Remote Psychoanalysis

First, it was three of the 9/11 hijackers, now it's a whole bunch of Mumbai wannabes. What exactly is it about Hamburg that apparently produces terrorists?

I believe I have the answer. It's not that the city is a magnet for, and provides cover to, religious fundamentalists intent on loosing bloody mayhem. As a former Hamburg resident myself, I just think these dudes are fucking bored. Hell, after five months of freezing rain, I was ready to stab a motherfucker on the Reeperbahn just to switch things up.

Freaks and Fire in Japan's Second City

Funny how stereotypes can be so stubbornly self-sustaining. A few years ago, I showed some friends in Baltimore my favourite Japanese TV show, Gaki No Tsukai. Though most found it hysterical (if mildly disturbing), one friend was actually angry with me. "Y'know," she started, "whenever I say 'my friend lives in Japan,' I spend all this time telling people it's not like you live on Mars, it's not completely batshit insane, not a real-life Blade Runner, the Japanese are just normal cats with some slightly different cultural conditioning - and then you show me this. What the hell am I supposed to think now?"

Similarly, six years ago, almost all I knew of Japan was the lunatic notoriety of the Osaka noise scene. Tokyo was forest of steel & neon, Kyoto was all bamboo & raked pebble gardens, and Osaka was an open-air asylum packed with certifiable nutters who'd swapped bushido for bulldozers & fuzzboxes. Of course, after moving here, I saw how coarse & ignorant this assessment was. Tokyo is an omnivorous hyperreality, Kyoto is more than a historical diorama, and any perceived derangement on the part of Osaka-jin was likely more middle-child contrarianism than a hysteria innate to the city.

But after last weekend's Bakuto festival, I take that last bit back. There really is something in the Kansai water, and Osaka people are off the fuckin' hook. Okay, that's a little unfair: any festival will draw a self-selecting (and thus unrepresentative) multitude. Bakuto is equal parts skate show, dub-head soundclash, tattoo convention, and experimental rock extravaganza - none of which screams "mainstream appeal." But if I threw a loudly-'n'-proudly "countercultural" festival in Tokyo, I'd likely draw as many reactionary nationalists ("Death to post-modern demographics!") as anyone. I certainly couldn't expect the diverse congregation of J-dreads, mori gyaru, baggie skaters, gangsta pseuds, techno-hippies, hardcore punks, fashionistas, greasers, tweakers, pushers, enforcers, Vice mag devotees, expat Williamsburg/Brighton wannabes, aloof chin-strokers, awkward tag-alongs, and unhinged musos that populated Bakuto.

Immediately striking is the festival's setting: a disused shipyard, backdropped by the post-industrial rust & grime of the Suminoeku waterfront. Strolling the docks, it's hard to see whether or not the outside world has indeed crumbled into the yawn of the apocalypse. This dilapidation at once encourages avant-gardistes to bring their convention-smashing A-game, yet makes whatever Neubauten-esque mayhem ensues seem merely appropriate to the environs.

My band was playing the outside stage (next to the skate park) in the mid-afternoon. I spent most of the morning people-watching and wandering wantonly. The earliest bands were all the kind of willfully-amateur, pseudo-tribal dance-punk acts that made Wham City famous, despite how dull & gimmicky they are. Watching a band with the exquisitely dull & gimmicky name Ultrafuckers (ウルトラファッカーズ), a Jared Swilley lookalike was trying way too hard to be really into it while simultaneously stonewalling me, as I depressed his currency as "in-the-know" white guy. Tokenism will only get you laid for so long, dude.

Lunch was a Kafkaesque experience that bordered on sensory breakdown - which had nothing to do with the quality of food. I'd slunk indoors to avoid sunstroke, but the second-floor concourse was sandwiched between competing bass frequencies of obscene volume. From above came the indolent throb of house DJs soundtracking the tattoo convention, while below bands on the Gareki stage vied for sonic supremacy with the incessant thrum of the "Black Chamber" drum-n-bass room. The whole building - windows, walls, ventilation ducts - groaned as several streams of sub swam in and out of phase, coalescing into the same ear-canal-clenching whomp as the Inception score. It sounded... no, it felt like a war zone. Seasick and half-deaf, I stumbled back outside.

