Re-Telling Someone Else's Story

The ability to summon Asperger-ish focus upon a task is mixed blessing: on the one hand, I always manage to complete a project to satisfaction by deadline; on the other hand, everything else gets sidelined. The closer I come to completing a mammoth project, the more I become a kind of music-studio Gollum: a wretched, washed-out creature that exists to the outside world only in rumour.

Then comes the happy day that I achieve my goal and can rush outside, arms outstretched to welcome the world back within me. Of course, this time, it was more a case of rushing outside only to jump back into a cargo van and heave away on a month-long national tour - hopscotching from one great undertaking to the next. Not that this is a problem. I love touring Japan, if only because truckstop service area food actually resembles food. But then the coffee's never strong enough. Trade-offs!

Anyway, enjoying a brief breather between jaunts, I figured it was high time I unveil what's had me waylaid for the past month: my new solo album, a collection of genre pieces & "re-scores" inspired by indelible scenes from various films I love.



Over the winter holidays, as per usual, I spent a couple-dozen hours on planes with nothing better to do than drink cheap whiskey and watch eight movies back-to-back. I actually quite enjoyed most of the movies I watched (with the notable exception Drive) yet found myself thinking, more often than not, that I could've composed a better film score. Perhaps it was the booze talking, but it seemed a wager worth taking.

Of course, unless I was content to sit around & wait for my first commission, I'd have to work with pre-existing material. The initial plan was to re-score a entire film from start to finish, but I couldn't imagine who'd want to sit through a whole movie, stripped of dialogue & sound-effects, simply to hear several variations on a single theme. Instead, I selected a handful of films that whose visual content offered a reasonable amount of stylistic leeway - films that didn't scream out for another blustering Holst knock-off or the moronic thrum of bad techno. From each of these films, I chose a scene or two whose mood & pace would benefit from musical support and set about giving it to 'em.

I continued watching movies for fun in my free time. Recently, though, I'd been revisiting the ol' poliziotteschi, those gloriously amoral Italian cop movies from the 1970s that apparently all star either Franco Nero or Maurizio Merli. So naturally, a couple of weeks into the writing process, I began churning out generic themes to the best & bloodiest of Italian B-movies, attempting my best impressions of maestros Morricone, Piccioni, Ferrio, Micalizzi and - as seen below - Cipriani.



In the end, three of these genre pieces landed on the album; the other twelve tracks, however, were are written specifically to picture. It'd be silly, of course, to compose soundtracks whose visual component would go unseen, so I've made a YouTube playlist of the songs synced with their respective scenes for all to enjoy. So... enjoy!

Paper Napkin Chicken Scratch

Errant observations and imprecise opinions hastily scribbled over the course of three weeks bouncing between several countries...

It takes most directors and screenwriters three-ish films to arrive at either their apogee or the plateau along which they'll comfortably cruise for the rest of their careers. Taxi Driver was Scorsese's fourth film and Paul Schrader's second script. Blue Velvet was David Lynch's fourth effort as writer/director. By the release of The Royal Tenenbaums, you knew a Wes Anderson film would be wealthy eccentrics shot in diorama-style mise-en-scène over an old Kinks song. It didn't even take until Eternal Sunshine to realize that all of Charlie Kaufman's films are basically Annie Hall if Woody Allen had grown up reading French post-structuralists instead of German psychoanalysts.

J.J. Abrams' films follow a reliable formula: one part Spielberg, one part lens flare, and one part daddy issues. (Some would argue, therefore, the proper formulation is two parts Spielberg to one part lens flare.)

Drive is a terrible goddamned movie - the kind of faux-arthouse poppycock that portends to work that style-into-substance alchemy when it's merely a spitwad of smug artifice transubstantiating up its own ass. The pacing would put Jim Jarmusch to sleep, there's as much teal-and-orange colour correction as a Michael Bay movie, and the characters are so stock they're listed on the NASDAQ. (It takes all of two lines before Albert Brooks' jowly Italian mobster says "Wuzzamattawichoo?") Man of the Moment Ryan Gosling spends about 15 seconds of the film acting, and the other hour-forty-minutes-and-twenty-five-seconds playing a mannequin with a fake Brooklyn accent whose "principled" refusal to carry a gun is kind of undercut by the drownings, stabbings, and beatings he delivers unflinchingly throughout the film.

My wife and I are utterly baffled by Ryan Gosling's apparently universal appeal. His much-heralded sexiness eludes us ("He just looks like he's from rural Ontario!" says my wife) and we've yet to see any acting chops above the standard of, say, a guest appearance in an HBO series. Also, his phony Noo Yawk accent just pisses me off. I addressed this specific complaint in two separate conversations with two friends, each a young, cosmopolitan French woman. Both immediately cited Gosling's tenure on the Mickey Mouse Club as the possible source of his aberrant accent. Ah, but that was shot in Florida! If Gosling had effortlessly sponged up the local dialect, he'd sound more like Hank Hill or (if he was really overachieving) Tony Montana. But no, he sounds like a truck driver on the BQE, so how can his accent be anything but fake? To this, both of my friends - separated by three days and 380 miles, totally unaware of each other's reaction - quietly shrugged and said, "Well, he might just be quite stupid."

Do they think Gosling is an idiot because he's a blond pretty-boy Disney alum? Because he's an actor? Or, indeed, because he sounds like a grease-monkey from Gowanus? Whatever the reason, let it be known: sophisticated, worldly French women think Ryan Gosling is a dumb-ass!

Overinflated New Yorker also happens to be Jon Stewart's go-to accent for impersonating morons, con artists, and garden-variety assholes. A canny choice on his part: tough & streetwise though it may be, the New York accent doesn't particularly appeal to many people outside of New York. Still, it isn't as ugly as the native Baltimorean accent, which sounds like a hillbilly crack-baby. Come to think of it, almost every accent is saddled with negative stereotypes. Received Pronunciation is the accent of the learned, the elite, but also the cosmically evil. In the UK, Brummies are idiots and Scousers are thieves. In the States, southerners are gregarious racists, Bostonians are either moneyed pricks or thuggish drunks, and mid-westerners (and by extension Canadians) are benevolent folks so simple they border on Autistic.

