Twenty-seven years ago Ryuichi Sakamoto made his not-quite-so-thrilling acting debut in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, opposite David Bowie, Tom Conti and Jack Thompson. He also composed the soundtrack.
We’re not here now to talk dramatics, since Sakamoto let his acting career slide. It’s the man’s music, including many more film scores, that has continued to flourish.
“Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence was actually the first movie for which I created music,” Sakamoto is quick to point out. “I’ve liked movies since I was a kid, but I never imagined I’d compose music for them.”
Well before techno and house music, there was Yellow Magic Orchestra - a Japanese trio subsequently cited in the same sentence as ‘70s peers Kraftwerk, Cabaret Voltaire, Can, Throbbing Gristle and Tangerine Dream.
More recently they've been appearing on Japanese tellies to promote chocky treats Pocky, from local brand Ezaki Glico - first sold in 1966, the treat is a thin sliver of biscuit stick coated with chocolate, and you can check out the commercial here:
While these days YMO may be hawking popular snacks, three decades ago these above-mentioned bands improvised experiments with new-fangled synthesizers and analogue electronic gadgetry that eventually inspired a deluge of DJs, producers and bands across the globe to lay down the club sounds we now take for granted.
Sakamoto was a principle member of YMO, but it’s obvious he’s laid that legacy to rest rather than continue banking on yesterday’s glories.
“That’s in the past,” he confirms with a laugh.
“What can I say? There isn’t anything enlightening to add, except that my relationship’s still good with the other two members of YMO.”
After the wide-girth, experiential YMO years, conforming to a structured musical palette would be a difficult detour to take - something Sakamoto confirms.
“At the time I had no idea what I could refer to so I asked Jeremy Thomas, a British producer, and he recommended Citizen Kane. When I now contemplate Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, I’m not sure if the soundtrack succeeds as film music - but the director, Nagisa Oshima, encouraged me to produce it my own way without any inhibitions so it ended up rather like my solo music.”
Sakamoto subsequently scored three movies for Bernardo Bertolucci, starting in 1987 with The Last Emperor - for which he shared the Oscar with David Byrne and Cong Su - and winding up with Little Buddha (1993).
“When you create a soundtrack of course you care about emotion,” Sakamoto says, “but I’m equally intrigued with the actors and other elements within the movie - like the actor’s eyes, a slight movement of someone’s moustache; those things are vital to me. I want to paint the structure of the story through music even though this isn’t always required by a director.”
More recently Sakamoto composed the sound track for Women Without Men.
"It was awarded the Silver Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival," Sakamoto enthuses, quite obviously excited by the filmmakers.
“Shirin Neshat is an Iranian artist, originally involved in the visual arts, and this is the first fiction film she’s made - for which I did the music.”
Given Ryuichi Sakamoto’s long-term experience, it would be educational to understand how one annotates a line between the creation of a soundtrack and producing one’s own music for an audio release. The man’s response reveals that this lineation itself is blurred; it’s the people involved who make a difference.
“Both are my music, so there’s not so much dissimilarity,” Sakamoto muses.
“However, when it comes to doing a soundtrack there are clients, such as directors, and what they require is of principle concern. In that case it doesn’t matter how much I love the work I develop - if they don’t like it, that score goes straight into the trash. This is the major difference. Then we also have different taste and preferences and things may not always gel, so there is quite the added tension. By contrast, if it’s my own music I make the decisions and never have to deal with this kind of stress.”
The collaborative fusion of the two is key, however.
“Bringing them together is enriching because the odd demands of a film score force you to think outside your usual comfort zone, in order to meet the challenge; this is an essential experience for me as a musician.”
On the new release Playing the Piano Sakamoto combines twelve of his best known pieces, much of the content film music from Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, The Sheltering Sky and The Last Emperor. It’s been rendered far simpler as the album title suggests - recorded from live performances in Japan by the man behind the music, utilizing just a piano.