Happily, Bakuto delivered that epiphany you always hope for at festivals: when you discover the kind of music you knew someone had to be making but had yet to hear. Kyojin Yueni Dekai (巨人ゆえにデカイ) more-or-less translates as "Because I'm a Giant, I'm Big," which explains why frontman Mizuuchi Yoshihito plays atop stilts, exaggerating his already wiry & mantis-like frame. His guitar has the tinny, equivocal tone of a shamisen or wounded banjo, except for the bass string substituted in the instrument's lower register. The bass string is so roughly detuned that it doesn't so much articulate notes as belch concussively; an atonal gut-punch. Skinsman Wada Shinji alternates between the most minimal of percussive accents and blastbeat freakouts, mirroring Mizuuchi's vocals as he leaps from stony blankness to hoarse bellow. But catharsis is always deferred in favour of suffering the anticipation of the next note; restraint and painfully drawn-out pauses become more tensely theatrical than any punk shitfit abreaction. The effect is like mid-'80s Swans if Gira had been a kabuki student instead of a construction worker.

Unfortunately, two acts that I was especially looking forward to - オシリペンペンズ and オニジャガデルカ - were both playing at the same time as my band. Still, we had a healthy turnout considering we were competing for attention with two giants of the Osaka underground. Hell, I wouldn't even blame someone for skipping our set to go watch the Battle Robots.* Don't get me wrong, I think we're pretty good, but not a lot can compete with remote-controlled scrap-heaps going at it hammer-and-tongs-and-flamethrower.

Some acts were less willing to sacrifice their audience share to automated warriors, and fought fire with fire - literally. Following our set was D.D.S., who performed as a kind of checklist for "subversive" noise rock. Bondage masks? Check. Samples of Hitler? Check. Theremin, circuit bending, turntable abuse? Yep. Gratuitous immolation of old televisions? Of course - but these brainiacs had set the TVs atop a stack of old tires. They deliberately started a tire fire. As plumes of noxious yellow smoke rose into the sky, an ambulance came screaming onto the festival grounds. I suppose the authorities reasonably assumed the sudden expulsion of fumes meant some bad shit was going down.

D.D.S.'s vocalist responded to this incursion by clambering atop the fence and hollering at the EMTs, "Dees eez LOCK AND LOLL!" Couldn't really argue with that, eh?

(*) - That's actually my band in the background of this video clip.

Life's Rich Tapestry (Music Edition)

Shimokitazawa is the Williamsburg of Tokyo: a hustle-bustle locus of all things cool & au current that may have been genuinely countercultural a decade ago that is now more populated by tourists & trendspotters than radicals. Why it became a hotspot is a bit baffling: Shimokitazawa stands on the suburban border of the metropolis with nary an arterial road nor marquee metro line to access it. Beyond that, the neighbourhood is a near-unnavigable tangle of tiny streets wherein even the keenest sense of direction chokes in confusion.

At the bottom of a sloping street, in the unmarked basement of a liquor distributor, is Three - arguably the worst live venue in Tokyo. Sure, it's got glossy brutalist decor that screams modernism, and the clientele is tragically hip, but lord does it suck. The PA was set up by someone I wouldn't trust to fine-tune a home stereo: the speaker stacks face inward towards each other at 45º angles, creating a swamp of phase-cancellation that makes every square inch in the room sound different and bad. Then there's the one-meter-diameter column right in the middle of the fucking floor.

But there's something psychically wrong with Three as well. Maybe its low-lying location at the bottom of Shimokitazawa's labyrinth make it a sinkhole for bad voodoo, but whenever my band has played there we've suffered catastrophic, show-stopping technical difficulties. The first time, the bass cabinet blew out and the bridge on my guitar collapsed. A week ago, barely two songs into the set, I broke two strings and the drummer's kick pedal came unscrewed during the same verse. It's enough to make you wanna get medieval on a motherfucker.

The good news is that we've a chance to redeem ourselves tonight at a sightly more upscale venue in Shibuya. The better news is that in a little over a week, we're playing the Bakuto Festival in Osaka. Not only are Osaka audiences as bacchanalian as the Japanese get, the line-up includes some of my favourite bands - Solmania, Oshiri Penpens, OOIOO. A good way to spend a long weekend, indeed. (And I don't even have to do any of the 8-hour drive!)

