Japanese Noise

that mainliner cd sounds like that because they recorded it with all the meters in the red, not because of the cd mastering or whatever.

*kumura san did drum for mailiner but not on that album altho he is with them on the clip i posted.**i know nobody gives a shit

that'd be mason jones, right?

him and david kato hopkins who ran public bath press were the two gaijin most responsible for bringing western ears to japanese underground music / noise scenes from the mid/late '80s on.

www.discogs.com/label/29647-Public-Bath

www.publicbathpress.com

certainly reading about the japnoise and underground psych scenes in zines made a big impression upon me and was the main reason i went their winter 97-98. it just seemed like something i had to check out for myself.

i'd spent the previous 10 mths working away on an accommodation and per diems deal on a big film and saved everything i earned. i had also broken my right elbow on the 2nd last week of the job and was told by the docs not to work again until it had fully healed. which would take at least 4 mths. so, i bought a three week return ticket to tokyo and off i went to check it out. i was 35 and had never been outside of australia before, didn't know a word of the lingo, anyone there, or even anything about japan at all. just that i want to see some of these bands i'd been reading about for years.

fuck man, i was so far out of my comfort zone it wasn't funny. the travel agent in australia had booked me into a really bland boring salaryman hotel in ikebukuro that sucked and when i went out i was completely lost all the time. i pretty much hated most things about it for those first two weeks...and, i hadn't found any of the shit that had bought me there for in the first place.

for my last week there i decided to move to a nearby ryokan that i'd seen advertised on a pin board in a small local bookshop. it was immediately so much better than the business hotel. on my second night there i got talking to a lovely japanese girl that was staying there. and that, or rather her letting me tag along with her, unlocked the whole place to me.

i ended up cancelling my return flight home and staying for five and a half months. saw a whole bunch of the psf and weird bands that had made me wanna go in the first place and i pretty much had the time of my life.

i really wanted to stay longer but had ran out of money and had no idea how to. besides one guy who wrote for lonely planet guide, all the gaijin i had met there (not very many) were without exception english teachers for one those big language schools there like aeon. i had neither the qualifications nor inclination to do that so i just gave up on living there and came home. 

ha, yeah fuck. sometimes i wonder why that stuff was so alluring to a small handful of us, yet so repugnant to the majority? i know that was the point to a degree. but there was way more to it than just that. why did it appeal to me, i was just a working class high school dropout from a small town. no art school or intellectual pretensions. i just followed my instincts. i don't really think about stuff too much. i just do shit. i've done lots of dumb shit that i've regretted. but i've never regretted following my instincts down the weird music rabbit hole.

Rooting this style of album art 




Both cd's on sale here at 3.90 a pop.

www.kaos-kontrol.org/shop/sale/government-alpha-seventh-continent-cd?limit=100

Completely unlistenable mind you but let's not shoot the messenger here.

david was one of the good guys. i was sad to read that. it was a couple of years ago now. i bought stuff direct from him thru the mail a few times the years and he was alway super helpful. i emailed him just before i went to japan the last time in 2017 asking if there was anywhere in tokyo that might have stock of a couple of recent books i was after. he told me which disc union in shinjuku to go to, but they were out of stock at the time i went. was finally getting around to emailing him about getting it shipped to me when i read that he'd died. big bummer.

yeah i had a few copies of exile osaka. i gave a tea chest with all my old zines to a kid when i was moving away from melbourne about 15 years a go. i dunno, he probably thru them out.

i went to osaka for a few days in early '98 a friend in sydney who had been there a year or so before gave me a number for this guy satoru higashiseto who owed a shop called forever records in shinsaibashi. who, it turned out i had met briefly in sydney five or six years before when he came to see my band play. anyway i rang him up and met him at his shop. after he closed up we went out for drinks and a meal. then he took me to see 'melt banana' and some other bands at a place called fandango. that was cool a place. there were no shows happening at bears at the time.

agree that is probably their best. another thing i had and have no idea what happened to. oh well. its on the youtube now.

  a few years already for Hopkins...damn. He put out a book before he passed, so some great posteriority...I gave my collection of zines, including pretty good runs of early Flipside and MRR from #1 to 30 or 40, to some guy at MRR, Matt Average I think was his moniker, big into zines so at least appreciated.

I saw Hanadensha and Hijo Kaidan at Fandango! Definitely a nice space. Right in the middle of a huge red-light district, Juso. Went there at least once more - it has relocated to Sakai, an Osaka suburb.

Matt Kaufman who did Exile Osaka is still there and mostly focuses on food drink places. He has graciously taken me around to all kinds of fun and funky places for a few years but haven't been to the Big O since pre-covid. Dying to get back. I was there for the first time around New Year '97 because I was staying in Nara. Pretty dead but ended up at some late-night disco and I met this Brazilian woman. My Spanish/Portuguese was way better than my Japanese. We met up at a later date in Osaka and went to the Hard Rock Cafe for god knows what reason but Ozzie Osbourne and family came in at some point! Maybe he was playing Bears!

(Matt has also done stuff for the Japan Times)
www.osaka.com/author/mattkaufman/

These guys were playing in the lobby when I saw the Boredoms:


I played this comp a lot



My first foray into the Boredoms was actually Super Roots 6. I think I had a friend who worked at Reprise and she sent me the tape that I played the shit out of in my shitty Mazda - it's more like fucked-up trip hop and just seemed to fit the shithole chaos of LA circa 1996...

...and matching pillows