As much as I've love to tour its splendid whiskey distilleries, I don't think I'll ever get back to Scotland. My wife says the accent - despite being intermittently incomprehensible - poses a very real threat to our marriage.

Lots of people have a pet accent, one they find ineffably sexy & sensual. Not me: I might find a woman of another mother tongue alluring, but that has more to do with the woman than how she blends her vowels. At least that's what I thought until I saw Marion Cotillard in Les Petits Mouchoirs, swearing a blue streak like she was Linda Blair in waterwings. I can't begin to explain why, but woo lawd was that hot. Of course, I find French women generally fascinating: their faces are like fountain-pen caricatures and their hair is like choreography. The Golden Ratio - thought to be integral to our perception of beauty - seems to elude French features more often than not, which has the unfortunate effect of making many French men look like big-nosed, unshaven pimps. But it also makes the women so much more interesting to look at than their geometrically-regular, Teutonic neighbours.

Of course, it's inaccurate & unfair to suggest that Germans meet some mathematical ideal of physical perfection; that's only half of 'em. The other half look like the mustard algae staining the bottom of the gene pool.

There was a billboard in the Munich train station for a large commercial bank - I think it was Sparkasse - that posed the question, "Which bank is doing what's right for Germany?" in a friendly, white, sans-serif font. Next to the text was the image of a platinum-blonde, blue-eyed young girl, hands planted firmly on hips, eyes fixed sportively on the middle distance. Now then... I understand that as EU leaders (especially German chancellor Angela Merkel) attempt to balance the wildly discrepant economic health of its constituent countries, mutual mistrust and resurgent nationalism is rampant across the continent. But I wouldn't have guessed that a commercial bank in King-of-the-Hill Deutschland would appeal so baldly to some latent Aryan arrogance.

However, if you're intent on discussing Nazi architecture, then only do it after a minimum two mugs of mulled wine so your vocal chords are warmed up and your inhibitions have been properly shellacked. After all, buildings so bellicose & humourless that they look like clenched fists deserve to be discussed only in equally belligerent terms.

The Singularity, European Stereotypes Edition

I believe I've found the point at which total self-consciousness and zero self-awareness fold back upon each other Moebius-like. At least as far as the French and Germans are concerned.



A brief translation of that last bit:

Reporter: When are the regional elections?

Kindly old lady: I've nothing to say to that. I'm an anarchist and I want to fucking destroy all of capitalist society.

I swear, that is what she actually says. As for translating this next item...



None required. Or perhaps none possible.

A Half-Hearted Attempt at Genuine Enjoyment

As the recently-late, formerly great Christopher Hitchens once said, travel - contrary to popular belief - narrows the mind, in that it diminishes difference & spotlights repetition. So it is with the touring musician: the more gigs you play, the more other bands you see, the more other bands you talk about and listen to... the more everything starts to sound the same. This is why so many stalwart musicians are crusty chauvinists guarding the carved-in-stone conventions of their respective genre: they've had to retreat to only the most elemental, primordial iteration of what they love(d) about music to feed whatever flagging enthusiasm they have left for the art form.

The point is that I'm a very tough motherfucker to impress. In the past, this was largely thanks to arrogance (and still is to no small degree), though by now I've logged enough hours as a listener, enough miles as a working musician, and enough hearing damage as an audio engineer that I'm rarely - if ever - surprised. Of course, I still want to be surprised, and seek it like a fiend. On the odd occasion I am surprised, it's not the shock of the new, but the unexpected re-appearance of some estranged sonic friend. No wonder all the contemporary bands that push all my buttons are older dudes who've been stubbornly strumming away since my formative, sponge-brained adolescence in the mid-'90s. Vaz produced one of the gnarliest rock records of the year, Chartreuse Bull, but they're veterans of the hallowed, harrowing Amphetamine Reptile roster. The Psychic Paramount are the most instrumentally enthralling band on the planet, but that is certainly because guitarist Drew St. Ivany and bassist Ben Armstrong have spent almost twenty years in the art-rock trenches. Meanwhile, the inimitable Metatron from Maryland, Daniel Higgs, might as well be one of my parents' old art-school buddies.

The good news, though, is that excellent music continues to be made, and in greater volume that I have time to attend. Some of this year's more experimental releases (e.g. Roly Porter's Aftertime and The Haxan Cloak's gorgeously glacial eponymous debut) were gripping textural explorations that demonstrated an intense, detail-oriented approach to composition - though I still prefer artists whose focus is wide enough to encompass the whole forest, not just the peeling bark of a single birch.

Another Year, Another Holler

1. The Skull Defekts feat. Daniel Higgs - "Peer Amid"
2. Young Widows - "In and Out of Lightness"
3. Action Bronson & Statik Selektah - "Silk White"
4. Tom Waits - "Talking At the Same Time"
5. Obake - "The Omega Point"
6. The Haxan Cloak - "Burning Torches of Despair"
7. The Psychic Paramount - "DDB"
8. Roly Porter - "Corrin"
9. Vaz - "The 2nd"
10. YAMANTAKA//SONIC TITAN - "Reverse Crystal//Murder of a Spider"

Then, of course, there is the record collection. Now that my wife is as avid a crate-digger as I am, we've fast run out of shelf space and now our floor is disappearing almost as quickly. A great many (if not most) of our acquisitions this year have been '60s and '70s Italian soundtracks and funk bibelots, since it's a musical area we enjoy equally. Sure, most of it is breezy & cosmopolitan, much to my wife's pleasure, but there's plenty of strange sound-mass strings & free-jazz bass spazzery to keep an avant-gardiste prick like myself happy. Anyway, here's a few of the tunes that earned the heaviest rotation on our turntable this year...