The best news for the time being, though, is that my latest solo effort, Rogues Gallery, is finally available to you dear people overseas. Six months after its initial release in Japan, the album is now for anyone-from-anywhere to own on cassette. Yes, cassette, but not because I'm capitalizing on Reagan/Thatcher-era nostalgia. I simply ain't got the scratch for a vinyl release right now. But format snobbery aside, it sounds delightfully thick & feral on tape and every copy comes in a handmade cardboard case.

Still need to be convinced of this fine product's artistic worth? Well, you can stream the whole album on Bandcamp and the lead single, "The Bug Man", is available online for free. Lend me your ears and they will be richly rewarded.

Odds 'N' Sods

Just a few non-sequitors strung together to retune my synapses to typing-mode...

An oft-forgotten and neglected stop on the Yamanote beltway is Uguisudani (鴬谷), or "Valley of the Nightengales" - an appropriate name for a labyrinthine pit of iniquity populated largely by ladies of the night. Nestled within the neon smog is a claustrophobic music club called What's Up, a ramshackle dive whose construction-site decor reminded me of Toronto's Bovine Sex Club. I played an improv gig there last night with some friends. The music most often split the difference between post-rock cathartic crescendos and jam-bandy noodling - at least until the last set, when the whole thing went full-tilt-boogie batshit a la Acid Mothers Temple, complete with barefoot vixen writhing around the stage. Mercifully the "key" had become completely unhinged by the time I'd broken two strings and was struggling to play anything other than echoplexed banshee squall.

The return journey from the gig revealed that it was a strange Sunday night all around: a shirtless white man was engaged in a screaming match with several police officers at Ikebukuro station, and as I strode home there were several EMTs scrubbing spots of blood off the sidewalk outside my local station. No other indication as to what had happened.

Meanwhile, the local discount dry-goods-'n'-liquor store has stepped their game up by installing a Muzak system. But instead of golden-age easy listening or chirpy contemporary pop, they've decided that ragtime is the ideal soundtrack to purchasing overstock pasta and almost-expired yogurt. The juxtaposition between jaunty Scott Joplin tunes and the defeated ennui of the staff is cartoonishly tragicomic.

Finally, during our jaunt around northern Japan, my wife & I suddenly began communicating almost exclusively via daft slang. We're fairly fond of odd turns of phrase (e.g. "gong show" for a chaotic or unfortunate event) but it was a little strange to find ourselves quoting Gucci Mane or Dizzy Rascal ("Blüd! Kin ya heeya them sah-rens coomin?") on an hourly basis. Perhaps all that sulfur at Osorezan strangled our grey matter a bit.

Autobahn Kriegeren

Via the always-awesome WFMU blog...


The creative geography employed by the editor is fantastically random. The largest geographic jump created by a single cut is, I guesstimate, just over 3km. Perhaps charting the chase on a municipal map will reveal some secret pattern or message - a constellation perhaps?

What I honestly find so intriguing about various filmic depictions of Hamburg from decades past is how rough the city looks - a bona fide blue-collar shithole with enough character to power the Tom Waits songbook. It's got stubble, grit, and spittle on its chin that makes the Baltimore of The Wire look clean-cut. Who'd have imagined then that, less than a generation later, it would be such a reserved, starched platter of bourgeois predictability?

Green Light/Red Light

There's only so far I can wander into the debate about minimal techno's lack of a certain sumbitch, because I'm in no way qualified: I don't dance, I hate clubs, and the last self-advertisedly "electronic" album I bought* was Amon Tobin's Supermodified. (My one snidely brief salvo: why listen to something labeled "minimal" then complain about its flatness?) But in his reading of minimal techno as a symptom of Berlin's - and perhaps Germany's - cultural listlessness, Mark K-Punk nailed it:

Berlin has in many ways become a capital of deterritorialized culture, a base for DJs and curators whose jetsetting lifestyle is indeed a "bizarre phenomenon". If hauntology depends upon the way that very specific places – Burial's South London Boroughs, for instance – are stained with particular times, then the affect that underlies minimal might be characterised as nomadalgia: a lack of sense of place, a drift through club or salon spaces that, like franchise coffee bars, could be anywhere.

