| Mizutama Shobodan - A Sky Full Of Red Petals |
| Mizutama
Shobodan (i.e. The Polka Dot Fire Brigade...heh) isn't a name that's on
everyone's lips, even in the relatively hermetic Japanese rock scene.
If people know them, it's as the first band from
vocalist/experimentalist Tenko, a forceful, complex personality whose
career has seen her rub shoulders with some of the most important
musicians of the 80s and 90s: Zeena Parkins, John Zorn, Tom Cora, Fred
Frith (with whom she had a son, Yui,) Arto Lindsay, Christian Marclay,
and others. Mizutama Shobodan was a New Wave band, the challenging kind. The kind that was much closer to The Pop Group than Duran Duran, a highly experimental and occasionally difficult undertaking that, like the edgier bands from that scene, took the debris left over from the punk explosion and reconfigured it in ways that were initially daunting, but which made a surreal, confused sense after a bit of attention and repeated plays. Even taking the difficulty of their chosen direction into account, the five piece, all female band experienced some rough going, finding themselves in a Japanese music scene that wasn't interested...at all (they eventually had to start their own label, Kinku Bijo, or "muscle women.") Their debut was edgy enough, an aggressive, dayglo take on the same territory explored by Western contemporaries like Pere Ubu. But it was their second album, "A Sky Full Of Red Petals" (produced by Frith) where the weird truly took off. At its best, non-pop New Wave was an impossible rush of (sometimes conflicting) musical ideas, an orgy of tiny slivers that, taken individually, could be quite accessible, even catchy. "まな板の上の恋" ("A Loving Frog On A Chopping Block") takes peppy keyboards, pounding drumming, and an often rousing vocal line, and presents them without hierarchy: everything's simply laid on the table, with no one idea emphasized over the other. It's bewildering but intoxicating, performed with a tight energy that doesn't leave the listener any time to catch their breath. This can be off putting at first, of course, but after a few plays, familiarity allows some of the details to sink in and stand out, and hooks are all you hear. Hooks, because even though the building blocks could be made of seemingly anything, Mizutama Shobodan, in the broader sense, functioned as a pop band. While the individual members' improvisational experiences clearly played a role in their approach, everything is still verse chorus verse, and the songs are obviously compositions, not free form. The title track starts off with a piano run that could have been taken from a Charlie Brown special, which is then grafted to a dark, mechanical spine and fleshed out with creepy, wailing backing vocals. And that's just the first minute: later additions include operatic trills, atonal note clusters, and subtle electronic manipulation. But it all comes back to that piano bit, a bright little piece of happiness in a maelstrom of confusion. Everything happens together in the end, culminating in what musical convention would call a climax, but which is too fragmented to truly cohere. If I absolutely had to draw a comparison, I suppose The Plastics have some surface similarities: both bands stuff a cornucopia of ideas into pop structures. But where The Plastics followed their pop instincts, Mizutama Shobodan are more about walking a fine line, driving towards their goal while simultaneously reveling in the chaos of ideas and textures. This, their second album, was also their last, with Tenko jetting off to the West to work with David Moss, John Zorn, and others, eventually releasing the wonderful but even more unpredictable "Slope: Gradual Disappearance." Unfortunately, Mizutama Shobodan's catalog remains difficult to track down (both discs were reissued on Tenko's own Shoh label in 2001, but are virtually impossible to come by.) This isn't just annoying, it's bizarre: they were clearly a deeply important piece of Japanese rock history, not just for their music, but for who they were, what they represented, and what came after. One can only hope this band will soon get their (over)due. |