Fine Vinyl

1. Piero Umiliani - "Le Raggaze Dell'Arcipelago"
2. Ennio Morricone - "Trafelato"
3. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "She Fell Away"
4. Scott Walker - "Rosemary"
5. Buck 65 - "Up the Middle"
6. Roots Manuva - "Witness (One Hope)"
7. I Marc 4 - "Hyde Park"
8. Googoosh - "Shekayat"
9. Piero Piccioni - "Traffic Boom"
10. Main - "Flametracer"

Like Flies

Well, the second-craziest despot to rule a third-world autocracy has become the newest member in Ozymandias' Infernal Big Band. That is, he's dead. Neither will he be missed, nor will anyone hesitate to celebrate his demotion to mere worm-meal as Jong-Il's death is unencumbered by gruesome criminal circumstance. Good ol' fashioned natural causes as opposed to, say, occupational hazard.

That being said, given that no one has the slightest notion what North Korea's contingency plan was once Dear Leader slipped this mortal coil, I'm suddenly very happy to be exiting the Orient for the next few weeks...

Hiding In Plane Sight

The second I go off the grid, several new holes erupt in civilization's creaky, buckled hull. A delusional white supremacist single-handedly shell-shocks Norway; England explodes; and Malawi - my parents' current place of residence - takes a big, bloody stride towards becoming yet another penny-ante despotism. And to think my greatest personal concern for the past three weeks has been a single sickly bat fluttering about the rafters of a drafty cabin in rural Nova Scotia.

I'm going to have to work overtime upon my return to Tokyo to tap out appropriate responses to all of the above (not to mention my recent take-down of John Maus has unexpected renewed relevance and could benefit from further examination). For now, though, it's 1:14am in Vancouver and my wife is pleading with me to turn out the lights, so I'll leave you with an ornery screed I sent a friend from within the grey bowels of the San Francisco airport...

Well, instead of an 8-hour layover in your fair local airport, our inbound flight was 3 hours late and consequently we're stuck in the terminal without any open amenities or services and - because this is fucking California - nowhere to smoke. Fer chrissakes, if I could either smoke or get a cup of coffee, I wouldn't be one wry comment away from a Chris Benoit-class air-rage episode.

At least there's free wi-fi, so I thought I'd wax insomniac a bit about the flight into San Francisco tonight. Good god, it was sold-out economy cabin of living clichés. You'd couldn't have written a harder-stereotyped cross-section of the Bay Area populace. Towards the front of the cabin was a twentysomething black dude reppin' Oakland a bit too hard; also, the long-suffering wife of some Silicon Valley luminary was struggling to corral a newborn & a vaguely bratty toddler. (How do I know she was married to a tech-head? Who else would put an iPod on her infant, an iPad in the hands of a 4-year-old, and not stop talking ever on her fucking iPhone?) In front of me where two late-'30s first-time parents percolating with excessive pride in their bulge-eyed free-range baby which made disturbingly animalistic noises and was mostly charming until he shat himself with an hour left in the flight.

I was sat next to a young Russian blonde who was reading a book titled Why Should Anyone Be Led By You? and, despite being on the chapter about "Managing Social Distance", totally blanked me the whole flight. She had a mole like an anti-melanoma PSA behind her right shoulder. Two rows behind were a couple who weren't really a couple, having just met each other in the departure lounge, and broadcast the arc of their burgeoning flirt-friendship in loud, smug conversation. She actually hissed at the TV screens during the welcome message from United's new CEO, before going on at length about (despite "not really being into nationalism") responsibly representing her country & her gender during her Peace Corps stint in southern Ghana. He reciprocated with anecdotes of his time in Beijing. He was wearing these glasses. By the time the plane had landed, the two had moved on to lovingly (if critically) describing their parents and talking about their "really, like, totally healthy" relationship with their mother's French lesbian partner.

Currently sat amongst a planeful of furious passengers awaiting their connection to Dallas-Ft. Worth. I'm going in search of coffee somewhere in this Dantean mezzanine.

I'm In a Good Mood Today

How good? This good.

Speaking of musicians who got sleeve-tattoos of their influences yet were "ferociously and utterly contemporary"...

Everything Back To Norbal

The jaunt to Hokkaido was a pleasant vacation from the past month's mild panic & lingering paranoia. I'd visited the northern isle a few years before, so it wasn't totally unfamiliar territory - just different enough to unclutter the brainspace a bit. I gave myself a few extra days before my band's tour kicked off, so I got to enjoy Hokkaido's panoply of vaguely odd pleasures unhindered by driving schedules or sound-checks. A few old favourites were revisited - the Otaru Music Box Museum, Sapporo's Ramen Alley - but the highlights were stumbled-on surprises that, with the exception of bathing macaques, were of a distinctly unoriental nature: Japan's oldest concrete utility pole and the Lucky Pierrot burger chain! With its Edwardian-cum-Old West sideshow decor and demented half-blind mascot, Lucky Pierrot looks like a frighteningly dodgy proposition - a gastronomic Don Quixote. But I'll be damned if those weren't some of the tastiest, tongue-titillating burgers I've ever had, and for half the price of the mediocre, modestly-sized grub you get in Tokyo.

One burger joint I'd conversely advise against patronizing under any circumstances is Sapporo's Crazy Burger, not the least for its dull dentist-clinic decor. Their menu challenges customers with the 恐怖バーガー (literally "terrible burger") which, by the menu description, is only made daunting by a fish paddy and some extra jalapeño peppers. Accepting their culinary dare, I forked over ¥800 (around $10) only to be told they were out of buns and condiments and so was served two thumb-sized cuts of raw fish, and not just any ol' ichthyoid: Surströmming, officially the most foul-tasting food on earth. I discovered this only after having shoved both measly slices into my mouth. The taste was something like a beached whale carcass covered in cat piss. Or maybe sewer-snake braised in battery acid. I'm not sure. The shock to my digestive track was so rude that my whole physiology forbade the very notion of further ingesting anything more solid than air. My appetite had been raped. I'm just vaguely impressed I didn't vomit.

