Tone Glow 091: Otomo Yoshihide
Tone Glow 091: Otomo Yoshihide
An interview with Otomo Yoshihide + our Writers Panel on Acheulean Forests & Trhä's 'Die Macht Der Feenflamme' and Chiho Oka & Aoi Tagami's 'The Best Concert Ever'
Otomo Yoshihide
Otomo Yoshihide (b. 1959) is a musician and producer born in Yokohama. He was a pioneer in electroacoustic improvisation and has traversed various musical styles that ranges from noise to pop to free improv while playing the guitar, turntables, and various electronics. He lived in Fukushima as a teenager and it was during this time when he would regularly visit jazz cafés and become enamored with free jazz. He would move to Tokyo in 1979 and study under legendary jazz guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi. Otomo would then become interested in ethnomusicology and study under Akira Ebato at Meiji University, learning about Japanese pop music made during World War II and the development of musical instruments during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. He was the leader of the experimental rock group Ground Zero throughout the 1990s, and would continue to collaborate with numerous musicians throughout the course of his career. Otomo has also produced over 100 pieces for film and television. Otomo Yoshihide Special Big Band’s Stone Stone Stone was released in 2022 and can be found at Bandcamp. Joshua Minsoo Kim talked with Otomo via Zoom on September 11th, 2021. Junko Okada provided interpretation.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: What are some of the earliest memories you have related to music?
Otomo Yoshihide: My mother’s side lived in Yokohama and they always had parties on the weekend. The neighbors would get together and then dance and sing. My uncle played guitar too. In the 1950s, there were a lot of dance halls in Yokohama—partially because of the influence of the American military—and my mother would end up dancing at a lot of them. She was a bit of a “bad girl” (laughter). My father didn’t play music but he was an electrical engineer. He made his own radios and TVs and record players—he had all this equipment he would use to listen to music.
What do you feel like is the importance of having watched your father make all that?
After watching my dad, I made my own radio when I was in 6th grade. And before thinking about being a musician, I was thinking of making instruments.
What led you to take the art form more seriously then? What were some formative experiences for you?
The first experience I had was before I entered elementary school. I watched this TV show called Shabondama Holiday that played every Sunday at 6:30pm. That show had comedy and jazz and kayōkyoku. I was always really looking forward to it, and it was the first time I loved music. My second experience was back in the 1960s when I was in 5th or 6th grade. I started buying records, mostly American and English rock, but I was also into group sounds.
Like The Tigers?
Yes, The Tigers and The Tempters. A third experience was when I was in high school, I went to jazz cafés and started listening to free jazz.
What kind of person were you in middle school or high school? You mentioned the jazz cafés but I’m curious about who you were otherwise.
I was doing well academically… I think I was considered a smart but weird kid, and my teachers didn’t like me (laughter). Back in junior high school in Fukushima, boys were supposed to shave their heads. I went up to my teacher and argued with them about how that was wrong. There were a lot of things like that; they thought I was problematic. I didn’t attend most of my classes in high school—I spent most of my time at jazz cafés, though I did go to the high school jazz club. I had to make up a lot of classes in the spring to eventually graduate.
Do you remember the first free jazz show you attended and who was playing?
It was Kaoru Abe in Fukushima. I didn’t understand the music at all back then. There were four jazz cafés in Fukushima and they all seemed really cool, and I wanted to be part of that—I wanted to be cool too. I saw many Abe shows in Fukushima and I started talking to him but he suddenly passed away [in 1978]. That was really shocking. I really wanted to understand more of that music after his death.
Do you remember anything you two talked about?
I remember him recommending different records. One of them was Marion Brown and Han Bennink’s Porto Novo.
That’s a great record. You mentioned how you wanted to understand free jazz—what sort of things did you do to accomplish that?
There weren’t a lot of people playing free jazz in Fukushima, so I knew I had to get out to Tokyo. I had this idea in my mind that Tokyo had a lot of free jazz, but once I went I realized it wasn’t true. When I moved there, there was this guitarist named Masayuki Takayanagi. I wanted to study with him since I played guitar. I studied under him for six and a half years. I learned a lot about music, but even more than that, I learned how difficult human relationships could be.
