2016 round-up

Ahem. It's been a while.

In case you missed the “memo” (via my far more regular blog here), my new novel Small Change has just been published via Roundfire Fiction in the UK, and it features Roy Scherer and Suzie Miller from the Tales to Admonish series: think a mix of noir, horror, mirth, and homage.

One homage, clearly from the cover art and title alone, is to the great Tom Waits.

On January 14th I put the finishing touches to novel #6, and sent it off to a prospective publisher: 1970s crime-noir-pulp tipping 67,598 words, including the glossary at the back of the book, partially based on my current comic book series Trista & Holt.

Its title is Black Sails, Disco Inferno. Keep an eye on the novel’s Facebook page for updates. 

Otherwise? 

My collaborative comic book project with Australian artist Frantz Kantor – Magpie – is in full flight. 

We just finished Episode 2, but the first one, introducing our fledgling character Maggie, will hit newsstands in Australia in February 2016, inside Oi Oi Oi! #7. I think the fact that we both have strong, inspiring daughters (Frantz has three to my one!) accounts for some of the direction we’re pursuing here. This is hardly some wallflower, despite first impressions. As Frantz put it in an interview we just did, “What a pleasure to work on a smart female protagonist! Like Margo Channing said [in All About Eve]: ‘Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!’.” 

In this series we’re paying homage to, nodding, winking and piss-taking everything – from Roy Thomas to Ghost in the Shell, M.C. Escher wrestling Russ Manning’s Magnus, Robot Fighter, and on into mass-media current affair programs, even 2001: A Space Odyssey, Fantastic Voyage, and Lost in Space. 

Look out for the first installment of Magpie inside Oi Oi Oi! #7, at the beginning of February in newsagencies across Australia. 

Issue 1 has already scored some very nice feedback from Greg Hatcher @ Comic Book Resources (“Cute and funny and really quite gorgeous to look at – Frantz Kantor is evoking the Mad-era Wally Wood…”), Comics Alliance (“Magpie offers a humorous take on a superhero world, and Kantor’s art is nothing like what we’re used to in traditional superhero comics.”), Comic Crusaders (“The art looks fantastic!”), Sci-Fi Jubilee (“This new comic strip is great!”), and Jason Bennett @ PopCultHQ: “Stunning work… from these talented creators.” 

Also out next month, this time in the U.S., is my redux-version of Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat – with me again doing art chores alongside the script. 

The comic’s currently being printed up by Project-Nerd Publishing in America, but you can pre-order both versions here. 

Aside from being over-excited about Magpie for 2016, I’m looking forward to seeing how the latest short film from Tokyo’s Production I.G (the creators of Ghost in the Shell) goes on the international festival circuit. It’s called Pigtails, directed by Yoshimi Itazu (character designer and chief animation director on Miss Hokusai), and I worked on the English subtitles — mostly naturalizing the translation and giving it a bit of zing. 

Finally, music-wise, I still do stuff as Little Nobody, even though I decided to quit the DJing side of things under this name in August last year. 

However, thanks to the very cool Nicolas Lutz, who runs My Own Jupiter in Europe, I’m about to release a double-vinyl LP of Little Nobody tracks made over the past 14 years here in Tokyo. It’s called, appropriately enough, This is Tokio — and you can tune in to the tracks HERE. 

I’ll let you know when it’s finished being pressed-up and is ready to drop — again in the new year. 

And here’s an interview I did with Tarita Weber @ Say What? magazine.

Two New Books Now Available

Quick update, since I’m over-excited as always when these things happen—my next two books are available (early) to order through Amazon.

Yep, I'm being greedy/self-indulgent (tick applicable) and publishing two of 'em.

The Condimental Op collection, officially out in July, is already in the hands of some of my mates if not yet my own, and Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa?—due out in September—is now available for pre-order.

Just click on either novel’s moniker to go to the associated Amazon page. Both even have heavy discounts for any aspiring early birds.

And I’ll love you to death as a bonus.

What have either got to do with Japan? Well, Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? has very little—aside from lead character Pretty Amazonia (pictured here, conjured up by artist Juan Saavedra), who's a hybrid of super-powered girls' anime characters from things like Sailor Moon and PreCure. She even spends time reading a manga volume of Candy Candy.

And she gets around in a ship named the Magnetic Rose (check out Katsuhiro Otomo's 1995 anime Memories).


And there's a cameo by another character that plays on the Fuchikoma 1-man tanks used by members of Section 9 in Ghost in the Shell.

Otherwise, this is a novel paying equal homage to 1930s/40s noir by the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett as it does to sci-fi/pulp and the silver age 1960s Marvel comic books by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Jim Steranko, Roy Thomas, Barry (Windsor) Smith, John Buscema, and their ilk.
 
Set in Melbourne.