The album even comes with a bonus disc, Out of Noise, which is Sakamoto’s first solo studio opus in five years. Comparing this with Playing the Piano is like comparing milk-based food products and soft, white, porous sedimentary rock; they’re that diverse.
Out of Noise is a complicated journey that’s at times sublime, ethereal and prescient; at others the mood is challenging and focused, like an icy exercise in yoga meditation.
While the ageing process causes other avant-garde musicians to lose touch - or to shift into safer parts of the mainstream - Sakamoto continues to bracket himself with current musical concepts, technology and ideology, and he’s embraced the digital age as much as he did its analogue predecessor 30 years ago.
Yet you have to backtrack further still to uncover Sakamoto’s favourite movie soundtrack.
Without a moment’s hesitation he selects Nino Rota’s score for Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954).
“That movie is fantastic and the music is superb,” he appraises.
Big thanks to Yoko for doing most of the work here, and to Filmink for organizing.
2010 been an absolutely dire year for televised anime over here in Japan, with most of the more innovative studios (Madhouse, Production I.G, Gonzo, Studio 4°C) seemingly in hibernation over the past twelve months – or at the very least keeping their claws sheathed.
While Madhouse did pull off something nifty in the Redline feature movie directed by Takeshi Koike, and Keiichi Hara’s anime movie Colorful has been one of the cinematic highlights this year, the medium was lacklustre on the tellies.
It’s quite clear that the Japanese anime scene is going through a rough patch right now, very much like that which has crippled the newspaper/magazine and music industries, which may (or may not) have a bit to do with either the Internet or the global financial downturn or both; I’ll leave that appraisal to better qualified people.
There is a bright note here, however.
One series that's kept me amused and even a little infatuated over the past six months or so has been HeartCatch PreCure!, the infectious, disarming kids’ series you might've spotted elsewhere in this rambling blog.
The yarn started up with our shy, upright schoolgirl heroine Tsubomi (Cure Blossom), swathed in pink, who was joined by trusty neighbour and fashion-minded sidekick Erika (the all-blue Cure Marine). Five months into the series, the third heroine emerged with the gold-hued, androgynous Itsuki (Cure Sunshine) – who dresses in boys clothes but shines in her girly PreCure persona.
More recently, over the past few weeks, a reticent, quietly cantankerous and quite possibly bitter senior high school student, Yuri, was revealed to be the purple-shrouded Cure Moonlight - the predecessor of our other three champions who lost her powers in a big battle with Dark Pretty Cure (that's a long story for another blog entry - or not) and two weeks ago had those powers and her attire restored.
I'd like to pretend to have some dignity, but stuff that - bring on tomorrow morning's episode...
Oh, and my excuse is that I watch it to spend time with my four-year-old daughter Cocoa, who also loves the series. Which one of us digs it the most is up for debate.
For a bit of a sneak preview, here you get to see Cure Moonlight reclaim her identity a couple of weeks back (zounds!):
Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower (モード学園コクーンタワ) is a relatively new building in Shinjuku that I've been passing nearby for months on the way to work, but I only got around to taking some happy snaps of the place the other day.
Better known to me as the HAL 9000 building because it houses HAL Tokyo, a special technology and design college (and it just looks so darned "designer modern", like something that'd be right at home in 2001), the Cocoon Tower was actually completed 2 years ago, designed by Tange Associates, the company set up by famous architect Kenzo Tange.
As far as facts and figures go, the 204-metre-tall (669 ft), 50-storey tower is apparently the second-tallest educational building in the world. I think the highest building I set foot in at Melbourne University clocked in at five storeys, which is a wee bit shorter.
Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower is currently the 17th-tallest building in Tokyo - and it won the Kewpie Doll when it was awarded the 2008 Skyscraper of the Year by Emporis.com.
It certainly gets this wayward blog's nominations as well.
