Geltz!

(NOTE: this interview makes reference to "kiaii," which is a concept difficult to explain in English. It's a combination of adrenaline, aggression, spirit, passion and feel, both mental and physical. In funk it's called "groove," in hard rock it's called "kickass," in free jazz it's called "transcendence." Geltz! themselves suggested the term "manpower" when contrasting the feeling of playing traditional instruments as opposed to electronic ones. None of those quite capture it, although hopefully this description conveys the general principle.)

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JR: Your music is very technically difficult: a lot of fractured time signatures, sudden changes, and unusual progressions. How much practice does it take to get it all down?

(both laugh)

AM: We're amateurs, but we practice so much it doesn't matter! (laughs) We just keep practicing until it's perfect.

JR: How do you decide when something is finished? Many of the tracks on your CDs are very short, ten seconds or so. They're just long enough to finish a brief musical idea.

Kota Tazawa

KT: We'll start out improvising for a long time, then cut everything into pieces. That's where the short pieces come from: they're a complete idea we liked, and we just cut out the rest.

AM: It's not really necessary to stretch it out. If an idea is good, that's enough. We're really a band designed to play live, and these short pieces are building blocks that we use as the mood strikes. It leaves us flexibility to perform to the moment.

JR: How much of your live show is improv?

AM: Maybe five percent. We've already decided on the individual pieces, those building blocks, but we'll improvise between them. It comes from how we might feel that given day. We practice so much that we can kind of sense what the other is thinking, we don't even make eye contact that often, but it's not really improv.

JR: What kind of music did you listen to growing up?

AM: Teenagers tend to have a musical hero, one person they want to emulate. I never really had one, and he didn't either (gestures to KT, both laugh.) More recently, though, I got into electronic music: Tangerine Dream, Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, things like that. There's also electro-acoustic music like Francisco Lopez, Bernhard Gunter, Fluxus artists like LaMonte Young, Nam June Paik. I started getting into all this stuff when I was 25 or so.

KT: I was into abstract music, hip-hop, stuff like DJ Shadow and DJ Krush. Prog rock, also. I'm kind of a hybrid, I like everything! (both laugh)

JR: It's interesting that there's such a strong electronic element in your background, since you don't use synthesizers.

KT: We like the feel of playing music, which you tend to lose when you do everything through computers. It's better to feel the Kiaii! (laughs) We have an electronic base, but we want to convey that feeling with our...manpower? (everyone laughs)

JR: Electronic music, of course, tends to be very organized and exact. Is the electronic influence why your music is so precise?

AM: Kiaii is kind of the opposite of precision, but things get interesting when you balance the two. You really have to keep that balance, though, since if you lose the balance, you lose the interest.

JR: Do you think of yourselves as belonging to a kind of musical tradition?

AM: Not really, we just try to make music that is our own. We actually discussed this when we started, we wanted to create music that didn't really have any specific antecedent. But it's not a philosophy or anything, we just enjoy playing the music as it comes out of us.

JR: You also run a CD label (VLZ Produkt.) Does that work the same way, just going by inspiration?

AM: Yeah, we do that together. I do the recording and find the artists, he does the packaging and design. I live in Tokyo, and there's a lot of musicians that I think deserve exposure. There's not really a genre that we try to stick to, it's just what we like. I'm most concerned about getting the music out there.

Each piece is a kind of document, kind of like a field recording. It's not necessary to always record in a studio: (Folk singer) MoM was recorded at a riverside. We try to find an location that provides an environment that suits the music. Each CD has it's own story.

Fluxus would do that, make a lot of live recordings. When you make a live recording, you can hear the ambient noises, the natural sounds that accompany the music, and it adds to the atmosphere. (Kalimba player) Hiroyuki was recorded in a tunnel, you can hear pedestrians passing.

JR: What about your music? Tokyo is a noisy place.

AM: I work with scrap metal. The cover of the first Geltz! CD is a metal sculpture I made from junk at work. I'll get some sounds from there as well.

KT: I'm an accountant at a cemetery. I don't really know how that affects anything. (laughs)

AM: Maybe spiritually! (laughs) It really depends on my mood, but sometimes the noise of the city sounds like ambient music, other times I'll pick out a sound.

JR: When you started the band, did you do it with the idea of keeping it a duo?

AM: We've had a pretty long history together. We used to be in a band with a few members, a singer and all, but eventually we were the only ones left. This is the fourth iteration of the band. We've been working together for seven years, but Geltz has been around for about two years.

KT: This arrangement works best for me. In the other bands, there would be all these different personalities. I'd have disagreements, but not with him. Overall, I'm a pretty calm person. (laughs)

AM: We're really interested in bonding together to create something unusual, to see what we do as a duo.

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Geltz! is playing on August 31st at the Blue-T in Shimotakaido.

Their MySpace page is here.

Their label, VLZ Produkt, has a MySpace page here.