Much of the conversation on tour - as everywhere else - centered around the triple calamity of March 11. In Hokkaido, the effect has been almost entirely abstract. The tsunami that hit its coast was little more than a large wave. Also, the island operates upon a separate power grid; the dimming of neon facades has been out of solidarity as opposed to necessity. The only tangible impact has been the scarcity of certain items - specifically certain cigarette brands & Heineken beer - thanks to interrupted supply lines.

I suppose much the same is true back in Tokyo. Searching for evidence of the disaster, the devil is only found in the details: certain items are still rationed in supermarkets, gas prices are hiked, and commuter train schedules are bedeviled by rolling blackouts in certain suburbs. But then, if every daily trivium is touched by the catastrophe, that's not exactly an unperturbed normality, is it?

A fair number of those expats who fled during the madness of mid-March have quietly returned. The psychosocial schism isn't nearly as dramatic as, say, the Hollywood blacklisted versus the HUAC informers, but there's still some strain between those who stayed put and those who split. My post criticizing the "byejin" or "flyjin" who left the country ripped open an especially ugly fault-line in our immediate social circle. For my part, I've refused to ask anyone to take sides in the argument, but given the communicative embargo my "nemesis" has imposed against me, it unfortunately looks as though mutual friends will have to orchestrate engagements rather shrewdly to keep us apart.

It's interesting that another friend & I, who've been the most vocal in our censure of fleeing foreigners, are also the most explicitly socialist within our clique. Because of our politics, we likely see the disaster as an ideal situation to reconstitute the social framework of Japan. Never before has there been such an opportunity to forge lasting cooperation & compassion between the native population and the expat community. For all the times we've lamented the insular homogeneity of Japan, this is the moment when solidarity amongst Japanese & gaijin can transform the country into a more inclusive, diverse, and fluidly-identified culture. It's to our dismay & detriment that, instead, the hysteria & self-regard of many expats has pitched them in stark, unflattering contrast to the stoic endurance of the Japanese.

Inner Ear Balance

Earth Hour - a token gesture at best - doesn't mean much in a country rolled over by blackouts. Having lost 20% of its capacity, TEPCO is running dangerously near its maximum output and has asked for the public to curtail its electricity consumption. For their part, the Japanese have dutifully & promptly complied: tights belts are the new black. This new trend of collective restraint is the upside of that hive-mind passivity that recently emptied supermarket shelves and often drives type-A expats off their hinge.

I personally suspect the electricity deficit could be addressed merely by shutting down all the damned pachinko parlours. But otherwise, the obvious first sacrifice is Tokyo's famous forest of neon signs. A week ago, my band drove the width of the city coming back from a gig, and from the Edo river through to Shinjuku, Tokyo was a literal shadow of its former self. Friday nights are usually a parade of packed taxis jamming streets lined with sloppy drunks under a technicolour canopy; instead, we sped through a chaioscuro landscape haunted by the odd straggler searching for cabs that were all idling outside dimmed train stations. The hostile loneliness reminded me of the grim, grimy New York immortalized in After Hours or Night On Earth.

(Lest I be accused of bathos, let me refine the above description: Tokyo now looks less like Blade Runner on MDMA and more like... well, just any other city on the planet.)

Having shaken off the initial shock, we're starting to understand the medium- and long-term consequences of the disaster: the global consumer economy has been gut-punched by the disruption of Japanese manufacturing, and imports & exports will be unsteady until the Daiichi plant is solidly entombed in cement. Both of the above have direct consequences for those of us in Japan physically unscathed by the catastrophe: no beer and no new iPhone! The horror... the horror...

But this is where my general pessimism pays off. Should the patina of modern convenience completely peel and flake away, I'm ready. I've been anticipating the day when the lights go out and supermarket shelves are stripped bare since I first saw Mad Max. No tears or rending of garments from me, 'cuz son, it's go-time!

I want to be clear about the cut between pessimism & cynicism. I haven't spent my adult life glumly awaiting Armageddon because it's all fucked anyway - that is the joyless slouch of the cynic. My pessimism sits somewhere between Shöpenhauer's and Nouriel Roubini's: those of us lucky enough to inhabit the best possible part of this worst-possible world ought to enjoy it because it's too good to last forever. Every time I set out across this city, I'm filled with a marvelous hilarity. Should I ever have grandkids, how will possibly describe the lunatic animation of this place to them?

During the drive home with my bandmates last week, we had an amusing epiphany. Our singer had titled two songs - both written last year - "Plutonium" and "Atomic Age", the latter of which contains the couplet "I don't wanna meltdown/But this is really happening." Barely two years into his career as a language-mangling frontman and he's already giving Mark E. Smith a run for his money as rock's preeminent psychic. The drummer immediately demanded the singer start writing some happier goddamned songs before he kills us all.

It's been good to get back to gigging. Aside from restoring a sense of regular purpose, it kills the solitary paranoia of disaster to see friends and swap where-were-you-when stories. Next week, we're off to Hokkaido for a run of shows across Japan's northernmost isle. Nothing like a short vacation from the capitol to clean off the cold sweat & fear-spun cobwebs of the past three weeks.

But now another potential casualty of the disaster could be Japan's live music circuit. Not only have dozens of foreign acts (who bring in the big money) canceled their Japanese tours, but rolling blackouts pose a clear danger to the functional existence of many venues. In the interest of keeping the ecosystem healthy, we're overloading our live schedule. By playing the same city three times in two weeks, sure, we may split our audience for any given show three ways, but better to draw one-third of our audience each to three different venues than pack one club while leaving two others to languish.