I heard that there was tension between you two. What are some thoughts you have about it now in retrospect? What was difficult?
I loved Takayanagi so much that I felt like the weight of his influence over me… I just wanted to get out of that feeling. He was a very difficult person, but I do think that Takayanagi loved me too. There was sort of a father-son relationship happening.
Did you ever talk with Takayanagi about Abe?
Takayanagi and Abe were good friends but there was a rumor that they had a fight and that it severed their relationship, so I didn’t talk about Abe in front of him. I remember later on, though, there were moments when Takayanagi would be raving about him. I found a tape of a conversation that they had together. I think they were actually on good terms when Abe passed away.
Do you mind sharing a story about Takayanagi that explains what you loved about him as a person or as a musician?
As for his music, Takayanagi had a really unique sound. He was really noisy and loud—that’s what I liked about him. I was kind of acting as an engineer because I made instruments for him; he wasn’t familiar with a lot of the technicalities of electronics. This was all when I had a really good relationship with him. As for his personality… he was very cute. He said a lot of puns [dajare]. He was a very fun person with his close friends, but outside of that circle, people thought he was scary. He had friends and enemies, and I didn’t like the idea of someone thinking about, “Who’s my friend? Who’s my enemy?” We had a fight about that.
Who were his enemies?
Many other free jazz musicians (laughter). These two sides to him were part of the appeal, though. He was really charismatic.
What did you end up building for him?
Takayanagi used to only use one amplifier before I built a whole PA sound system for him. And a tabletop guitar, which my father made motors for. I wanted to make motors for the tabletop guitar myself but it was so difficult that I had to ask my father for help.
Did Takayanagi ever give feedback on your own music?
(Turns and shuffles around for a cassette, and then brings one close to the camera). I made a cassette tape once a month and I gave it to Takayanagi to listen. I would ask for advice. He didn’t say anything specific—he would listen and say, “Hmm, not bad.” (laughter). I heard from someone that Takayanagi was telling other people that my music was very interesting, though. It was like homework for me—it was really important for me to make one cassette each month.
You said earlier that when Abe passed away, you wanted to better understand free jazz. Did you do anything similar when Takayanagi passed away? Did you try to play in the way he did at all?
It was completely different from when Abe passed away. I was a teenager then and I had not officially started playing music. When Takayanagi passed away I was already a musician. Unfortunately, he passed away right after we had a fight. I had a really strong feeling that I couldn’t copy Takayanagi and that I had to make my own unique music. After six, seven, or eight years, I realized that people overseas and even those in Japan didn’t know about Takayanagi. I felt a responsibility to make sure people knew about his music, and I helped to release live recordings and tried to mention his name when I was interviewed.
If there’s one last thing you could say to him, what would it be?
It would be nothing but gratitude. I wouldn’t be able to exist if it weren’t for him. (Otomo Yoshihide grabs a guitar and shows it to me). This is the guitar that Takayanagi used to play. I feel very fortunate to have it.
Do you play it? Or do you feel like you shouldn’t.
I play it on special occasions (starts strumming).
I wanted to ask how you first met Sachiko M. I think I heard it was at a concert. How did that happen?
The first time I met her was when she was a sound engineer and did sound effects for a performance by Rinko-Gun. I was in charge of music for this theater group. She used a reel-to-reel tape recorder and I was so impressed by all the music she was making.
Do you mind talking about your collaborations with her? Of course you’re partners—how do you feel like you’ve grown together as musicians and as people throughout your decades together?
Back in the 1990s, we toured together and talked a lot about the future direction of music. Sachiko is 11 years younger than me and she was committed to this newer music scene, and I was influenced by that. At the end of the 1990s, she played a lot with Toshimaru Nakamura, Ami Yoshida, Tetuzi Akiyama, and Taku Sugimoto. Back then it was called “onkyo.” It was really exciting to hear something new, to hear something I wasn’t used to. It didn’t matter if it was loud or quiet—it was just exciting to hear something different.
Have you had that feeling with any recent music?