Quite possibly as he was writing this, a British friend and I were busy slagging off Germany for not incubating any place-specific cultural idiosyncracies; there is nothing being created here that is innately of here, that couldn't be found in any number of other cities. I've met my fair share of creative types around both Berlin and Hamburg, but they're all either transients or have their ambitions and attentions focused elsewhere. Berlin in particular functions less as an artistic cauldron than a boho crossroads, a city-sized airport lounge where people encounter each other, debate ideas, exchange contacts, and then hustle off to where ever the real action is.

The Berlin mythology that seduces so many (Bowie & Pop, the Birthday Party, Blixa Bargeld, and Bruno Ganz with wings) was founded on an antagonism that no longer exists. Following the collapse of communism, it seems Germany swapped its aphasia for amnesia, forgetting how to speak as Germans, opting instead to speak as Europeans. Combine this erosion of self with the gentrification forced by an influx of "international 'creatives'," attracted to Berlin's cheap rents and scuzzy cachet (now minus any genuine danger) - that makes for one anonymously monochromatic playground. If this could be anywhere, then why be here?

* * *

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, an unexpectedly melodramatic exchange over at The End Times has Dan apparently "consider[ing] packing it all in." I'll assume the best: that this is a sarcastic jab at the defensive hysteria into which the conversation descended. As self-aware and ludicrously well-read as he is, surely Dan's not going to close up shop because of one dilettante with all the good grace, objective reason, and eloquence of a teenager who discovered Sylvia Plath and Garden State at the same time.

Nor should my second comment be misread as some P.C. plea for civility & offensensitivity. Wasting as much time I do online, I see way too many comment threads descend into coke-head-aggressive lobotomite name-calling of the "Fuck you!"/"No, fuck you!" variety. Reading Dan's deletion of the controversial link and denial of an ad hominem attack, it was refreshing to see someone who'll cool the rhetoric and commit to common courtesy to keep the conversation going while leaving identity out of it, in hopes that it doesn't come to shrill Stuart Smalley-esque self-affirmation and oblivious hypocrisy (e.g. "I'm hurt!"/"I'm strong!" and "I'm classless!"/"So what if I'm bourgeois?").

Didn't work that time, though, did it? Better luck tomorrow, Dan.

(*) Despite being a laptop musician, Tim Hecker's music is sufficiently vague, degraded, hauntological that I'd shelve him between Philip Jeck and My Bloody Valentine, not alongside Hawtin or RIchard D. James.

Painting the 'Burg Rot

Whoop - wrong kind of spree...

With the proverbial Ball-'n'-Chain back in Baltimore for a bit, I've been adrift without her to anchor what rags of a routine I have. To avoid withering into some kind of indie-geek Gollum, self-bound in quarter-inch cables, I afforded myself a few nights on the town, to see what exactly it is people do with other people in consensually-social situations. Evidently, there is a tried-and-true template for an evening out in Hamburg. Please refer to the following instructions:

1) Begin by meeting your free-lancer colleagues and ex-pat compatriots (20% of whom are already plotzed) at a random pub in Sternschanze. Enjoy the bourgeois-bohemian ambience: feel smugly countercultural, because there's a fastastically vandalised cinema-turned-squat across the street, yet enjoy the luxury of overpriced Long Island iced teas & oggling college girls in horn-rim glasses and keffiyehs.

2) As the alcohol affects your auditory acuity, decide to escape to more happening, exciting environs. Spar with a gaggle of intoxicated dilettantes for a minivan cab. (Better to move everyone at once; arranging a rendez-vous is a Quixotic endeavour by this hour.)

3) Arrive on the Reeperbahn right as a single drunk dockworker manages to whup three junkies simultaneously to the delight of onlooking Turks.

4) Elect to patronize a nightclub that isn't overcrowded, not because of its exclusivity, discrete location, or unapproachability so much as its overarching mediocrity. The Cuba libres are both watered- and Diet Coke'd-down (for eight Euro a pop); the shirtless, leather-vested DJ spends more time tweaking his faux-JT hat than making his selections; the women are split evenly between disgusted and desperate; and the men are all too drunk to notice that they outnumber the women at least 2-to-1. The club itself used to be a brothel and currently sports an eyefucking fractal wallpaper that pushes the blacklit ambience dangerously close to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas before you've even ingested any illicit substances.

