Fujirockers: The official fansite of the Fuji Rock Festival

Of all the Japanese bands that I wanted to see at Fuji, toe was by far and away the one I was most looking forward to. Having seen these guys play several times at medium sized venues in Tokyo, I was extremely curious to see how their playing style and utterly original sound would be taken in by a crowd of 20,000+ in the majestic mountains of Naeba on Fuji Rock’s main Green Stage. I cannot say that I came even close to seeing all of the 200 or so bands that played over the 3 days at Fuji but of those that I did see (except of course for the incomparable Seun Kuti & Egpyt 80), none even came within a mile of playing with the fervor of toe. I think they could release an entire book of incredible photos of their facial expressions and body positions as they squeeze every iota of energy out of their respective instruments in poses of contorted bliss. Continue Reading…

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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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…

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…