The Tokyo underground is, well, underground. It's inscrutability has been one of its major attractions, its obscurity a major source of frustration.

Then there's Marble Sheep, and their parent label Captain Trip. Both are helmed by one man: Ken Matsutani, a musician / entrepreneur whose history reads as a who's who of the Japanese underground: he drummed for Keizo Miyanishi's Onna with a teenaged Michio Kurihara, joined White Heaven before they were called White Heaven, and worked at the seminal Modern Music record shop in the mid 80s (birthplace of PSF Records, not to mention a huge percentage of the bands that made up the birth of Japanese psych.) His own band, Marble Sheep, has seen such luminaries as the aforementioned Kurihara and a pre-Ghost Masaki Batoh, among countless others.

And that's just the man's music. There's also Captain Trip, one of Japan's most internationally successful independent labels.  Outside of offering a home for assorted Japanese releases, they've also become one of the world's premiere reissue labels, issuing Can, Neu!, Amon Düül, Pink Fairies, etc. The label has also fulfilled an archaeological function, unearthing previously unheard music from bands such as The Velvet Underground, Pärson Sound, and others.

One article isn't going to cover all this, so today, Jrawk presents the first of a multi-part interview conducted with Matsutani in April of 2009. For this first installment, Matsutani discusses the Merry Pranksters, an ever changing lineup, and illicit substances...

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JR: You were in Onna and White Heaven back in the 80s. Which came first?

KM: I was drumming in Onna first, I think I was...23 or 24. They did a single, then wanted to go on tour...I joined for the tour after the recording. (Onna mainman Keizo) Miyanishi had some musical differences with the guitarist, so he left. That's when Michio Kurihara (White Heaven, Ghost, Boris) joined. After Onna, I joined White Heaven in 85 or 86, although the band was called "White Poppies" at the time.

JR: ...and Marble Sheep started the next year.

KM, Yeah, in 87.

JR: So you never recorded with White Heaven?

KM: I played on a studio demo tape...at that time, White Heaven was closer to New York punk, like Television or Richard Hell. Garage punk, but with some Pink Floyd influence, or Peter Ivers, some psych feeling. Nobody knows Peter Ivers! (laughs)

First Anniversary Live 7" (1988)

JR: So now you were starting Marble Sheep and the Rundown Sun's Children.

KM: Yeah, I wanted the longest name in the world! (laughs)

JR: What drew you to psych? In 86/87, the psychedelic resurgence hadn't really taken hold.

KM: Punk was 76/77, then there was New Wave, hardcore, noise, and industrial music. Then MTV killed rock music. After those music scenes, there wasn't anything else for rock to do. Starting in 80, you had R&B, Hip Hop. So in the 80s, I wasn't interested in what was happening at the time. I went back to 60s music.

In the 80s, getting 60s music was very expensive, and that was only if you could find it. There weren't many reissues, everything was difficult to get. I worked in Modern Music, so I could get it! (smiles)

JR: How big was the Tokyo psych scene in the 80s?

KM: In the 80s, the psychedelic world was very new in Japan, especially in the underground. Most of the bands were new wave sounding, psych was difficult. The scene was pretty small at that time.

JR: Did the scene grow around musicians, or was it more of a record collector phenomenon?

KM: Both. They were really one and the same.

JR: Did it grow around Modern Music?

Marble Sheep's debut (1990)

KM: That, and Alchemy Records. Marble Sheep's first album was on Alchemy, Jojo (Hiroshige, Hijokaidan member and Alchemy Records head) is a friend. He would come to Modern Music in Tokyo occasionally, and we hit it off.

PSF Records was starting at about that time. PSF had very strong choices in their catalog, there were a lot of free feelings, free music, free musicians. There was also Unbalance records, out of Osaka, a No Wave type of label. The Tokyo scene was only a little bigger and there was a lot of interest in the Osaka scene, so the two were about the same size.

JR: The psych scene has a lot of collaborations and membership changes. When you started Marble Sheep, how many people were in the band?

KM: (thinks) I can't remember! (laughs) Maybe twenty members came and went.

JR: Did you start Marble Sheep with a specific idea, a specific direction?

KM: (thinks) At first, I wanted to do a combination of free music and more traditional songs. Sun Ra meets Gong! There were two main members at that time, me and Fool. That was just his nickname! (laughs) He was on the first album.

JR: Do you think of Marble Sheep as a collective? For example, are they more of a traditional band, like The 13th Floor Elevators, or more of a collective, like Amon Düül?

KM: We're both. Sometimes, we'll do a very simple song, but we'll play it like a collective.

JR: When did Captain Trip fit into this?