Yeah, there are many different things now; it’s completely different from the 1990s. I’ve been playing with children with disabilities and I recorded an album. This music is completely different from music by professional musicians. I still think there are professional musicians who make interesting music, though. I’m just always interested in musicians who don’t stick to a specific style, it’s like they’re multilingual.
That sort of ambitious multi-genre scope is what I feel defined Ground Zero. Do you mind sharing what goals you had for the group back when it was still active?
I was thinking of trying to do something “multilingual” with that group back then, yes, but when I think of it now, it sounds like such an old idea. To become multilingual is a natural process; trying to be multilingual—that goal is old. Playing a bunch of different genres doesn’t mean you’re “multilingual,” it’s more like you’re dreaming about it, like someone in the rural countryside might dream of the city. When I hear these younger musicians, they’re not even trying, it’s just who they are. Playing with them is really fun. There’s one who’s 25 or 26, his name is Kei Matsumaru and he’s a saxophone player. There’s also the drummer Raiga Hayashi, who’s only 21 years old.
I don’t like talking about the past. When I listen to the music I made when I was young, I still think it’s good, though. I’ve been thinking about releasing unreleased work. The thing is, I want to release it but I don’t want to evaluate what I’ve done or talk about it; I just want it out there.
Are there specific albums you feel like were important breakthroughs, though, for the way you thought about and approached music?
The two most important albums were Revolutionary Pekinese Opera and Filament 1. These two pushed me to get to the next level, like doors were being opened. The album I made with children with disabilities is going to be released and that’s a very important album for me too.
Do you worry about ideas of exploitation with such work?
I don’t worry about that. It’s been 15 years since I first worked with them and they’re adults now—they’re no longer children. I first met them back in 2005. There were college students who asked me to join them alongside other local musicians.
I used to play with musicians from Europe, Japan, and America. But in the last 15 years I’ve been playing with musicians from Korea, Singapore, China, Indonesia, and Malaysia. That’s been really important. Musicians from Europe, America, or Japan have a similar background, while musicians from Indonesia or other Asian countries have a different one. I still feel like I’m growing and getting more experience. And because of that I feel very sad with what’s going on with the coronavirus.
Do you mind talking more specifically about one of these collaborations with Asian artists?
Since 2008 I have had this project called Far East Network (FEN), which has Ryu Hankil from South Korea, Yan Jun from China, and Yuen Chee Wai from Singapore. There is no leader, and we don’t pick a specific location for us to work. When we get invited, we get together and play, and we don’t even talk about what we’re going to do in advance. It’s just four artists from different countries coming together—It feels like eating hot pot.
Are there specific art forms outside of music that you draw influence from?
I’m influenced by Norimizu Ameya, he’s about the same age as me and he does theater, performance, and installations. He expresses his ideas in a really extreme manner, in a way that no one else does.
Is there any advice you’d give to younger artists?
Just do whatever you want.
Do you feel like you’ve done that?
Yes. But I also like to make music for other people, especially for movies. I love being asked to make specific music for others, when I’m not making music for myself. I love making music for Bon odori, a Japanese traditional dance. I love when people can enjoy dancing to that music. When doing something like this, I think about how I can bring joy to people.
Given you like making music for people to dance to, and at the very beginning of our conversation you talked about your mother dancing, I have to ask: Do you dance?
(Speaking in English) I’m such a bad dancer—it’s a big problem! (laughter). I just enjoy seeing people dance.
After the earthquake 10 years ago, I spent a lot of time in Fukushima. I started doing a lot of musical and non-musical activities there. I started to find joy in people dancing and embracing each other in this way. This is when I started doing music for Bon odori.
There’s a question that I always like to end my interviews with: Can you share one thing you love about yourself?
(Mumbles in disbelief and then pauses). Wow… nothing (laughter). I can appreciate a good meal.
More information about Otomo Yoshihide can be found at his website. Otomo Yoshihide Special Big Band’s Stone Stone Stone was released in 2022 and can be found at Bandcamp.
Writers Panel
Every issue, Tone Glow has a panel of writers share thoughts on albums and assign them a score between 0 and 10. This section of the website is inspired by The Singles Jukebox.