While it does stick out like a sore thumb directly outside the West Exit of Shinjuku JR Station, it's the kind of aching digit you're more than happy to put up with.
I guess we could throw in the old punchline here about suffering for art.
And speaking of HAL 9000, here he is for a bit of nostalgia's sake.
“Sometimes I sing ‘Danger Zone’ in the bathroom. I like the music from Top Gun. When I was a child I dreamed of becoming a fighter pilot, and to this day Top Gun is my favorite action movie. But this is not bathroom music,” laughs Takashi Watanabe.
“Hmm. I think jazz house, because of swing and the punchy hi-hat accents and R&B horn riffs.”
As DJ Warp, Watanabe usually spins far harder techno and tech-house tunes.
Toshiyuki Yasuda, who makes music under his own name as well as doing vocoder crooning as Robo*Brazileira, jumps at the opportunity to answer this one. “Coleman Hawkins’s ‘Body and Soul’,” he cites.
“It never repeats the same riffs or theme throughout the tune, so I feel fresh and stimulated each time I listen to it - which is important for it, isn't it? Although actually no music is really the best, I think.”
“I like deep and dark minimal because it makes me erotic,” suggests Rie Kurihara (better known as veteran DJ/producer Ree.K), and then she goes one step further and debunks the idea in agreement with Yasuda.
The rest of this article is onlineHEREat Forces Of Geek.
Today I picked up the flier for Macross Frontier ~Sayonara no Tsubasa~.
I always hate it when they put those fancy squiggly things like "~" in titles, as it just looks twee, but aside from that inconsequential complaint the movie will hit screens across Japan from 26 February 2011.
The subtitle Sayonara no Tsubasa has been roughly translated in recent press statements as "The Wings of Goodbye", whatever precisely that means.
It's the sequel to last year's Macross Frontier ~Itsuwari no Utahime~ (more squiggling action, which actually does look better in Japanese: マクロスF ～イツワリノウタヒメ～).
That movie was directed by Shōji Kawamori (河森正治), previously the mechanical designer on Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor 2; he also acted in Oshii's Tachigui: The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters, created the original Macross Frontier manga - and apparently was responsible for the initial toy designs in the late '70s for the Transformers' Optimus Prime.
More importantly, Kuwamori was the creator, production supervisor, mechanical designer and writer of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross (超時空要塞マクロス, Chōjikū Yōsai Makurosu) TV series, a 1982-83 sci-fi melodrama of the finest sort that, according to Kawamori, depicts "a love triangle against the backdrop of great battles" during the first Human-alien war.
And really that tells you enough - it's an awesome romp that has mecha action wrapped up with base human emotions like jealousy, rivalry and anger.
I loved it when I stumbled across it (on VHS) back in Australia in the early '90s.
Even better, however, Kuwamori also co-directed the ground-breaking Macross Plus (マクロスプラス) in 1994 - with Shinichiro Watanabe (Cowboy Bebop) - thereby creating a slab of absolutely essential anime.
Whether the new movie lives up to these original yarns is yet to be seen (obviously, since it hasn't even screened) but until the unveiling in February they have the website here for more pics/info... in Japanese.
In the meantime here's the bloody brilliant old trailer for Macross Plus; it used to feature on most of the 1990s videos released by Manga Entertainment in Australia (now better known as Madman).
A couple of days a week I get to teach English to half-bored, half-cool students at a design college in Harajuku (right).
The view from our lecture room on the fourth floor is a superb one that takes in the Yoyogi National Gymnasium (国立代々木競技場), below, and I often find myself glancing out there.
Apparently internationally famous for its suspension roof design, it was designed by Kenzo Tange - the man behind the iconic Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building in Shinjuku, which opened in 1991.
The Yoyogi National Gymnasium was built between 1961 and 1964 to house swimming and diving events in the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics; word is that the design also inspired Frei Otto's arena designs for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.