KM: (thinks) Hmm...maybe '92. It was started to release Marble Sheep albums. At that time, we had (Ghost's Masaki) Batoh, so the second recording was half Marble Sheep, half Ghost in terms of sound.

When I sent the tapes of the second album to Alchemy, they said it wasn't any good. I still have the tapes in my house! Batoh left to form Ghost, and I decided to change the band's sound at that time. We wanted a new approach, and Captain Trip was part of that.

JR: So there's a lost Marble Sheep album?

KM: Yes!

The thing is, in the Tokyo underground, there's this mystique: wearing all black, not speaking, no smiling. I wanted to make sure we were different, that we weren't part of that pose. Also at the time, in the Tokyo underground, there was the idea that you had to be avant-garde, must be heavy, must be loud. That was the Tokyo style. I wanted to stay free, not conform to that style, but I still wanted to perform psychedelic music.

So I chose more of a Grateful Dead direction, but they have great technique, so our rehearsals got very long! (laughs) Maybe three times a week. About '93, '94, we had a small audience, nobody was interested in our sound. But now, there are a lot more jam type bands.

JR: Does the tendency to jam get in the way of the shorter songs?

KM: There's a mix: sometimes we'll put a jam in the middle of a song, sometimes we'll take a jam and pare it down. Improvisation is the basis for psychedelic rock: if you want to play psych, you need to be able to do improv. But for some people, improv is all they can do, they can't play a straight song. So the idea behind doing both is that we maintain our improv fundamentals, but discipline ourselves with shorter songs. Improv alone is not enough. It's too simple by itself.

JR: How about the changing membership? Does that effect the dynamic?

KM: Changing members is painful. Always. I wish it didn't have to happen.

JR: Do you change members to alter the dynamic of the band's sound?

KM: It's always different for each person. Personal character sometimes has a lot to do with it.

JR: The Marble Sheep website says the band possesses "chaos and paradise."

Message From Oarfish (2007)

KM: That just means rock and improvisation. Rock is Heaven, improv is chaos. It's important for us to have fun, but the chaos is important also. The last show, we played simpler stuff...

JR: Do you decide that ahead of time? To play a more song based gig, versus a jam session?

KM: We'll wait until right before the show, usually in the dressing room. It varies.

JR: The site also says you're the Merry Pranksters of the 21st century.

KM: We've always been prankster types. The message I want to send the world is to believe in the possibilities of the future, and the power to live strong. Life energy.

JR: Do you ever feel outside of society? Japan can be a very conformist culture.

KM: Honestly, I've never paid much attention to society in general. You can't completely remove yourself from society, but I don't think of myself of sharing anything with it.

The problem with Japanese society is that they don't so drugs! (laughs) There are a lot of people in the psych scene who have avoided drugs altogether, and listening to their music, you can tell.

JR: Hmmm...do you think that authentic psych rock can't come from sobriety?

KM: Basically, no. If you haven't had the experience, you can't create the music, it's just a pose, just style. People like to copy things, people are good at it. But if you haven't had a psychedelic experience...you can tell. You can listen and tell. But that's the way psych rock is in Japan.

JR: Do you think this inauthenticity is a general problem in Japanese psych?

KM: They want to sell records, and they want attention. And really, in the psych scene, psych people can't play! (laughs) They're not good enough to copy.

The Gate Of A Heavenly Body (2005)

JR: There's a perception in the West that the Japanese arts tend to copy, to shun originality.

KM: Do you mean in terms of spirit, or the sound of the music?

JR: The sound of the music.

KM: Well, you should always do what you want, but if all you're going to do is copy, it's not going to be interesting. In Japan, everyone grew up listening to foreign rock music...there's a tendency to feel that foreign (to Japan) rock music has more originality, and sometimes, the music from Japan reflects this.

In the celebrity world, they'll stick to pop music., and sometimes, the music will happen to sound like rock 'n' roll. That's all there's really been here, at least in terms of the mainstream. Although sometimes, even in that environment, you'll get some people who know what they're doing, like The Flower Travellin' Band.

JR: Do you think there was a "Japanese sound?" Starting in the 80s, the psych scene coming from Japan has been very distinctive. Do you think of Marble Sheep as part of a scene?

KM: When we started, there wasn't a scene, but back in '87, psych was somewhat fashionable in the Japanese underground. We were interviewed in an English magazine a year later, that's when people started talking about us being a specifically Japanese psych band. It really originated abroad, and Japanese scene reflected it back. When there was external attention, it suddenly became a scene.

JR: Do you think there's a shared aesthetic in the Japanese psych scene now?

KM: All we have in common is that we're Japanese. That's it. We're friends, of course, but there's no shared aesthetic.