5) Once everyone in your party has successfully pulled a dodgy Serbian girl (or thought better of it), declare this scene dead and head towards the harbour via the impassably-packed sidestreets south of the Reeperbahn.

6) Find yourself redirected into a dim, woody pub with all the charm & conviviality of a Kentucky truckstop. The ursine barmaid takes her dentures out to sip from her pint and Black Sabbath is blaring loudly from the jukebox. Five of the six customers already seated around the bar are prostitutes on their break.

7) Decide to cut & run either when the sun's first rays strike the high-rise hotels, or when the eldest member of your party leaps atop a table whilst caterwauling along to Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" - whichever comes first.

Mercifuly, not every night out has to conform to such a pathetic & dissolute pattern. I attended one of the most engaging (and physically exhausting) live shows I've seen in quite some time. Not only was the rock brought most forcefully, but I got to shoot the shit with some denizens of my former domicile amidst the post-collapse anti-glamour of Hafenklang. I'm hardly convinced that the operation is entirely legal (or competently run), but not only was everyone terribly unteutonically friendly, there was something uncannily comforting about seeing this once-posh, palacial department store gutted & ghostly, a four-story epitaph to consumer frivolity... now host to a hive of gleefully unconcerned, doom-positive counterculturalists. Dancing on the future's grave isn't quite as gloomy if you've got other people to do it with.

Bodysnatchers

"Oy! Fuck off, you lot! This is my Deutscheland!"

And just when I was finally starting to feel settled in, along parades the peanut gallery. Bloody hell.

I've never been much for mass movements (except perhaps for Bill Hicks' proposed People Who Hate People Party, which I'm sorry never got off the ground). There's something that constricts my throat when I see how many of my friends & former classmates migrated to the same section of Brooklyn; similarly, I feel relieved at having left Baltimore before the city became pop-culturaly name-drop-able - and not just 'cuz the the music sucks.

So to know that I've landed in the buzz-king burg for the Western culutral elite (or at least the luxury classes) awakens my inner isolationist. It gives me no thrill to know that Willem Dafoe kicks back at the cafe next to my local grocer. Rather, I feel cramped by carpetbaggers. (Can't say "squatters" 'cuz Berlin's already rife with the real deal.)

This is not to hate on the city - far from it. It's a fascinating place of many faces. But it rings false to hear the New York Times rhapsodise about Berlin's similarity to "New York City in the 1980s... Rents are cheap, graffiti is everywhere and the air crackles with a creativity that comes only from a city in transition." If memory serves, tags were treated as a plague in pre-Giuliani New York. The great innovators of that era (which is now being historicized and fetishized) were largely ignored and derided at the time. And "cheap" rent is relative: artists from the Big Apple may be swarming to the German capital, but if you're an "artist" who could actually afford to live in contemporary NYC, then of course your coffers are full enough to make rent in Berlin - or Baltimore, Prague, Turin, even Toronto.

The simile also ignores that Berlin is subject to the same modern rubbish as any other "world-class city." Subway fare is triple the minimum fare in Tokyo. Starbucks, H&M, McDonald's, and BMW dealers pepper the polis like overpriced confetti. The commercial hubs arouse little beyond concrete & plastic big-box deja-vu. "Old World" it ain't.

Again, I'm not trying to diminish the exquisite experiences Berlin does offer. But in trying to capture whatever uncanny élan entranced the great resident artists of bygone times, all I find are whiffs of history, yellowed snapshots of a city that no longer exists. The melodrama & nightclub decadence of the Brecht's 1930s Berlin; the drug-addled alienation of an "inland island" on which Bowie & Pop exiled themselves; the post-industrial, politically-charged slow-motion riot of the '80s as distilled in song by Nick Cave & Blixa Bargeld - none of this is present. In the right light, at the right time, my mind adrift just enough, I can feel the breath of of this past on my neck. But I can't hold onto it.

So let Brangelina buy that epicurean condo in Mitte, and Jude Law can hit all the cafés he wants. The hype about Berlin becoming "nothing less than the 'new Paris'" is still bullshit, because it hardly bodes well for a city when its ghosts make more compelling company than its occupants.