The Tokyo Concert Experience

  When I first saw Emperor in 2019, just a few months before the pandemic started, it was definitely a memorable experience, my favorite concert of that year. When I saw the announcement of their return in March this year it was a no-brainer, I needed to get that ticket. They upgraded the venue to the somewhat posh Roppongi Ex-Theater which made it an even more attractive option. I got there early on the day of the show and I had the number two printed on my ticket, which it meant I was going to be the second person to get inside the venue. In Japan concert tickets at all-standing shows are numbered, apparently in the order they were bought . It means that the earlier you bought your ticket the lower your number you got. At the venue a staff member calls the numbers in order and people get inside. It didn’t work out this way for this show. They sold two categories at the same price alleging standing and seated areas. Besides a small balcony with probably a hundred seats, the show ...

  I’ve heard a lots of people saying that a piece of music stopped them in their tracks. I remember that happening to me a couple of times. Once was at the Ochanomizu Disk Union Jazz store, listening to Free For All by Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers. The other one was in my car, while driving on my way to class more than twenty years ago. I was driving my beat up 1993 Hyundai Scoupe, going to an afternoon class, when a tune on KXLU made me literally stop and park by the curb to wait until the DJ announced the title. It started with a piercing high pitched distorted sound, almost like an alarm. Then it transitioned to an ascending unending melody line, no chorus or bridge, with layers of guitars over it. Culminating in a more traditional but also infectious guitar-bass instrumental break. The song was Texas Never Whispers , a non-album cut only to be found on the Watery Domestic EP. This was my introduction to Pavement . I discovered them a year after they disbanded this way. ...

  For Mayhem the adjective “infamous” is kind of an euphemism. It is well known that murder, suicide, all kinds of illegal activity and practices of the occult have been part of its history. But even me, someone who doesn’t believe in the separation between art and artist, can’t deny their contribution to music. Black metal owns a debt to Mayhem like no other genre owns to any other artist. They set the framework of it around forty years ago and rarely the genre has deviated from it. On top of that they haven’t been afraid of experimenting adding references to punk, industrial among other genres, throughout their discography. They really are a fascinating group of musicians. This show was sort of a celebration of their evolution and contributions to the black metal imagery. The main reason for me going was the metal shows drought Tokyo have experienced since the pandemic. I don’t know, maybe most of this extreme band members are not too concerned with Covid restrictions and that’s...

  This year felt almost like a pre-pandemic year. It seemed like shows went on in a similar vein as in the recent past. With a few exceptions, like the lack of international artists at Blue Note or almost non-metal shows, the second half was pretty much stacked, it was actually quite exceptional.  My show-going year started in June with the sole Classical concert I attended (I had a ticket for the Kronos Quartet by then canceled their Japan tour altogether). All the artists I saw at the eleven shows I attended I saw for the first time and each show was special in its own way. It was not easy to rank them, but I’ll try it with my five favorites. 5. Otoboke Beaver at Liquidroom. Showcasing their whole catalog with an encore -or should I say several encores- unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, this was a memorable energetic and fun show that also managed to say something original with incredibly musicianship and stage presence. It was the closest to a metal show I saw this ye...

  I’m not exactly an expert on rave culture, but whenever I hear about it I associate it with England. I might be wrong, but I think rave culture was deeply rooted in the UK, especially in the nineties. It makes sense that a reinterpretation of the jazz trio will be inspired by that climatic period of time that anticipates the beat drop in Electronic Dance Music.  The Comet Is Coming not only take musical cues from EDM. Their live shows, as I witnessed in their first headlining performance in Japan, are built around this cathartic aspect found in the climax build up and the eventual drop release. It’s definitely exhilarating and infectious. It’s rare to see a Japanese audience actively participating and expressing joy in the way I saw at WWW that night. The show started with a tasty intro that was more in the Pharoah Sanders vein, with Shabaka Hutchings delivering in the tenor sax a taste of the righteous licks we'll be witnessing throughout the night, with Danalogue on keys ...

  To me The Stooges are not only quite possibly the best band ever, they also set up the template of the rock artist career. Their first album introduced their unique sound with dashes of experimentalism, but at the same time accessibility, perhaps as a compromise to a wider audience but still kept within the realm of the sound that we now identified as unquestionably theirs. The second album goes all out ditching any kind of compromise with full-on experimentation but with a sensual groove that’s definitely appealing. This one feel more like their own statement. The third one too, this time going back to the roots, to a more classicist sound. If the second one sounds like James Brown psychedelia, the third one sounds more inspired by late sixties Stones through a whole lot of fuzz. Raw indeed.    I’m not saying that Dry Cleaning is The Stooges (yet), but their recorded output -pairing the first two EPs into one album- seems to follow the trajectory of The Stooges album ...

  More than fifteen years ago I got a chance to catch a performance of Steve Reich’s Different Trains while I was on a business trip in Miami. To this day that performance remains near the top among the most emotionally intense I’ve ever seen. I remember seeing people sobbing along the string quartet recurring build up throughout the piece. The distinct voice of Reich’s former nanny and that of a holocaust survivor, both describing train rides done during wartime in different parts of the planet, offered a testimony that was both eloquent and touching. This juxtaposition that combines the natural rhythm of speaking patterns with the unrelenting train-like string accompaniment, painted a clear picture of horror, injustice and technology hand in hand. William Basinski is another master of this kind of descriptive music that translates sounds into images within a wider context. Take for instance his best known work, The Disintegration Loops , in which a loop from found sound element...