The arena holds somewhere in the vicinity of 13,000 people and is now primarily used for ice hockey and basketball - but also was used for the 2010 World Judo Championships, and J-Pop star Ayumi Hamasaki has most of her Tokyo concerts here.
You’ll still find the structures in obscure narrow alleyways in downtown areas, or even in parts of Ginza - one of the most luxurious shopping districts in the world and the most expensive real estate in Japan - like this samurai armor shop (right) that I stumbled across last year.
I’m talking up architecture.
And no, not the newer, over-the-top miracles of stone, glass, plastics and metals that crop up in Odaiba and Ginza and Aoyama. This month I decided to peer instead into the rear vision mirror, looking for the sense of history that (sometimes) feels like it’s sadly lacking in this metropolis.
You can forget the ancient temples and shrines; they already get plaudits even though most of them have been recommissioned or rebuilt after the general destruction of the Great Kanto earthquake (1923), fires, and the Allied carpet bombings during World War 2.
So what precisely am I thinking?
Well, the wooden abodes, quite often plastered; they’re simple houses, shops and other treats with shoji doors and strange takes on the “bay window” concept.
You’ll see them poking out behind people in old Japanese movies like Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) and Akira Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel (1948) or Ikiru (1952), most built before or during the Taisho period (1912-26) or early Showa era (1926-89).
When I moved into my apartment in Okusawa, near Jiyugaoka, five years ago there was a brilliant two story derelict house just round the corner (see picture above left). As-yet-unslain curiosity cat that I am, I just had to investigate.
The place was open to the street, yet—as per most Japanese derelict abodes—no squatters had ever lived there. In the drawers were old clothes including dusty kimonos, and while the tatami mats were water-logged and buckled up, and the building wasn’t in the best condition, it could’ve been fairly easily renovated.
Six months later it was torn down and replaced with a car park for the apartment block next door.
* The remainder of this self-opinionated rant is online now @ FORCES OF GEEK.
I'm still reeling and coming to terms with the news that anime filmmaker, screenwriter and manga-ka Satoshi Kon (今 敏), passed away on August 24 after a struggle with pancreatic cancer.
He was just 46 years of age, and therefore only a year older than myself.
But the list of Kon's achievements is a staggering one, and for me he was one of Japan's three leading anime directors, right up there with Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) and Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away).
After all Kon - a true auteur - was responsible for the superb anime movies Perfect Blue (1998), Millennium Actress (2001) and Paprika (2006), along with the TV series Paranoia Agent.
Millennium Actress remains my favourite Kon movie.
It's as heart-wrenching as it is invigorating - and combines drama with tragedy, comedy with historical fancy, moments of action and violence with a piquant sense of whimsy.
The story itself, on the surface, is deceptively simple.
A film crew set out to make documentary on a reclusive, elderly actress named Chiyoko Fujiwara - but what follows is a blurring of reality, a tectonic, unpredictable shift in time-lines, and a haphazard association with the plot lines in the old movies that made Fujiwara famous.
Add to this the actress’ long-time unrequited love, and an equally lengthy secret crush felt by the documentary crew’s director, the devastation of Japan in World War 2, samurai battles, vindictive secret police, and rocket ship exploration – all of it somehow tied together beautifully by Kon – and you have yourself an anime masterpiece.
The influences themselves are rich enough to dwell upon – from Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957), which rewrote Shakespeare’s Macbeth in a samurai context, to the real-life actress Setsuko Hara, famous from the 1940s to the ‘60s in movies by Kurosawa (The Idiot, 1951) and Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story, 1953), who suddenly withdrew from public life in 1963, the same year that Ozu died, and has only been viewed once or twice in the ensuing 45 years by the prying Japanese media. Meanwhile, Kon's Paprika is arguably to Inception precisely what Oshii's Ghost in the Shell was to The Matrix.
