| #657 |
|
2003 |
Perilous 657 Traversing the Tokyo railway network is becoming almost second nature now. The maze of crisscrossing routes and different railway companies mirrors the diversity of the city’s electronic music scenes. Since my last visit record shops have come and gone and this time the pick of the Tokyo shops was the amazing Warzawa in Kichijoji on the western side of the city. Not only an excellent selection carefully picked from around the globe, Warzawa had plenty of Australian releases on the shelves from Snawklor, David Miller, Fiam, Oren Ambarchi & Martin Ng, Clue To Kalo and so much more all nicely categorised and easy to find. Upstairs in a little bar affiliated with the store, two of Miami’s Beta Bodega collective were spinning records and doing live visuals to promote their Japan-only releases and a new album from activist hip hop quartet Cyne. For a city of well over 30 million you would expect a bigger crowd than the twenty or so who showed up, but that’s the thing with the city – it is all microscenes. And whilst Japan can be a lucrative market for overseas labels it is still very difficult for Japanese artists to get reciprocal access to European and American markets. Thus the latest licensing tie between Tigerbeat6 and Romz should prove interesting in the year to come. Romz is run by Com.A, a youngish producer whose works tend towards the ADD splattercore of other Tigerbeat6 acts tempered with detailed programming and an 8-bit video game aesthetic. Com.A’s brother, Joseph Nothing already records for Planet Mu and the Romz label is picking up a lot of the young and emerging artists around the country. Playing in Osaka I got to check some of the local crews including a young DJ, Mu-T, who apparently is part of a wider Japanese trend of weird out-of-time mixing of tracks. She would skip happily from noise to jungle to Detroit techno with crazy crossfading and no attempt to get things in time – the effect similar to the noisy crosstalk between competing street advertising songs as you walk down the streets of both Osaka and Tokyo. The colour and chaotic order of Tokyo behind I am now in Montreal at the Mutek festival. For a city as small as Montreal there is an incredible amount of local art happening. Everywhere there are amazing full wall graf pieces and punks and skater kids jostle each other on the street. With ultra low rent and a close proximity (6 hour flight) to Europe as well as just 2 hours to New York, Montreal has become a cheap alternative for both Canadian and US artists. In the mid-90s Ninja Tune set up their North American offices in Montreal and later Force Inc followed suit lured by the geographic location and low cost. Being here makes it very clear that Sydney is becoming totally unaffordable for artists much to the detriment of Sydney’s culture. Canada, generally, though is very similar to Australia in terms of its electronic music scene. Spaced widely apart the main cities of Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal each have their own specialties with it being more profitable for local artists to sign to overseas labels and to tour overseas than to focus on local sales. Although the USA is close the ‘border protection’ policies tend to make it difficult for Canadian artists to cross the border legally to perform and this has only gotten worse since 9/11. Mutek is now a five-day event with daytime business workshops and night time gigs covering both the dancefloor and the experimental varieties of electronic music. Mutek starts properly tomorrow and so a full report will follow in the next Perilous which will be filed from Paris. Yellow Peril (www.snarl.org)  Goto
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