Acheulean Forests / Trhä - Die Macht Der Feenflamme (self-released, 2023)
Press Release info: N/A.
Purchase Die Macht Der Feenflamme at Bandcamp.
Gil Sansón: Lo-fi black metal is, for many, the most genuine representation of the genre. The Dollar Tree production guarantees a product unmarred by the assembly line of much modern metal, which makes it more quirky and unusual, but also sketch-like and underdeveloped. Acheulean Forests goes heavy on the cheap keyboards, which somehow feel removed from dungeon synth, and in the more typical black metal passages confound listeners by using mostly major-key chords. That’s the thing with lo-fi, one-man BM projects: there’s no one to tell you how to do anything. The sound is original enough, and when combined with suspiciously tuned guitars and sloppy drumming, the music has an exciting kick. The other side of this split album belongs to Thrä, but besides the same taste for incomprehensible song titles with ten umlauts, the end result is quite different: it’s closer to the ’80s, but has epic ambitions for a bedroom project. To be honest, this isn’t really my cup of tea within the genre; the goosebumps I expect from a black metal record, lo-fi or otherwise, are absent here. But I’d take these guys over a band like Cradle Of Filth any day.
[6]
Vincent Jenewein: The album’s title translates to “the power of the fairy-flame.” Where there's fairies, the goblins can’t be too far away, right? The goblin-fairy dialectic forms the basic operational logic here. The fairies are glistening and svelte in their flight, occasionally veering into rainbow-colored kitsch. It’s all good, but a bit too Tinker Bell to be exciting. But that’s where the goblins come in, angrily digging tunnels and chopping rocks in the earth beneath the fairy kingdom. The record’s best moments happen when goblins and fairies interact, juxtaposing airy fragility and kitsch with dirty, earthbound timbres and a rundown junkyard-atmosphere.
[7]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: This is twee in a way that makes me think about the current era of bedroom-pop skramz. The Acheulean Forests songs are often at their best when aiming for slapdash melodicism and brevity, but the cutesiness is one-dimensional. I’ll burst into laughter when hearing the chintzy choir and glockenspiel on “Ik kan dit gevoel niet uitdrukken,” but the dungeon synth follow-up “Mijn hart verlangt naar een jeugd” lumbers onward for nearly four minutes and gets me yawning. The opening side of Trhä’s side is the only long track that works here, as it leans into its glossy absurdity. It also has vocal melodies buried that are legitimately catchy, bolstered by the chiming instrumentation (in Acheulean Forests’ wordless songs, any high-pitched noises function as pure texture, which is significantly less interesting). Still, Trhä has had more convincing works in the past, and the split format feels less like revealing different strands of a specific sub-subgenre than showing who can do it well and who can’t.
[3]
Sunik Kim: Suffers from what, honestly, most black metal does: stretching a potentially interesting production technique to a taut, gimmicky extreme over formulaic and forgettable songs. The crackling, swampy-but-clear moments of blown-out exuberance on the Acheulean Forests side, and the JRPG-esque chiming on the Trhä side, are genuinely intriguing. But lacking any kind of serious attention paid to structure, flow, or development, the novelty wears off in a matter of seconds, the shallowness of the whole affair standing out in stark detail. Here we find a textbook example of the fundamental indecision at the heart of black metal: that between “atmosphere” and actual songwriting. In these darkened realms, genre, it seems, trumps all; there is vanishingly little room to maneuver. Just as these tinny guitars and MIDI bloops wash and blur into each other, this half-hour of incantations all too easily dissolves into the bottomless, hazy anonymity of the black metal morass.
[2]
Average: [4.50]
Chiho Oka / Aoi Tagami - The Best Concert Ever by Chiho Oka and Aoi Tagami (Ftarri, 2022)
Press Release info: Oka (laptop, synthesizer) and Tagami (voice, singing, electric guitar) gave a duo concert at Ftarri on January 3, 2021, as one in that year’s “New Year Concerts with Ftarri Fukubukuro CD.” The collaboration was so great that it resulted in this CD release, which consists of a 22-minute improvised performance from the first set (track 1) and a 25-minute piece called “Hanafuda Game” from the second set (track 2). On stage in the latter performance, each musician drew a "hanafuda" card and the two simultaneously performed separate pieces inspired by words written on their respective cards. Their conversations in the intervals on this track are recorded as well, so listeners can enjoy the atmosphere of the "hanafuda" game.