This past Monday, I played an improv gig with Uozu, guitarist for hardcore abstractionists (and my favourite band in Japan) Z. This was only our second excursion into quadramplified chaos under the clunky moniker UOZEB, and though it was a hell of a lot of fun, I couldn't hear myself play a damned note all evening. This may have been because we were augmented by a guest drummer & violinist (who ran through more effects pedals than I did). Bedlam at 120 decibels, but all for a good cause: I recorded the show, and as soon as it's mastered, it'll be available as a paid download with all proceeds going towards the Tohoku relief effort. I'll have it all linked up here as soon as possible.

See you on the other side of next week, and meanwhile - stay outta Hong Kong.

Defined As Disorientation Or a Change of Scenery

Well, I've made good on my promise to crank out that "sketchbook of improvised production exercises." Upon hearing it, my bandmates joked that I need to start grading my records - Rogues Gallery for beginners, Dépaysement for experts - lest some guileless listener looking for Shellac-like sturm und drang get stuck with an album of swampy, tuneless arrhythmia.

Not that the new album is impossibly uneasy listening; I haven't broken any rules left intact by either Brian Eno or the past generation of post-rockers. But Dépaysement would upset anyone looking for the relative concision & geometric construction of my last couple o' albums. On the other hand, the miasmic feedback & undulating drones provide the perfect soundtrack to that long dusky drive, jetlag-enabled insomnia, or snowbound solitude many of us face in the coming weeks.



And with that, I'll catch you all on the other side my own long-haul holiday transition. Pray the TSA doesn't take a dislike to my bearded countenance.

The Cold Hard North

The problem with Osorezan is Mutsu. Poised at the base of the Shimokita-hanto axe-head, it is the gateway to & from the peninsula and, as such, an unavoidable hurdle for anyone who wishes to visit the holy Mount Dread.

Though Mutsu suffers from the same sluggardly pace and surfeit of empty storefronts common to much of northern Japan, it immediately differentiates itself by its North American-style sprawl. Most Japanese cities conform to the global standard of socio-economic topography, wherein wealth & power are concentrated at an urban core and fade the farther they're stretched out towards shoddy suburban estate housing. But Mutsu fits the classic (if inching-towards-obsolescence) North American mold: the decaying husk of a downtown nucleus is ringed by prefab strip malls, car dealerships, and chain restaurants which give it a curiously nostalgic, pre-globalization anonymity. Standing outside the Mutsu train station, surveying the McDonald's, the Exxon service station, the D.I.Y. home furnishing warehouse, this could be Brandon, MB; Decatur, IL; Surrey, BC; anywhere really. Only the garish facade of the pachinko parlor insists on the place's specificity.

Suburban sprawl is only the start of Mutsu's strangeness. At the tourist info office, they handed us glossy-print maps that highlight Mutsu's "nightlife & eatery hotspot" in pink, a colour that in Japan carries connotations far more sinister than girlish innocence. But in a town of barely 60,000 residents, we were sort of stuck for options, so off we went with hopes of finding a foreigner-friendly pub. Sure enough, the "nightlife & eatery hotspot" was solid square kilometer of snack bars, stucco-shedding windowless shoeboxes of iniquity with asphyxiating neon signs that crackled with all the hostility of an electric fence. The only things on the street in fewer numbers than working streetlights were women. Everyone we passed was some leather-necked man in ratty sweatpants.

We eventually found one izakaya with some guileless students stood out front, so it seemed like a safe bet. That didn't stop the young waitstaff inside from being struck speechless by the sight of two foreigners. After a panicked exchange, they hauled the head chef - apparently the only one with any English ability - out from the kitchen to seat us. Once we'd shown that, yes, we did speak some Japanese, the evening proceeded without problem and we enjoyed some grilled chicken before retreating to our hotel.

The next night, I thought steal a few snapshots of this roughneck warren, given that it's the kind of place few foreigners ever visit, even by accident. Except for the photo above, I came away empty-handed. It took little more than two minutes before I realized how obnoxiously I stood out, a lanky John Lennon lookalike armed with a camera in a backwoods red-light district. Gaggles of half-drunk fishermen and farmhands felt silent as I passed, sizing me up and finding me their physical inferior. Nowhere else in Japan have I ever felt such intense, ambient hostility. I remembered how distinctly unwelcome some friends had felt when they'd visited Tokyo's oldest adult-entertainment area. The key differences, however, were that the locals of Yoshiwara are used to seeing foreigners; my friends were traveling as a pair, not alone as I was that night; and they had a pronounced height advantage over any potential adversaries, which I did not. If any belligerent goon wanted to test his mettle by jumping the gaijin, I would've been sausage stuffing. I was one rude gesture away from starring in a Japanese remake of Easy Rider.

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.

Straight To Hell

Yes, I'm going to Hell. Literally: I'm trekking northward towards Osorezan, traditionally regarded as the Japanese gates of Hell. Here's how famed hiker Alan Booth assessed the place:

Osorezan is the most disquieting place I have ever visited. Of course the temple and the lanterns and the eyeless figures were shaped and placed here for a human purpose. We know their dates and the names of the priests who built them, and we know the uses to which they are put. Still, this easy knowledge is belied by their power to intimidate and to awe. Like the yellow stream and the Pond of Blood and the silent trees on the road over the mountain, they are awesome because there is an old god in them - a dusty, crouching, terrible god who does not often reveal himself in the world.

There are places infinitely more disquieting that Booth hadn't visited, say Liberia or the Aral Sea. But coming from a man who put one of the planet's most geographically diverse countries underfoot, such superlatives wouldn't come unearned. In fact, Booth's three-page description of Osorezan's ashen solitude was the primary inspiration for my trip. Whether you're gothy pseudo-nihilist or post-New Age Ouroborosian, any place styled as the underworld's welcome mat sounds damned intriguing. And the Pond of Blood? Talk about awesome! Sounds like a Cannibal Corpse song title. My morbidly-curious inner adolescent is already throwing devil horns in the air.

