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.
Part one of two. Part two is here.
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.
 |
| Tokyo's "1979 Studio" cassette
(1979) |
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.
 |
| High Rise's self titled debut
(1984) |
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.
Part two of this interview is here.
