently DJs at. There's two main rooms and then a pool room that sometimes gets used for DJing. It has a second floor with a bunch of couches, which is where I go to read stuff on my phone during most of these things. There was someone sleeping next to me the whole night. They weren't even drunk. Maybe this is just where they come to sleep on Wednesday nights. It's free after all. Maybe they were wearing earplugs.
As for the usual things I say when I mention a band: I first heard Casio Turkey Onsen the summer of 2019 via this Youtube video (thank you Noka). I did some googling and found this video for the second song on there. I was impressed by the various facial expression employed in their demonstrations of Surimacca. There's also a video of them hula-hooping. So I bought their album (somewhere surely -- I can only find a store page for their newer EP now), and the dream it embodies of 80s keyboards and calculator samples has accompanied me through snowy nights and torrential rains ever since. I thought I'd mentioned Tanoshii Ongaku on here before, but it turns out I haven't. Despite it probably not being completely accurate, I imagine Casio Turkey Onsen and Tanoshii Ongaku existing in some continuity, separated by three decades musical development that, strangely enough, feels irrelevant. I just like people who use electronics to make weird sounds, and who take those weird sounds to form dream-like landscapes. That, for me, is the final goal of music.
I've had another lapse into listening Happy End. I think it's because it's October. The air is getting colder. It's cloudy every day. I haven't seen the sun in who knows how long. This does two things. It makes me think about the summer (which leads to me thinking about 夏なんです), and it makes me go back into guitar-practicing mode. I'm not sure why I feel such an intense urge to play the guitar in the fall. I guess the first time I ever seriously picked up the guitar was in the fall, and everytime the weather gets colder, I think back to that time. Often what happens is a spend a month or two trying to learn every song from some album. In the past it was every song on the Beatles' White Album, which lends itself quite well to solo guitar playing -- probably more than any of their other albums. This year I find myself trying to play every song on 風街ろまん, the album with all the faces on it. I remember being so utterly unimpressed with the album the first time I heard it, after encountering someone on the internet saying it's the most important album in Japanese music or whatever. I've had an incredibly slow journey coming to enjoy it. I guess it was only this time last year that I was really able to allow myself to be enveloped in whatever mood is coming out of this album. The folk rock dream, as seen through the eyes of four Japanese guys in 1971.
Right now, as I write this, I'm listening to Recoride's album 絶叫みだれラリーランド, the first song of which is Baseball Murder. Whenever I hear a rock band using a bunch of synthesizers, I always think it's the most original and delightful thing in the world. There are so many "Synthrock" bands, especially synth punk rock bands in the early to mid 2000s, yet I still fall for the trick every time. All these bands seem like a revelation to me. I listen to all their albums over and over for a month, then forget they ever existed. Recoride is much more electronic than a lot of the bands I'd put in this category. I first heard them in 2016, which was around the time I was also on Soundcloud obsessively listening to wannabe videogame composers. I suppose Recoride comes from a similar (but much angrier) place, many of their songs sounding like Soundcloud-style fake chiptunes with big aggressive vocals on top. This is in contrast to a band like Mowmow Lulu Gyaban, which is only incidentally electronic. They don't have a guitarist, so the band's sound is all keyboard based. It's not like there's any sequencers being employed like there are with Recoride.
The other piece of "nostalgia" music I've been listening to the last few days is Sadistic Mika Band. The nostalgia I refer to is a double (or triple) layered affair. In one sense, it's nostalgia for 5 or 6 years ago, when I first listened to this music. In a deeper sense, it makes me think of the 60s and 70s English language rock I first heard when I was 12 years, that convinced me music was something worth caring about. This was Led Zeppelin, Cream, The Soft Machine, T-Rex and so on. The Sadistic Mika Band feels like some achievement of all the promises of that music, that I only discovered nearly 10 years after no longer listening to rock and roll. And of course, perhaps even more surprisingly, it was being made contemperaneously with all those bands. I wonder if we'll ever rewrite the canon of classic rock to include all these Japanese bands (who weren't even necessarily recording in Japan). I think my favorite Sadistic Mika Band song is ヘーイ, ごきげんはいかが. The first verse is in Japanese. It's not my native language, I only gained a vague idea of what was being said after looking the lyrics up, so I'm not going to pretend that first verse moved me in any deep way, other than hearing the words "hey" over and over and having some sense of encouragement being throbbed at me. The second verse, in English, continues to excite my imagination many hundreds of listens later. I can't help wonder why the person being addressed wanted to go to Houston, and what awaits them in Tokyo.