But it's a damned long train ride up to Aomori from Tokyo. I've already got my reading material sorted (cheers, Ben & Michael!) and have patched together a playlist that complements the rhythmic thrum of the rails, as well as the foggy sense of expectation when having a wander. Hopefully, this will make up for the conspicuous silence of the next two weeks. Enjoy, and click on the mix title to download.

Bulldozer Market

1. Circle - "Andexelt"
2. Serena Maneesh - "I Just Want To See Your Face"
3. Suicide - "Girl"
4. Wirtschaftswunder - "Patre Del Mondo"
5. Moebius & Beerbohm - "Subito"
6. Mayyors - "Ghost Punch"
7. Sonic Youth - "Tremens"
8. Mort Garson - "The Unexplained"
9. Fantastikoi Hxoi - "Na Exeis Ta Panta"
10. Boredoms - "San"
11. Laddio Bolocko - "As If By Remote"
12. Electric Sandwich - "China"
13. Scorpio Tube - "Yellow Listen"
14. Polvo - "City Birds"
15. My Bloody Valentine - "Bilinda Song"
16. The Oscillation - "Respond In Silence"
17. The Stranglers - "Meninblack"
18. The Fall - "Fantastic Life" (Live)
19. The Brian Jonestown Massacre - "Origin of Love"

Tangential Postscript: Desperate for more of my acerbic bon môts while I'm away? I've got a new article (about an old complaint) up on the Mute Magazine website, filed vaguely inappropriately in the "news & analysis" section.

Double Je

Here's an anecdote I've been repeating often this week - I can't quite understand why it's been relevant to the various conversations in which it's come up, but funny enough...

A little over two years ago, I was visiting a friend in Lille, a Dutch-flavoured French city near the Belgian border. In the mood for some fine Flemish cooking (yes, there is such a thing), we wound our way down tiny countryside roads to a restaurant that couldn't have been more European: wrought-iron furniture on the patio! Wood & mortar structure! Implements & spoils of the harvest hung cadaverous from the ceiling! Dozens of exquisite ales whose delicate bouquets & subtle flavours swamp together after the fifth pint! Marvelous. I ate my own weight in dairy & meat that night.

Anyway, because this was a building of antiquarian peasant construction, the toilets were out and around the side. (Reassuring that Rule No. 1 has always been "don't shit where you eat.") Circling back towards the front entrance, a young couple passed me on their way out and almost gave themselves whiplash doing a double-take. Slowing their walk to a foot-dragging limp, they began whispering with beehive-loud sibilance, all the while staring back at me. I did my best to ignore them, until the man blurted out Tourettishly, "Kreestov Wil-ahm!"

"Excuse me?" I had no idea what had just been shouted at me. Was this some strange Ch'ti invitation to fisticuffs? "Kreestov Wil-ahm?" he repeated, more hesitantly. The women chimed in: "Aren't you Christophe Willem?"

Ah, a name! Mistaken identity. "No, sorry." They looked unnervingly skeptical. "You're really not Christophe Willem? C'mon, we promise we won't make a fuss. You're him, right?"

Dangerous territory: I looked like someone worth making a fuss over. What kind of fuss? Would I suddenly be set upon by the local S.W.A.T. team, like that unpleasant incident in Seattle? Was I about to get paparazzo'd and then accused of using my likeness to curry undeserved favour? Who the fuck do they think I am?

Keep in mind this entire exchange was taking place in French, adding a veneer of semantic surreality. "Look, I'm just come Canadian guy visiting friends. I don't know who you think I am." The couple deflated, apparently convinced by the nasal vowels of my affected Quebecois accent. "Oh... well, he's this French singer - god, you look just like him! You haven't heard his music?" They broke into an awkward disco stomp, as though arrhythmic caucasian hip-swiveling would make everything clear.

C'est comme ça, qu'est-ce que je peux, c'est comme ça...

I was unmoved.

Back inside, I was still slightly baffled by what had just happened. Taking my seat across from my friends, I waited for a moment's pause in the conversation to ask them: who is Christophe Willem? Their faces blanked as they flicked through their cranial card catalogue. Suddenly the penny dropped, they gasped and pointed at me like a bodysnatcher gone red-alert.

"Putain, c'est étrange!" Evidently, I did very much look like this Christophe Willem chap, a young performer who had won the 2006 French version of Pop Idol and had since become one of the country's biggest stars. Well done indeed.

But I wanted proof that the resemblance was strong enough to turn heads in a random restaurant parking lot. Back at my friend's apartment, we fired up YouTube and searched for the hit single that had been sung at me (yes, at, not "to") by the dancing duo. Ah, there it was - entitled "Double Je", or "Double I" appropriately enough. Let's have a look...

Fucking hell, it's me! Okay, my glasses are round-framed and I don't half-ass the facial hair whenever I stop shaving, but otherwise... The abominable posture, the Pete Townsend beak, the limp-greasy mop of hair, even the ratty-ass military-green hoodie. I am he and he is me and goo goo ga-fucking-joob.

But the son-of-a-bitch sings in a stratospheric falsetto that would make the Bee Gees sound like baritones. Atop shit disco! Goddamn, this was even worse than all those times drunk salarymen in Tokyo pubs called me "Harry Potter." Couldn't I get mistaken for someone cool? Please?

Yes I can. Now that my hair is greying and I've sloughed off any youthful gloss, I'm compared almost exclusively to my favourite Beatle. (George fans, mad respect; everyone else, get stuffed!) Quite nice to be told you resemble one of the great musical revolutionaries of the 20th century - at least far better than resembling either a cotton-candy French twerp or a fictional teenage wizard.

