Fujirockers: The official fansite of the Fuji Rock Festival

In my last post I wrote about a couple of bands who, although being fantastic at what they do, are in my opinion still quite derivative in terms of their sound. The band I am lucky enough to be writing about today, toe, are anything but that, and have ingeniously crafted a style of music I think they can truly call their own. Yes, toe are sometimes lumped into the post rock genre (probably because almost all their songs are instrumental), which is a pretty loosely bound categorization anyway, but their music is completely unique. They formed in 2000 as a four piece with 2 guitars, bass and drums. And what a drummer he is. Being somewhat of a drummer myself, listening to Takashi Kashikura play his drums either on an album or live is like being intoxicated with rhythm, with his incredible speed, precision and power he is anything but your typical drummer and gracefully mixes rock, jazz, bossa nova and african flavors into his rolling beats. Continue Reading…

The band mouse on the keys (they prefer a mouse-like lowercase spelling) emerged out of a hardcore scene, forming in Tokyo in 2006. But the group is based around jazz-type instrumentation, namely two keyboard players, Atsushi Kiyota and Daisuke Niitome, and a rock-kit drummer, Akira Kawasaki. For the past two years, their sets have regularly included jazz trumpet player Daisuke Sasaki and saxophonist Jun Nemoto, who also plays in the groups Z and Hununhum. The sound is definitely feels a lot more like jazz than hardcore, but there remain strong connections – both in the emotional tone of the music and of in terms of friendships and collaborations – with genres more based around guitars and distortion pedals. mouse on the keys has so far released its music through Machu Picchu record label, which is run by their friends in the post-rock/hardcore band Toe. They’ve also played on multiple bills with the emo, screamo band Envy.

Recently, mouse on the keys came to my home turf of Taipei, where they played at The Wall on May 25. They may have been the first jazz band to play there, and they were certainly the first jazz band to crowd surf. I ended up snapping a bunch of photos, and after the show caught up with Daisuke Niitome for a quick interview.
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Japanese fans may have heard of Taiwan’s Sugar Plum Ferry for accompanying Mono on a tour through mainland China in 2009, and any associations with Japan’s top name in post-rock will surely not be mislaid. Both bands helped usher in the genre to their respective countries, both have become more or less the definitive post-rock groups for their national scene, and both started around the same time – Mono in 1999 and Sugar Plum Ferry in 1997. Being in Taiwan, SPF’s avenues for international exposure have been relatively limited, but their home scene in Taipei always knew they were something of a powerhouse waiting to happen. In the last couple years they’ve played New York’s CMJ festival and Canadian Music Week in Toronto, and now they’re making their Japan debut at Fuji Rock!

The lineup has shifted just slightly over the last dozen years, but Fujirockers was happy enough to do an email interview with two members. Xiao-bai, who goes by the stage name Insecteens, is a guitarist and founding member who is responsible in a big way for not just the sound of Sugar Plum Ferry, but also of Taiwanese post-rock, as his side projects have constantly been in the fore of Taipei’s instrumental music scene. Guitarist and synth player Su is a later addition to the band, but no less a key member of the current lineup. The ensemble is rounded out by bass player Leaf Lee and drummer John Wu. Here’s what they had to say about the history of post-rock in Taiwan and what Japanese fans can look forward to in late-July and early August.

Q: I heard your first CD, Lack of Something, sells for a lot of money in online auctions. I have a copy and it is signed by the drummer at that time, Yoz. How much do you think I can I sell it for? Continue Reading…

I’ve already said most of what I want to say about toe here and here, but I’ll just add this nugget: they didn’t disappoint. It was a 3:40 pm show at the white stage, darkening skies but no rain (that would come torrentially about an hour later, at the tail end of Zappa). It’s hard to get it to where you can hear precisely every note a band plays on a stage the size of white, but it was close enough this time. Luckily toe isn’t just about the torrents of notes they play, but the emotion as well. There was even some dancing going on–drummer Kashikura Takashi manages to maintain the straight down- and up- beat groove, even with the flurry of notes in between.