The Condimental Op is a collection of noir, surreal stories, comicbook asides, hardboiled moments, fantasy, dystopia, sci-fi, snapshots of Japanese culture, and the existentialism of contemporary experimental electronic music—bringing together recent short stories, older material, new comic book art, and a range of pop-culture articles written about music and Japan from 1999 to 2013. 

Included are articles on bon odori, saké and fugu, along with reviews of Japanese flicks by Satoshi Kon and 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano.

Plus there's a minor spotlight on the joys of working on English subtitles for a feature by Mamoru Oshii.

The cover art is actually by my 7-year-old daughter Cocoa, and I love what she did here.

BTW, hats off to my awesomely indulgent publishers, Perfect Edge Books, and to all and everybody who’s read (or bothers to read) either tome mentioned here.

Got'cha, GATCHAMAN! G-Force is Go!

Last month, I got to be a gaijin extra (think a refugee running amidst fire and rubble) on location for the live-action movie adaptation of 1970s anime series Gatchaman, aka Battle of the Planets, or G-Force.

I'm not sure if it's because I'm Australian, but this doesn’t mean too much to me.

The Japanese obsess regarding the 1972 anime Kagaku Ninjatai Gatchaman (Science Ninja Team Gatchaman) created by Tatsuo Yoshida (Casshern, Speed Racer) and most Americans I know are wild about the repackaged and slightly Westernized 1978 version Battle of the Planets.

While I dug the earlier Speed Racer, I was far more into Yoshiyuki Tomino's Mobile Suit Gundam from the same period — which grants me an excuse to stick in a picture here that I took in October of the 115-foot RX-78-2 Gundam statue in Odaiba.

Still, I was acquainted enough with this other series minus Gundam (the storyline goes that G-Force — a fistful of kids dressed up in bird costumes — protects Earth from planet Spectra and other attacks from an international terrorist conglomerate of technologically advanced villains), to think this would be a hoot, and grabbed the chance.

It was being shot outdoors in the evening in the expansive ruins of a huge abandoned paper mill in Takahagi-shi in Ibaraki, about 2 hours from Tokyo — and under 100 km from the leaky Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

This place was wild — a photographer's dream (if we weren't otherwise preoccupied).

READ MORE @ FORCES OF GEEK.

APOCALYPSE THEN: How B-29 Bombers Burned Tokyo

I think I've mentioned here (several times over) that during the past year or so I've been immersed in the writing of my second book, this time with the focus on Japan from 1929 on.



One Hundred Years of Vicissitude is a blend of historical novel, surrealism, a mystery and noir; there's fantasy and a wee bit of romance in there as well, and I'm always ready for a hardboiled moment or two.

Included in this mix is an homage to classic Japanese cinema by the likes of Akira Kurosawa, Seijun Suzuki, and Satoshi Kon, along with actors Toshiro Mifune and Meiko Kaji.


There are nods to manga and comic books, medieval potboilers, Melbourne, Lewis Carroll, and Osamu Tezuka - along with the only visit to Tokyo by the Graf Zeppelin, saké, an eight-headed dragon, the sumo, geisha, James Bond, the Japanese Red Army, and a lot of other wayward stuff people might expect of me.

Also included is a pivotal dramatic tipping point, one that relates to the fire-bombing of Tokyo in March 1945.

Not long after I first arrived in Japan in 2001, I remember an elderly student, a child in that firebombing of the evening of March 9th and the morning of March 10th, 1945. He recounted a story that the Kanda River ran red. Whether from blood or the reflection of the fires all around, I was too timid to ask.

For the novel I ended up doing a lot of research into that fateful night. After doing so, I abridged several pages to put together a three-page summation. I toyed with this as the prologue for One Hundred Years of Vicissitude - but ditched the notion and instead integrated most of the facts and figures into survivor Kohana's diatribes about the event, early on in the story.

Coincidentally, I was writing up the fictional account here in Tokyo this past March, around the same time as the 67th anniversary of the aerial strike - though I was too immersed in the yarn to notice.

Disclaimers out of the way, let's start with the B-29. You might recall the one from the opening credits of the Watchmen film, emblazoned with "Miss Jupiter".


The American B-29 bomber had every right to call itself a ‘Superfortress’, since the contraption was a flying stronghold.

This was the largest aircraft inducted during World War II, a four-engine beauty flaunting a dozen 50-calibre M2 heavy machine guns mounted in five turrets, and one 20-millimetre cannon in its backside. All that was missing was a catapult.

While the plane’s length doesn’t ring so impressive - 99 feet, or just over 30 metres - the wingspan was 141 feet (43 metres) and it had an area of 1,736 square feet.

The bugger weighed in at 33,600 kilograms, prior to cramming in its particularly lethal payload.

The B-29 pushed the throttle to 357 miles per hour and it had a flight ceiling of 12 kilometres - making it practically immune to ground-based anti-aircraft fire and enemy fighter planes such as the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, which flew slower and lower.