Shortly thereafter, l'affaire Willem inspired one of my better songs of 2008, "Dinner With My Doppleganger". Yes, I realize it's misspelled. Yes, I should proofread my tracklistings before the record goes to press. So be it. Although Willem really only provoked the title; the song itself is more a meditation about my hypothetical "evil twin," whose yin is my yang and whose vice is my virtue, and the disappointment that we'd be more or less indistinguishable from each other. Not that you'd necessarily glean all that from the lyrics. If, however, you can guess the two songs of which this track is a conscious hybrid, congrats, you get a free copy of my latest album. And a cookie.

Occupational Hazards

Coming off the road is a retread of the same agonizing steps. First: faced with the divine form of a private bed with clean sheets, I drop my gear and sleep for a solid 16 hours. Second: I'm awoken by caffeine withdrawal clawing holes into my brain. Third: as I contemplate my muscle aches & callused fingers over a cuppa joe, I wonder how in the hell I managed to survive going on tour again.

Any working musician who tells you that going on tour is straight-up fun is either lying or facing one motherfucker of a come-down when the drugs wear off. That's not to say touring's no fun at all; it's some of the most fun you can have, legal & otherwise. But touring takes its toll, as attested by the wrecked relationships, band breakups, chemical casualties, and creative burnout it can leave in its wake.

Mercifully, I've so far avoided the most abysmal pitfalls. None of my bandmates have been junkies; no relationships have been sacrificed on the Dionysian altar; any accident has been the kind from which everyone walked away; and I've never even stayed on the road for a single stretch long enough to forget why the hell I play music in the first place. The worst episode of my touring experience - i.e. no fun then, not funny now - was when, in the boondocks of Pennsyltucky, a drummer was suddenly acquainted with a previously-undiagnosed congenital heart condition. A frightening moment, but obviously he bore the brunt of the misfortune. All I had to do was kill two days' time while he was in hospital (though in Johnstown, PA that's a Quixotic mission at best).

But narcotic indulgence, sexual frivolity, or lengthy estrangements can have ill effects even outside the context of, say, the sawdust-floored bathroom of some mildewed punk bar in Winston-Salem. Perhaps the furtive sociality & itinerant lifestyle of the touring musician make such excesses more accessible than if I was working at an office supply store around the corner, but sex, drugs, and nervous breakdowns have more to do with being human than rock 'n' roll.

What's genuinely strange about touring is the quotidian reality of it: it begins & ends familiarly enough (with slumber) and features the same dull hurdles everyone faces in their day-to-day (e.g. inane small talk, the occasional meal, lots of waiting). But this routine is lived through the warp of a funhouse mirror. The waiting isn't for a train or a slow-moving supermarket line; it's for a large, balding, bearded man called "Jerry" or "Bo" to duct-tape frayed cables so you don't burn to death in an electrical fire. The meals bare only fleeting molecular resemblance to food, and the dining establishments are provincially weird beyond a Cohen brothers movie. The small talk consists of the same Q-&-A with a new set of strangers every day, coalescing into such a reflexive script that you begin to wonder whether or not you have anterograde amnesia. What little sleep is had is in a different place every night, usually under dubious circumstances. (You'd think with the infinite spectrum of stains' colour that no one would bother with white sheets anymore.) For want of some kip, the average touring musician becomes functionally narcoleptic, nodding off in odder places than the average Baltimore junkie.

Speaking of which, I don't mean to make the musician's existence sound like the nadir of human experience. It's still nowhere as dangerous as growing up in Lexington Terrace, or as stressful as being an ER resident. But it's an incredibly odd milieu for anyone to choose, given the relative comfort & credibility most musicians willingly sacrifice in the name of the most ephemeral of arts.

Of course, there's no accounting for how people get their kicks, even in such a semi-masochistic schizogonzoid idiom. I wouldn't do it if I didn't really enjoy it, and I appreciate the musical world's capacity for the ridiculous... as evidenced by the above pic (snapped backstage by Misato from Kacica) of GEAR & myself doing our best to look like world-class pricks.

Oh, and since I've made no prior efforts to substantiate that I'm actually in a band, here's the second half of our set from the gig in Osaka last night.

Behind the Counter

There are multifarious venues in which men pursue their ostensibly macho yet embarrassingly geeky hobbies: paintball courses, model shops, video game arcades, automobile showrooms, firing ranges, sports stadiums, and record stores. Each arena has its own unspoken protocols & faux pas, and fraternal jocularity barely veils competitive contempt.

After many years of compressing my music collection to suit my itinerant lifestyle, I finally got back into the record-collecting game - coincidentally just as several friends were doing the same. Our rationales for doing so were myriad: the archival character of a good LP collection; the concerted listening the format forces; our disdain for the contentless stockpiling that digital culture encourages; the likelihood that analog media will be the only ones that survive the imminent collapse of civilization. (Okay, maybe that's just my concern.) But we all grudgingly confess that a chief motivation is that golden smugness of watching jaws drop in jealously at a particular gem in your collection.

The great lie of record collecting is that you can find anything if you just look hard enough. That's like saying you can be a rock star if you just try hard enough. It overlooks the primacy of location & luck in achieving success. I was reminded of this (not that I needed to be) while doing some crate-digging along Oldham Street in Manchester: some speedy-fingered bastard beat me to the last copy of The Fall's tenth single by a couple of hours. Right place, wrong time. But while my leisurely breakfast cost me "Kicker Conspiracy", I was able to score a couple of records well below what I'd have to pay either online or back home in Tokyo.

It only took me about two hours to scour every record store in Manchester's north quarter (at least the stores that weren't dedicated wholly to techno). Mancunian bin-divers obviously rely far more on luck than location to unearth microgroove jewels. It's quite a different story in Tokyo - but of course it is. The megalopolis has 28-times as many people as Manchester, packed into 19-times the space. There are more record stores within a 10-minute radius of my apartment than there are in all of City Centre. Why shouldn't it be easier to find damn near any LP in Tokyo than in Manchester?