I don't expect music by Japanese people to be in English. I don't even feel some pleasant surprise when it's in English. I feel a sense of guilt. I'm not going to get into why for now. Looking at things in a more positive way, every Japanese and Chinese song I hear with English lyrics that actually move me in some way (another one of these I keep going back to is Omura Kenji's The Defector), I can't help but contemplate the need and possibility of expressing oneself in another language. I'm not sure how much it comes through in my writing how much I think about and struggle with this everyday, existing on a day to day basis in one language (not my native one), yet resorting to my native language (which also happens to be the global Latin of the 21st century) for literature. It feels like a sin. It feels like it builds barriers between myself and the people who surround me physically, replacing what could be real life friendships with some vague connection to my past in America, a place that I don't even particularly want to go back to. Yet I feel like an idiot when I write in Chinese. I feel like an idiot when I speak it too -- which means everyday I constantly feel like an idiot. Writing in English is the only time I can pretend I'm a normal human being. But it all feels like some dumb fantasy. Maybe I'm weak. I dare not try to express myself sincerely in Chinese -- yet here is this music that has moved me deeply of people on the other side of a similar divide, expressing themselves in English, and moving me beyond words. It's not like I'm not moved by music in Japanese that I can't understand or music in Chinese that I can understand, though with some ocassional difficulties. I guess I just feel a deep shame that of all languages to be my native language, the one which reaches deep into my heart, it is English, the least personal language, the language of airport announcements, the language forced upon the rest of the world.
Bobby Orlando - Beat by Beat. Well I actually started looking up who produced some of the Hi-NRG and Disco tracks I’ve been finding in compilations, which led me to Bobby Orlando, one of those mythical electronic music guys who has a hundred different pseudonyms. It’s stuff like that that makes me interested in a genre. I don’t care about the music. I just care about whether or not the musicians making it do weird mysterious things that stimulate my imagination.
The sound 30 seconds into this track broke open my skin and pierced through my heart. The rest of the song, I don’t have much to say about, but that massively expanding ten seconds of electronic sound is too much for me the handle. I keep listening to it, wondering if this is the time it kills me. This is the sound Macbooks should be making when you boot them up.
Once again, I feel like an idiot discovering music that I’m sure everyone else knows about. Sorry!
I'm in a contemplative mood lately (ok, actually I'm always in a contemplative mood) and have been thinking about why listening to certain sorts of music feels like "Returning to my roots". Right now I'm listening to Kay Huang's album Pingfan, feeling that mix of embarassment and comfort that comes anytime I listen to this kind of pop music (I guess that's a topic I could at length about in an essay), though after contemplating my feelings more, I'm not exactly sure where the comfort comes from. Maybe this is just some automatic function of my brain that recognizes a mix of pleasure and pain, and immediately wants to destroy all pleasure so there is only pain. But the logic goes like this: I first heard Kay Huang in 2019, which is far too late for me to have any sense of childhood nostalgia associated with this music. Yet that's what I hear when I listen to it. I suppose there was a long history before this of sitting in a room and listening to Taiwanese podcasts every moment of my life for months straight (that is how I learned Chinese), and for much of the early parts of that period I'd hear Kay-Huang-adjacent music played in the background without really being able to look it up and learn more, since my Chinese was terrible. So maybe some of that nostalgia is towards that period of my life, which was quite a miserable time, but it's at least understandable why I'd feel nostalgia towards it.
Anyway, I feel like nostalgia is similar to sexual perversion: it's incredibly embarassing to talk about -- you feel disgusting bringing it up, unless you're talking with someone who feels nostalgia towards the exact same thing you do, and therefore is constantly encouraging you and reassuring you that there's nothing wrong for feeling this way. But when you talk about it towards anyone else, there's no way to communicate it.
I've been listening to a bunch of disco over the last few weeks (for some reason), so I'm just going to list some particularly memorable tracks here (that I mostly got from listening to Ishkur's mixes). I'd had some encounters with disco before (the robotic voice behind the vocoder screaming out "I want to know" in Mr Flagio's Take a Chance has been haunting me since my youth), but I've never really tried to understand it. I still can't exactly say I'm trying to understand it now, but I'm taking some preliminary steps at least. Understanding takes a long time.
Other recent miscellany that I don't want to forget: