Interpretation by Nate Shockey
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"I definitely see my music as an extremely positive thing...for me, it's party music."
Munehiro Narita takes it to the stage. |
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 As we've noted before, Japanese music started to truly get noticed outside Japan with the psychedelic boom of the mid 80s. Keiji Haino's Fushitsusha had gotten the ball rolling in the Tokyo underground in 1978, but the rest of the world got its first recorded taste with 1984's "Psychedelic Speed Freaks," an album from a trio of decibel happy rock freaks going by the name of High Rise. Bands had been extreme before, but High Rise took it to impossible heights of sonic mayhem. Focusing intently on everything that was "wrong" about analog sound (distortion, saturation, and general auditory slop,) they took the chaotic hedonism of bands like The MC5 and The Stooges and took it leagues further than even those bands ever dared go. Recently, High Rise guitarist Munehiro Narita sat down with Jrawk to discuss psychedelia in the absense of psychedelics, the subtlety of mixing everything in the red...and Kool and the Gang. JR: To start off...your first band was called Tokyo? MN: Yeah, we were a No New York style punk band, like Teenage Jesus, or the Contortions, DNA. There was a lot of communication between the New York and Tokyo music scenes...people like Ikue Mori were over in NYC, and Hida (Tokyo's leader) had connections to people like (Maru Sankaku Shikaku/Friction member) Reck. I was personally more into free jazz, and things like Keiji Haino's projects. I saw Les Rallizes Dénudés, Taj Mahal Travelers, Kaoru Abe, and a lot of other new music bands while I was in High School. I heard this stuff through a classmate, Jun Hamano, who was good friends with Haino-san. He started out in Shasatsuma (Serial Killer,) who took their name from Adachi Masao's film "Ryakushô Renzoku Shasatsuma," which was the story of Norio Nagayama. Nagayama had stolen a gun from a policeman and committed these random murders. He was eventually executed. Anyway, after that, Hamano-san went on to Gasaneta, and later Fushitsusha. He was really into that scene, he taught me a lot. JR: How about Masayuki Takayanagi? MN: I never saw him...unfortunately. The free jazz scene had a lot of opposing factions. There were people like Ryuichi Sakamoto, Hiroyuki Usui (L/Fushitsusha,) Takehisa Kosugi (Taj Mahal Travelers, East Bionic Symphonia) playing out a lot, I saw many of them, but never Takayanagi-san. That was just watching, I didn't start playing until I bought my first guitar just out of High School. I think I was 19. JR: Was that your first instrument? MN: Well, I had an acoustic guitar when I was 14, but I wasn't into Japanese folk at all, it didn't interest me.
I was attracted to improvisation, and the power that comes with it. I was interested in that energy, but for my playing, I wanted to see how I did in a more traditional structure...guitar, bass drums. There were people like Merzbow, Incapacitants, people making their own sounds from their own home made instruments. JR: Speaking of those sounds, were you attracted to improv because of its sonics, or were you interested in the interactions between musicians? MN: More as a sonic space, at least at first. The more I played, the more I had experience with performing with people, the more interested I got in interactions. Eventually I was kicked out of (the band) Tokyo! They were punk, I was very psychedelic, blues influenced. Their playing was all downstroke, my upstroke didn't fit. A lot of my influences as a younger kid, i was into punk, rock 'n' roll, and funk. I was really into pre-disco Kool and the Gang, from back when they were an instrumental group. James Brown style jams, that's what I grew up with, and that style was part of who i was. There was American music coming from the (American military radio) Far East Network, and they'd play black music, foreign music. That was my first exposure. I'd listen to Casey Kasem, those sounds were my childhood. I still love that stuff. JR: That's a connection I wouldn't have necessarily made from hearing your catalog, but it fits. What attracted you to funk? MN: I just loved the sound, but at the same time, you had "Superfly," "Shaft," along with those soundtracks, which was the first exposure to black American culture for a lot of people here. It made an impression! I was too young to really participate. I couldn't go to dance clubs, or parties with this music, but I'd hear stories about clubs in Roppongi, but never experienced them firsthand. There was more laid back stuff as well, Eric Clapton, the Doobie Brothers, the West Coast sound, which was different from the East Coast sound, which was heavier, more urban. We got this stuff a year or two after it happened in the States. It was the same with all this. The serious psychedelic scene didn't really hit Japan until the 70s...The Flower Travellin' Band, The Mops. When it happened in Japan, it was pretty much over in America. JR: And, of course, Japan didn't have the drugs. MN: No, only when the bands were on tour! (laughs) At the time of the psych scene, the drugs weren't available, or they were terrible quality. The main drugs back then were sleeping pills, downers. They were terrible in every sense, bad drugs and bad for you. I never heard of anyone actually coming in contact with things like LSD of mushrooms. You didn't really have a drug culture until 1980 or so. Until about '72, psychedelia was just a fashion, but after that, it got more serious.
JR: In the West, the music was inspired by a psychedelic experience: musicians would take the drugs, then create the music. So, obviously, that didn't happen here. MN: Japan is very strict about all recreational drugs. All drugs in general, actually. JR: So people started with the sound, the sonic space of psychedelia, and went from there: psych rock without the presence of psychedelics. MN: The development was definitely different. Which is just as well...the drugs were terrible, very damaging, especially the speed. JR: I'm interested why, with all this background in funk and psych, you started in a punk band. MN: I was into music, but I had just started playing. In that era, that meant you started a punk band. It provided a way for people like me, who didn't have much experience, of getting some time to develop in a musical sense without having to lock myself away in a room, practicing alone for days on end. When I was starting out, the people around me were into punk. People like (Maher Shalal Hash Baz's) Tori Kudo, although he has a strong background in piano. But people were really getting into punk bands, that was the scene. JR: What attracts you to extremity? Your music is very amped up, has a very strong, energetic attack to it. MN: After I moved away from the punk scene, when I started off with High Rise, that's when things got heavy. But before that, I still had stuff like the MC5, The Stooges. What I was trying to do was trying to take the power of improvisational music from people like Kaoru Abe, and move it into rock. The MC5 did that, specifically their focus on people like James Brown, heavy funk. I was trying to take free jazz and heavy blues, and put it into rock 'n' roll. JR: The MC5 were very hedonistic, very positive, reaching for transcendence, much like mush of the free jazz scene. Is that an important element to you? Listening to High Rise, the severity could go either way, joyful or punishing. MN: I definitely see my music as an extremely positive thing, very powerful dance music. Most people don't seem to hear it that way! If you think of what your typical PSF (Records, High Rise's label) fan is into, it's more of a downer, very serious. But for me, it's party music. The first time High Rise toured America, people danced! That was great, very different from Japanese audiences. JR: Does the typical Japanese audience reaction (contemplativeness, passive listening) frustrate you?  MN: Yes! Within the scene, people just don't get into the music on a physical, body level. You've got Jpop in the mainstream, and they jump up and dance as a matter of course. Jpop acts always, always have dancing, jumping around, they're very demonstrative. In the underground, people hate that! There's a real resistance to that sort of celebratory behavior...it's not just uncool, it's almost like selling out, in a way: that's what the majors do, we can't do that! It's really looked down upon. So, with High Rise, we weren't very well received at first. That had a lot to do with major label saturation. JR: Saturation? How do you mean? MN: Starting with the mid-80s, Jpop marketing reached another level. The media got their act together and started selling domestic pop a lot more effectively. The public stopped fixating on foreign music, and since rock was still inherently foreign, it dipped in popularity. When grunge happened in the early 90s, it was huge in the West, but it didn't take hold here in the same way rock trends had in the past. It was popular, Nirvana is still big, but it didn't spawn a huge scene. Domestic pop was much stronger at that point, at the expense of rock. The majors had much more effective market penetration. If you think about the world music scene, with grunge and heavy music, High Rise were actually not far off from the mainstream. But in Japan, we were very underground. (Sonic Youth's) Thurston Moore, (The Dead Kennedy's) Jello Biafra, people like that were talking about us, which wasn't much of a surprise, since we're really not far from bands like Mudhoney, Sonic Youth...but here, no coverage. Nobody wanted to know. My biggest regret is that we didn't make it to America at that time. We probably would have made a much bigger impact. JR: (nodding) When I heard Mudhoney for the first time in the 90s, my thought was that they were a cross between High Rise and Black Sabbath. MN: We opened for them in Japan, actually! Steve (Turner, Mudhoney guitarist) came to our Seattle shows. When Japanese rock first started getting noticed in the States...it tended to be the next generation, the next batch of bands. Zeni Geva, then Shonen Knife, then the Boredoms. High Rise didn't even tour the States until 1998.