Late last year I had the chance to interview Kon-sama and the resulting article was published in the January 2010 issue of Impact magazine over in the UK. I forwarded on a copy of the article to him and he e-mailed me back in January to say "It will be good for my English studying. Thank you."
Which was typical of Satoshi Kon in my all-too-brief experience of dealing with a man who turned out to be humourous, genial, thoughtful, thought-provoking, and fun - he even contributed to my long-winded piece on sake.
So, as one struggling way to pass on my own personal kudos, here is much of that interview, promised in this blog a few months back. The insights are at times inspiring as much as enlightening regarding his essential body of work.
INTERVIEW - OCTOBER 2009
Why do you enjoy directing movies, and which part of creating them makes you the happiest?
“I find joy in the entire film-making process – I really enjoy every single moment along the way. From assembling the script to begin establishing the world view, then on into character designs and art setting, story boarding, and collaboration work with lots of staff for the actual drawing and background art – this all makes for a stimulating experience, and there’s so much stuff I want to do in editing or in the acoustic work, too. Whatever the output, be it a sentence, a picture, or a sound, concreting the idea together is someone who is, after all, nothing but an anime fan.
“After the movie is completed, visuals creation or interview to advertise is a very important mission too; these are great opportunities to look back at the way I directed and what kind of movie I ended up with. In the course of film making, there are actually no jobs I don’t appreciate – though of course it’s not fun to give up or compromise an idea for the budget or tight schedule, I believe those decisions are going to be beneficial for the entire movie world, so I never think those are negative things either. A strategic withdrawal is sometimes necessary, and it’s an important decision to make.
“Among these fun-filled processes, I prefer doing the storyboard.
"When I’m doing this, I really feel like I’m ‘making the movie’. Even if they’re the still images, the story is visualized by connecting pictures, so it’s like letting the actors act, shoot them, and edit them – all on paper.
"Everything about my film making is on the storyboard.
“I was originally a manga artist – so therefore, controlling the storyboard is really easy for me since the style of story boarding is like doing comics. Manga artists are good at drawing tiny pictures within the frames; the only major difference between storyboarding and a comic is the fact that the storyboard is the blueprint to move characters, and the time flow, divided by 24 frames per second, becomes the important factor.”
How would you personally describe the kind of movies you make?
“It’s difficult to answer to that kind of wide-ranging question!” [laughs]
“But if I do dare to put into words the movies I have been directed, it would be ‘fantasy based on a world that has reality’. To only describe the real world is not enough, and only fantasy is far too sweet to have. Therefore, I’ve wanted to make something that has reality in its foundations, then take off from there and fly into the domain called fantasy. Quite basically this mentality hasn’t changed since I was drawing manga, before making anime. I can’t say for sure that this philosphy will continue into the future, however.”
It's been said that "Satoshi Kon's forte [speciality] is in the surreal interaction of reality and dreams - which often drift into nightmares." Would you agree?
“Of course. The interaction of reality and dreams is a motif I still have interest in, and I keep bringing it back into my work. Since my debut Perfect Blue [1998] got attention for that motif, I intentionally used it as a central focal point in Millennium Actress, Paprika, and so on. I think the way in which I’ve handled this, along with my workmanship skills, have got better and better after using this motif several times.
“However, it’s not healthy to keep using the same motif again and again, neither for the audience nor creators – even when utilized in a different context. So I think it’s better for me to steer away from ‘the surreal interaction of reality and dreams’ for a while, though I’m still interested in the theme.”
You did your first script for Magnetic Rose, directed by Koji Morimoto and based on the work of Katsuhiro Otomo, in 1995. How was that experience for you?
"Magnetic Rose became the movie that gave me the first opportunity to use the ‘interaction of reality and dreams’ concept, but at that point I wasn’t sure how to place and blend reality and dreams, so my technique and workmanship were simple. Still, there's no doubt the experience with that script led to the common characteristics of my work, and that became the big turning point in my creation history. I was in charge of script, art setting, and layout. I liked the story and visual factor, though at the same time I often felt the differences between my interpretation and the producers'. But I can say that it made me interested in the directing job so it certainly was memorable for me."