Purchase The Best Concert Ever by Chiho Oka and Aoi Tagami at Bandcamp.
Vincent Jenewein: Another improvised human-performer-meets-synthesis album? Let’s see. The first piece starts out promising, with spacious vocals over sparse, sine-like drones. It soon loses the plot, unspooling into a loose arrangement of vague sounds that doesn't quite seem to know what to say. On the second track, we begin with pleasantly cascading, metallic synth sounds. But they abruptly stop and the movements that follow aren’t nearly as captivating. At a later point, loud, annoying pitch-bending synths totally drown out the delicate vocals and acoustic instrumentation. It does not sound like a well thought-out, conceptual juxtaposition. Instead, while improvising, they simply landed on a combination that does not work. Of course, it happens—it’s part of the nature of improvisation. But does that automatically make it interesting, worth listening to? I don’t think so. While I’m sure that the performers and audience had fun, I just don’t see why this (and many similar albums) needed to be released. Sometimes, it’s better to let the transient stay transient.
[4]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I like that the two titles here: “Improvisation” and “Hanafuda Game,” imply that the latter is in fact composed. It serves as a reminder that so much of life is improvised, that despite the numerous plans we can have, every instance is a moment to adjust to our surroundings and scenarios. That idea made listening to The Best Concert Ever exciting because I approached each element as like one of the images in a Hanafuda card, the wordless voice becomes a minimalist landscape, or the guitar acts as embodiment of flora swaying in the wind. There’s a gentleness to this recording that gets thwarted by rupturing squawks, and all of it becomes a chance for play. The straight-ahead pop leanings of “Hanafuda Game” are a legitimate delight: I consider how in this intimate live setting, it’s as if Chiho Oka and Aoi Tagami are simply messing around. It’s not a jam session as much as an encapsulation of two people passing time in whatever way they seem fit. It has such an effortlessness to it that the diaristic, emotion-first field recordings plaguing experimental music today feel so hollow in comparison. They literally just have a conversation at one point. It’s beautiful.
[7]
Sunik Kim: Like rippling water or wobbly gelatin: we observe waves and modulations in an almost “pure” and uncontaminated state in and through various mediums and materials. I’m reminded of Kosugi’s Catch-Wave, not in any overt fashion, but mainly in the way that gestures and patterns are treated with a certain distance and respect; cycles are allowed to breathe, develop, and terminate, even to seemingly clunky or repetitive ends. The cascading synth rushes that are almost haphazardly laid atop the pluckier bed of guitar and vocals—beyond being hilarious, invigorating—stand as chaotic auditory attempts at “painting” or representing that bed; the depth of the resulting clash makes clear the level of focus and attention paid by the performers to the inner qualities of the sounds at hand—belying a lax surface appearance.
[7]
Gil Sansón: The terminology that was used for this particular type of quiet Japanese improvisation—onkyo—is somehow unfit to describe how this sounds in our time. It’s not as astringent as those early documents at Off Site, but it retains a similar uncompromising stance, maybe tempered with a certain tenderness, which is more evident in the quiet humming and singing. One of the most attractive features of this music—which is quite humble and sparse—is the trust placed in the materials, knowing the strength in their fragility. Another is how things can suddenly go bonkers but remain delivered with the same care, sometimes balanced by a long, cozy silence. Having every sound—from the mellifluous to the harsh—at the same level of concentrated intensity makes for a listen that’s both relaxed and keeps you on your toes. This is music for audiences of ten; it feeds on the concentration of a small and attentive public, attuned to the etiquette of small sounds presented in an informal yet elegant way, and has a raw beauty that conceals a great deal of refinement.
[7]
Average: [6.25]
Thank you for reading the ninety-first issue of Tone Glow. Let’s get some hot pot.
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