The peculiar thing about record-hunting in Tokyo is the method of vinyl's valorization. As opposed to a straightforward expression of supply-V-demand, records are priced according to their cultural cachet - regardless of their physical scarcity. For example: between post-rock's place as a dominant idiom in Japanese rock, and their 2008 reunion tour, My Bloody Valentine are currently enjoying unprecedented popularity among the Japanese hipoisie. This means that it's almost impossible to find a copy of the Glider EP for under ¥3500, even though there are sometimes several copies in the same store. Conversely, Nick Cave doesn't carry much currency in Japan, which means I can scoop up a copy of From Her To Eternity for pocket change (as opposed to the extortive $45 for which it's currently listed on eBay).

In such instances, it's very tempting to feel superior to the shop stewards, as though I've robbed them while staring eye-to-eye. The truth, though, is that pricing records according to their social value is probably another expression of Japan's collectivist tendencies. The record market isn't built around speculation & scarcity; if I'm lucky enough to find an album I adore for a bargain-bin price, it actually impoverishes my social standing, marking me as an outsider instead of ahead of the curve. An unloved copy of an obscure album is the sound of Japanese society shooing me away: "No one cares about your weirdo musical proclivities, nerd!"

Indie Bono-ism

Yesterday, I was catching up on current affairs & cultural chatter over my morning coffee when I saw this:

Yeasayer has committed to join the Polyphonic Spree on a trip to Gulu, Uganda later this year, where the bands will learn about the effects of the Ugandan civil war and perform live in various locations.

Ah, Yeasayer - the band with the hardest-working publicist in indie-rock, proof that in the post-Pitchfork paradigm, a high profile guarantees neither consensus nor support. Why exactly is this quintet of bourgeois-bohemian Brooklynites traveling to eastern Africa? Here's the story: Invisible Children is a nonprofit group that rehabilitates ex-child soldiers from Uganda's civil war; they've teamed with French music blog La Blogotheque to bring occidental indie-rock bands to Uganda to see firsthand what horror Joseph Kony hath wrought and, y'know, play a few tunes. La Blogotheque will film the cross-cultural encounters for a DVD which will be sold to benefit Invisible Children.

Oh, but to pull this off, they need fans of the bands to donate $20,000 towards the endeavour. Kind-hearted consumers can donate their ducats via the Kickstarter website, a "funding platform" whose investors include Pitchfork publisher Chris Kaskie.

This whole thing stinks to high heaven.

For starters, neither Yeasayer nor the Polyphonic Spree is a band that sells hundreds of thousands of records, let alone millions. If Invisible Children wants the M.O.R.-indie audience's discretionary cash, why not recruit acts with a wider fan base? Are Vampire Weekend unable to rearrange their touring schedule? Do the Arcade Fire not give a fuck about the Ugandan civil war? I seriously doubt that.

Secondly, the loop of participants is far too closed for this to be anything other than graft. Bands routinely hyped by a prominent music website get a free trip to Africa, while the publisher of said website gets his pockets lined by donations by the bands' fans - who are expected then to pay again for an entertainment commodity wherein the globetrotting bards will learn valuable "life lessons" from poor, beleaguered brown people. And Pitchfork seems to think the magic words "full disclosure" mitigate the flagrancy of this conflict of interest.

Amidst all this backscratching, it's expected that some money will wend its way towards the nonprofit, but this is going around your ass to reach your elbow. Rather than raise twenty grand to fly a bunch of mediocre musicians to Gulu, couldn't that cash be spent on, I dunno, a school? A mobile clinic? A skills-training program?

After all, why assume concerned consumers will only donate to Invisible Children after watching a bunch of middle-class musos wander awkwardly around Africa, muttering platitudes about what great perspective it lends them (before jetting back to the warm bosom of the developed world)? Condescending juxtapositions of celebrity Caucasians cuddling third-world orphans aren't necessary to appeal to people's sense of charity. Not On Our Watch just donated over $1 million towards the Haiti relief effort, and no one had to watch some damned documentary of Brad Pitt or Matt Damon gawking at bloody rubble in Port-Au-Prince.

Though I'm not the first incensed by this debacle, no one is questioning the nobility or value of Invisible Children's mission; I'd encourage you at the very least to check out their website, if not donate directly to their cause. What's disgusting is not only how integrated into the machinery of capital so-called "indie" music has become ("as in Lady Gaga is Brokencyde is Pavement reunion"), but that the musicians see nothing wrong with this and expect their fans to empty their pockets accordingly. By turning featherweight "ethical" gestures into commodities - like hybrid cars or "Live in Uganda" DVDs - capitalism not only keeps everyone playing only by its rules, it tacitly absolves everyone's guilt about playing only by its rules. The expected/accepted display of rockstar ostentation has shifted from trashing hotel rooms in a narcotised rage, to flying half a world away to be photographed messianically embracing victims of some fresh disaster. As Jessica Hopper put it recently, "is 'I can't afford to go on my trip to Africa' any different than 'I can't afford this special cocaine I'd like more of'? Not really."

Back Up & Way Out

Well, I've said it before, but it bears repeating: Japan is The Land Of Convenience for anything but the shit that matters. It comforts me to know that, at any hour of day or night, I can purchase Hello Kitty flip-flops, a half-gallon of grain alcohol, and/or a six-pack of ladies undergarnments. But when it comes to something like obtaining antibiotics, transferring currency, or securing internet access... count on more red tape than the binding on that mongoloid bastard of an American healthcare bill.

But, for want of proper content, here's a few minor Christmas miracles:

• Finally, the ISP acknowledged that our apartment building is not an "error" on Google Maps, but a proper building, and so finally got us online.
• The next full-length (yeah, didn't know that was in the works, did ya?) is done - barring, of course, revisions, reconsiderations, and mastering next month. Details to follow.
• And now, I'm fucking off to an east African country with a fuel shortage & political unrest. Happy holidays!

Please Turn Off All Electronic Devices

I'm coming home, baby!

Our broadcast will resume in short order. Meanwhile, please enjoy the in-flight entertainment.

Auf wiedersehen!