Millennium Actress (2001) is a wonderful movie that manages to reflect Japan's changes in the years before World War 2, and since then. Was this your intention?
"The answer can be yes and no; it depends to which ‘intention’ belongs. Originally the idea of Millennium Actress was for the main character, the actress, to run through her subjective time – which in reality is a play within a play – and for that we wanted to describe an eventful life story over a lengthy period.
“Then, while padding plot lines and thinking about the script, the idea dawned on me to insert a Japanese film history aspect and integrate the actress character’s development; it became a movie you can interpret in multiple layers. The notion of change in Japan itself filtered out during the film making process, which I hadn’t thought about in the beginning. I wouldn’t say that I became familiar with history through making this movie, but Millennium Actress is a special film which gave me the opportunity to rethink the relationship between me and my country.”
In Millennium Actress reality and unreality become blurred, and it becomes a story within a story. Could you tell us more about the development of the script?
“The plan for Millennium Actress got started by a call from a producer who’d just watched Perfect Blue.
“I began by thinking about a story which has the structure of ‘trick’ paintings, since the producer told me that he wanted to make a movie that was as much like a ‘trick’ painting as Perfect Blue apparently was for him. The first inkling of an idea was a sentence, and it was this: ‘Once upon a time an old actress talks about her life, but her memory is scrambled, mixed with various roles she acted in, and together this creates a dramatic story.’ I made a rough plot from this first memo.”
It's said that the character of Chiyoko Fujiwara is loosely based upon real-life actresses Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine. Is this true? What other influences shaped her character?
“As the image model, as you say, Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine are the actresses who represented the postwar movies, but I was influenced by a lot of other actresses too. In Chiyoko’s background, the actress who retires all of the sudden is sourced from Setsuko Hara, while the bright smile in the chaos after the war comes from Hideko Takamine’s image. However, those influences are more about the ‘appearance’ images I borrowed; to create Chiyoko’s personality, I didn’t refer to any real actress. Of course, I was going through Ms. Takamine’s bio and many actresses’ interviews, so probably there might be parts I included from those without being conscious about it.”
And then there’s Paprika, the movie Kon released through Madhouse in 2006. The opening minutes of the movie introduce the pivotal character of police detective Konakawa and his recurring nightmare – which revolves around the spliced-and-looped discovery of a homicide victim. You then undercut this traumatic vignette with references to a roll call of Hollywood standards, like Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth, Tarzan the Ape Man, Roman Holiday, and Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, all rolled up into one sweet dream sequence. Which foreign film directors have most influenced you over the years, and why so?
“It’s a difficult question. John Ford, Billy Wilder, Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, George Roy Hill, Robert Altman – it’s endless. I can’t limit myself to the one. For dream sequences and the like Terry Gilliam stimulated me, especially in the beginning of Time Bandits, in Brazil, and in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. These are my favourite movies. For the technique to connect different times and space, I was hugely influenced by George Roy Hill’s version of Slaughterhouse-Five.
"However, for the basic idea of the movie, I think I learned more from Japanese director Akira Kurosawa than overseas directors. I don’t have nerve to say I’m influenced by him, since I just learned, but I often read Akira Kurosawa’s director interviews or his crew’s interviews while making my own movies.
“Of course there are important directors like Yasujiro Ono, Kenji Mizoguchi, Keisuke Kinoshita, Masaki Kobayashi, Kihachi Okamoto, Kon Ichikawa, et cetera, but there is no one like Akira Kurosawa – who produced numerous masterpieces and who defined such strength of image. People can identify his work at a glance. Not only the acting or look, but the theme music, art, camera angles, the light, the tools or cloths... everything.”