MN: It has a lot to do with the way things work here. The reality here is that everybody has a day job, and on top of that, the prospect seemed daunting: getting the visa, paying for the tickets, orchestrating the tour. It didn't even occur to us, really. It seemed like the only way to tour the States was to be enormously popular. It just didn't seem feasible. JR: It's going back to that: I've heard a lot of complaints from non-US musicians that getting Visas to tour has gotten exponentially more difficult in recent years. MN: (nods) Our last tour was in 2000, just before 9/11. It was a bit easier then, but even so, High Rise has gone through a lot of drummers. When we wanted to go over, sometimes we'd have just lost a drummer to the issues he had in her personal life, so we'd play with tour drummers. JR: Why so many issues with drummers? MN: The core of the band is (bassist) Asahito Nanjo and myself, and we've typically had to shop around for drummers. At that point, bringing someone else into the band has extra issues: they have jobs, they have lives. Often, like (Acid Mothers Temple/Ruins') Tatsuya Yoshida, they'll have their own projects. I'd like to do High Rise again, but I want to move beyond the sound we got initially, and if I can't do that, I'm not going to bother. I'd love to do it again, but on my own terms. JR: One thing that made High Rise stand out was the sonic mayhem. There's a lot of aggression in the playing, of course, but the sound is so far in the red that it leaves just as much of an impression. Was that intentional, or as it a by-product of a low budget? MN: When we originally recorded it, the sound was much cleaner than what happened on the record. We spent a lot of time on the mixing process, and really tried everything. Did overdubs, added layers, added effects until we found a sound that had the intensity we wanted. There's a huge difference between what we got on tape initially and what we ended up with on the record. The sound is very much intentional. Those records were created in the mixing room. What we did is only possible with analog equipment. Putting the sound way over the top with analog gives you a certain effect that's completely impossible with digital. You turn it up on digital, it just gets cut off. But on analog... JR: High Rise is one of the first bands I can think of that put that much emphasis on a sound that was, normally, considered undesirable. If you look at past classic albums with distinctively severe mixes, like the MC5's "Back In The USA" or The Stooges' "Raw Power..." People like those records now, in part, because of those sonics, but they came about as accidents. MN: Yeah, I'd say we were one of the first bands to do that. PSF Records was really encouraging us, as well.  I don't think you could really create music like that again...a lot of different circumstances came into play. First, you had the actual music we were playing, then there was the production and mixing. Trying to do that now...very difficult, because it was the result of a lot of things that just happened to come together. JR: What was going through your head? At the time, people just didn't do what you did with that album. There was very, very little precedent for it. MN: As much as it was thought of as being incorrect, or a mistake...that went double for Japan. The listening culture here is centered around careful, passive listening. Everything was recorded very cleanly, the highs and lows were very carefully separated on the sonic spectrum, very clean production. PSF wanted to make a record that wasn't built for lounging with headphones. They wanted a record that was made to be played on speakers, loud, in a big room at full blast. We wanted the same thing, which was 100% against the clean audiophile sound that dominated the mainstream. PSF hated that stuff, we did too, so when we made our own record, we had a very clear idea that what we wanted was the opposite of that. A truly loud sound includes many, many sounds. Headphone music is usually much cleaner, more specific sounds. There are sounds that you get from listening to music on speakers that simply don't happen on headphones. With High Rise, most of my music, actually, I focus a lot on the mid range and lower frequencies. When you listen to music like this, you're not just hearing it with your ears, you hear it with your whole body, which you obviously can't do on headphones. The live experience is the same way, you're feeling it all over your body. That's the way I think you should listen to music. A lot of people think of High Rise as being very lo-fi, but they're hearing our music on headphones, or MP3s, which tend to emphasize the high end. They're not actually hearing us: they're literally not hearing our intent. Digital has serious problems with this kind of sound. That's why we're very pro-analog. People who listen to music on MP3s, on digital formats...right now, deep canal headphones are very popular, and that design has the most difficulty with the high end. But at the same time, a lot of Japanese music, Jpop, tend to focus on the high end. So, ironically, as the recording industry goes more and more digital, the music produced by the Japanese mainstream is going in the other direction.
JR: You mentioned seeing acts like Les Rallizes Dénudés and Kaoru Abe in High School, both fairly extreme artists. Did their aggressive stance inspire you to search for an equally aggressive sound? MN: I'd say so, yes. High Rise is a very physical band. If you see us live, the act of playing is very intense. Very important. The movement creates something inside the sound. You can hear the physicality. The wah-wah pedal especially...I can't deny the importance of the wah-wah pedal! (laughs) The wah-wah pedal has really dropped in popularity back in the day...you had Hendrix, then afterwards interest waned. By the time I came along, they were cheap: what was I going to do, NOT buy one? (laughs) The owner of the instrument shop offered it to me for super cheap: he couldn't get rid of them! It's making a bit of a comeback now. JR: Your new band, Green Flames, is extremely high energy, but with less of an emphasis on sonic extremity. MN: With High Rise, we had fixed our sound together. Green Flames is more me, more about my personal musical tastes. High Rise was very focused, very singular, but with Green Flames, I can throw things in from other genres, I can play with more technical skills, and generally branch out more. We're not totally on track yet: there's all these different strands, like funk, hard rock, all these things are part of who I am in musical terms. I'm still trying to integrate all this and find the best way to move forward. I'm not used to being a vocalist, either! I'm not used to singing and playing guitar at the same time. The influence of funk of psychedelia has been underrated recently, I think. If you look at people like Steve Miller, Hendrix, the MC5, funk's influence is undeniable. Funk was the heaviest music around for much of the 70s. JR: Yeah, but those bands didn't have the concept of sound that you do now. The idea of specifically crafting a sound in terms of pure sonic power was still foreign: they were focused on the sound and volume they naturally made. MN: That's what I'm shooting for with Green Flames. I want to create a powerful sonic space in terms of frequencies and physical impact...then I want to make that space funky. I want High Rise to continue as well. I'm going to play my guitar and hope for the best! (laughs) I think I still have a few years left in me. |