I don’t know how you feel, but all these facts and figures bamboozle me.

In a nutshell, this was a huge thing that was well armed, flew higher and faster than anyone else, and carried a lot of bombs.

“The success of the development of the B-29 is an outstanding example of the technical leadership and resourcefulness which is the American way of doing things,” U.S. Major General Curtis LeMay wrote in the foreword to the airplane’s Combat Crew Manual, which also includes Disney-like cartoons and useful tidbits like what to do in case of snakebite.


YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE @ FORCES OF GEEK.

It has my name on it!

OK, so the first time I saw this was at a shrine, with flowers and sake offerings, at the holier than holy Kamakura, near Tokyo.

I was with my mate, Briony Wright, and we both nearly flipped out - I mean, who is lucky enough to have a beer named after them? Complete with katakana subtitles?

Ye gods.

Ends up the beer was not so cool, though. Bergen Brau is actually from South Korea, is el cheapo (like me), and tastes like crap.

Oh well - the can is funky enough.

Andrez DJ/live soundsystem @ TTAK, Tokyo

Did a crap DJ and sound system set last weekend for the TTAK crew here in Tokyo, and you can download the 60-minute bugger for free right HERE, courtesy of the cool people @ Fun in the Murky:

ANDREZ BERGEN, LIVE/DJ SET @ TTAK, TOKYO 30 MAY 2009

Tracklist:

1. Andrez Bergen - Merian Cooper
2. Little Nobody - Compulsion (Bitch Shift remix)
3. Little Nobody - Compulsion (Wyndell Long remix)
4. Little Nobody - Robota (Jammin' Unit remix)
5. Veronica du Lac - Because It Pays So Thin (Bill Youngman remix)
6. Little Nobody - Compulsion (Luke's Anger remix)
7. Little Nobody - Compulsion (Donk Boys remix)
8. Funk Gadget - Blah Blah (Patrick Pulsinger remix)
9. My Exit Music - Donkey Powder
10. Little Nobody vs. DJ Fodder - Cocaine Speaking (Dave Tarrida remix)
11. DJ Fodder - Busted Piano (A Quickie Opening Movement)
12. Little Nobody - Fear Of A Black Bat
13. Little Nobody - Poiseworks (Funk Gadget remix)
14. Little Nobody - Metropolis How?
15. Little Nobody - Compulsion (Koda remix)
16. Little Nobody - Get Away From It All (AB- mix)
17. DJ Rush - Jack Your Body
18. Little Nobody vs. Someone B.I.G - I, Gottaman (Il Capitano's Contraband mix)
19. Luke's Anger - Working Overtime
20. Little Nobody - Compulsion (Gadget Cassette remix)
21. Little Nobody - Compulsion
22. Little Nobody - All Humanoids Must Not Escape
23. Little Nobody feat. Toshiyuki Yasuda - Robota (Paul Birken remix)
24. Little Nobody - Alright Already (Si Begg remix)
25. Little Nobody - Krinkle Kut
26. Little Nobody vs. DJ Fodder - Cocaine Speaking (Jason Leach remix)

Messy as heck and warts included...

I was also quite smashed, and was getting a fair way there before I started playing at 12, using a turntable, two CD players, an FM tuner, a laptop that kept bumming-up and crashing, an iPod, and a dictaphone. One of the channels (the one with the dictaphone) seemed to drop out somewhere at the beginning of the set, but I couldn't be bothered fixing it.

Tracklist looks terribly self-indulgent, what with all the Little Nobody references, but most of these little numbers are the rather brilliant remixes I've been getting this year, so I just really wanted to throw them out there on a half-decent system. And man they work. The DJ Rush track and the Luke's Anger number I added in 'cos I love 'em. As you probably know.

DJing isn't really my niche these days (when was it? Ha Ha Ha!), especially going principally digital, so it's messy and I know there were lots of annoying mistakes in there and moments when I completely zoned out, focused instead on the next beer or getting tangled in the headphones cord, but overall it went down a treat and at least I didn't bust the crossfader.

Iffy Bizness interview @ Elektrax

There's a brand new propaganda bomb/interview thingy with me up on the way cool Elektrax site, and I'm thinking one or two regular readers here may be curious - if, indeed, there are one or two people who actually peruse this site (slack-arse that I am, I never bother checking stats). Anyway, here's a sample of my crap philosophizing:

“Yeah, I’ve kind of lost count exactly how many names I’ve worked under,” Bergen acknowledges from his base of operations in Tokyo, Japan. “Most of them were conjured up either as a joke, or with specific musical perimeters in mind, but then the lines get blurred and I forget which category I’m supposed to be focused on. It’d be frustrating if I actually cared.”

The interview in its entirety, which some people may find relatively self-indulgent and/or inane, while others might perceive it as historically interesting, is online here.

Hype out.