ADDENDUM
At the time of our chat Kon was gearing up for the release of his long-awaited next anime movie Yume Miru Kikai (The Dreaming Machine), again through Studio Madhouse.
"This is my own original story - therefore different from my previous work," Kon advised at the time.
"While I was developing the script, I heard about a movie called WALL·E... and I got a little nervous that it might be similar to mine. I can't tell you how relieved I was when I learned that the two stories were totally different," he laughed.
"In The Dreaming Machine, only robots are there. I want the audience to enjoy the adventures of robots who survived even after their parents - human beings - had become extinct. After Paprika, I ended up taking a vacation for over a year, so we've just started development on this. You can see this movie in 2011."
I'm not sure what Madhouse's plans for the movie may now be, or how far Kon had gotten in the production of the movie.
According to Wikipedia, Kon left a final statement on his blog here. There's a translation in English also here.
There's nothing really more to add here, except: Respect. We'll miss you, mate.
Aside from this wayward blog I also get to run an equally aberrant record label called IF? Records, through which we release a bunch of electronic-inclined stuff on vinyl and through digital means.
Most recently we've been able to get stuff out by people like James Ruskin, Luke's Anger, Dave Tarrida, Paul Birken, Wyndell Long, Ben Mill, Dave Angel, Kultrun, Justin Berkovi, Mijk van Dijk, DJ Hi-Shock, Koda, Ben Pest, Bill Youngman, Enclave, E383, Donk Boys, Jammin' Unit and Justin Robertson - people across the board whom I respect and cherish as musos.
Last week the label put out something I've wanted to do for ages: a release focused solely around some of the best Japanese artists currently cutting sounds.
The source material was a track called 'Dry Fruit', put together by the somewhat enigmatic Tsuyoshi K (he doesn't tell anyone what the 'K' stands for), who started out making fringe, left-of-centre electro-pop stuff as Gadget Cassette but more recently changed name to Cut Bit Motorz and at the same time began pushing through more tech-house related sounds.
Funnily enough, even though we live in the same city and constantly email each other as well as remix each other's tunes, we haven't ever actually met.
But that didn't stop us releasing a digital slab of mixes of 'Dry Fruit', in which we got on board some of his more experienced Japanese peers - DJ Wada (Co-Fusion), Toshiyuki Yasuda (Robo*Brazileira), Takashi Watanabe (DJ Warp) and Tomi Chair - to do the rejigs, making it an entirely Japanese putsch that criss-crosses eclectic, tech, electro, house and (dare I say it) a marginally more progressive stance.
Truth is I really dig working with this elusive digital mate and Tsuyoshi is breaking ground with his own work (he recently remixed the Dead Agenda track 'Chaos Theory' as well as Tomi Chair's 'Stroboscope') and you'll probably brush up against the guy more often in future outside of this obscure forum.
"Regarding digital, there are great outlets online through which to dig up music from all over the world, and then share it about - which is fantastic," Tsuyoshi espouses.
"With this EP I've been most surprised about these people actually choosing to do the remixes in the first place, and it's exciting. I want you to listen to them by all means."
Two weeks back for my hack Flash in Japan column over at Forces of Geek I did a feature story on a bunch of cool, talented and rather diverse musicians based in this country (Japan), asking for the feedback on a swag of hotch-potch questions.
We ended up with far more material than we could run in one sitting, so we called that Part 1; without much further ado here’s Part 2 - kept nice and relatively simple - with the further feedback from Masaya Kyuhei, aka DJ Q’hey, Tsuyoshi K, alias producer Cut Bit Motorz, Akiko Kiyama, Ko Kimura, Takashi Watanabe (aka DJ Warp), DJ Wada (Shuji Wada from Co-Fusion), Tatsuya Oe (Captain Funk), Jin Hiyama, Toshiyuki Yasuda and Lili Hirakawa.
Luckily none of these people objected to my more obscure, self-indulgent queries—which this time around all related to that most essential of topics: anime and manga.