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Fuji Rock 2010 hosts what I just today decided is the greatest band on the planet: toe. It seems like in rock music there has always been an inverse relationship between instrumental virtuosity and emotional resonance, a phenomenon which interestingly never occurred in jazz. Lots of post rock bands have been gamely flauting that law over the past decade, but I believe toe has achieved the complete destruction of it. I’ve got 33 cuts of theirs stretching over eight years of albums and EPs, and there is not a single note, not a single bit of information etched into a CD or hard drive, that is not five solid and immutable stars of perfection.

If you like the indie-rock melancholy of Broken Social Scene you will like the vibe of toe, and with musicians this jaw-droppingly great there is nothing like witnessing their feats in person. My only regret is that it will be my first full show of the whole fest, 3:40 pm Friday at the White Stage, and I fear it will set my expectations too high for the rest of the weekend.

Further down the list of renown, but in much the same vein of virtuosity, there is Continue Reading…

As previously mentioned, the opening day of FRF ‘10 will offer up a tasty instrumental set of jazzy math-rock from  Toe.  Those in need of a second serving of excellent, wordless local rock need only wait until Saturday for Lite’s Red Marquee performance.

Lite previously appeared on the Rookie A Go-Go stage in 2007 and, like The Bawdies, have been invited back to wow a bigger audience this year.  Continue Reading…

The term “post rock” is a slippery one, prone to ponderous postulation and pigeonholing.  Post-rock seems to state that its practitioners have tired of traditional rock n’ roll tropes and decided to move on, noodling through music without regard for traditional song structures. The Yokohama-based quartet Special Others certainly fit certain criteria to be included in this camp: they’re instrumental; they rarely reach the squealing guitar crescendo of a rock gig; and they jam like a jazz band covering the indie rock catalog. Well, to be honest, they’re constructed more like a jazz band than anything else, with an upright bass and organ playing prominent roles.

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It’s probably been said before, somewhere by somebody, but the idea popped into my head spontaneously, so I’ma go with it: the best way I can think of to describe Tokyo’s toe (not to be confused with Utica’s moe., also at the Fest this year) is indie-rock instrumental jazz. Of course, there’s no section called indie-rock instrumental jazz at your local Tsutaya; they use the tag “post-rock” for such purposes. But I like my idea better.

The conceit of post-rock is to take the instruments of rock (guitar, bass, and drums) and create something much more rhythmically and harmonically complex than rock. Often there is a generous or even bulk helping of electronic glips and blops in the mix. toe’s got a smidgen of this on their latest album, For Long Tomorrow, released at the end of 2009, but what makes me think of 1960’s jazz is Continue Reading…

Album: Beacons of Ancestorship
Artist: Tortoise
Tortoise relased its latest album, Beacons of Ancestorship, about a week ago (June 23-24) and has garnered solid, though not perfect, reviews.
Wired calls it “the Chicago-based quintet’s most self-assured record yet”…”a potent dose of unclassifiable sound that veers from dub, funk and hip-hop to jazz, punk and rock without ever dissipating into incoherence.” The LA Times says it’s the band’s “most invigorated set of omnivorous instrumentals since 1998’s TNT.”
But the most canny observation comes not surprisingly from Pitchfork Media, which notes that several songs go – dare one imagine! – a bit ravey: “Dance music has always been in Tortoise’s arsenal, but it takes center stage here.”
See Tortoise’s new video (which, among other things, fires up some nostalgia for road trips on small-engine motorcycles) after the break….

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Most famous for ex-Boredoms guitarist Seiichi Yamamoto and having two drummers, Rovo is instrumental experimental progressive/post rock.
I became interested in the group first through the cut “Horses”, released in 1999 on the album Imago, their only record released in the U.S. Anyone interested in the outer reaches of the possibilities of trap-set drumming will find this one endlessly fascinating. These rhythms are nothing anyone else would be likely to imagine on their own. The track above, Spica, is a similar concept, but you gotta go listen to this snippet of Horses to get the full effect yourself. Heck, pay the 99 cents to buy the track. I never tire of it. It’s almost like the two drummers are phasing each other, like a Steve Reich composition.

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