Writing is work. I mean that in the sense that it's literally my job that pays for the food I eat and the roof over my head, but also in a more abstract sense — even the decision to use an em dash just before this part of the text instead of a colon or semicolon was tiresome and triggered its own mild drizzle of self-loathing. And zoom out to a wider panorama and writing is exhausting; it's where I try to order, make sense of and explain my thoughts about myself and the world, and then once I'm done with it, I stick my name on it like the pompous ass I am and announce, "Here is my wisdom, World: drink deep and rejoice!" Who needs that? No one, and probably not even me. It's tiring. It's work.
Which is fine, because the flip-side of work is play. In any case, a fair amount of my work — the work that gets published with my name on it at least — is really not much more than finding ways
of justifying all the playing I do with a patina of intellectual respectability. And I'm extremely lucky that at the end of 2020 I still have work of any kind, and especially that it's the sort
that I can do from the safety of my room. So if that new reality of life and work spent shut in a small room didn't really change my work, it had a big effect on my play.
The bars and music venues of Tokyo, where my social life and the subjects of much of my writing lie, didn't shut down entirely. Like many people, though, I never really felt the situation was under control enough to dip my toes back into that world, There's a temptation to blame those with less caution than me for making my playground unsafe, but that's just an expression of my own feelings of powerlessness. Whatever those spaces can do to survive, and whatever support they can get from their customers, it's all welcome. But me? I had to learn to play at home.
So I made music.
I'm not a musician. I have no technical skill or learning with an instrument or music creation software, and what talent I have as a writer tends to get checked in at the door when I start making music. But music is my life and making it is fun. As a non-musician, I have no responsibilities, nothing at stake: it's a playground for me and whatever more talented friends of mine I've roped into this particular project to mess around in.
Sharing it is more embarrassing. What am I looking for in sharing it? We made it in a bubble of private jokes and esoteric homespun cosmologies, so to share it feels like it invites awkwardness. But on some level, you have to hope someone will hear it, hear through my own personal ineptness, and be able to enjoy a reflected sense of the play that it sprung from. That's something I've always enjoyed in other people's music: being able to see the joins, the rough edges, the emotional outline of how it was made.
So I made music. Silly music, mostly. But it was fun and it helped get my through the year. Next year, I tell myself I'll write more seriously — that I'll try to find some joy in writing again — but this year, I hung loose and this is what I did.
February
Trinitron - make.believe - All of Trinitron
This was a compilation of old recordings that a band I was involved in made about ten years ago, in the period before and after the Great East Japan Earthquake. My involvement was mostly limited to lyrics and shouting ideas at the actual musical talent behind it (the Slovenian hip-hop legend N'toko), but at the time it felt like a qood balance of contributions. The songs were mostly satires on the pop and media culture around us at the time, and the band's structure with the two white guys in the back room making the music and putting the words into the mouths of the two female vocalists was a conscious riff on the idol culture that was exploding at the time (the song Democracy was playing off the AKB48 senbatsu election phenomenon). I don't know how much most of that really works anymore, and perhaps it now lurks a bit pointlessly in the outdated shadow of stuff like LCD Soundsystem, but I was surprised how well most of the music holds up just as a lo-fi post-punk and new wave band. Not new, but resurrecting it made me happy.
April
(Locked Down) Heroes - Children of the Eternal Psychic) Strasbourg
This year, I organised several compilation albums of homemade quarantine recordings by musicians and non-musician friends, and all of my various bands participated. I didn't actually do anything on this track except tell my bandmate Ralouf that I was OK with him using our band name for something he'd made by himself, but I'm putting it here anyway because I stand by everything Children of the Eternal Psychic) Strasbourg do, whether I was involved or not. Nominally this is a cover of "Heroes" by David Bowie, although I think the slowed-down text-to-speech vocals reading out the lyrics are the only thing explicitly taken from the song. The ambient backing track is thematically consistent with the Eno-enhanced Side B of the "Heroes" album though, the egos of Ralouf, me and the original song itself perhaps all somehow dissolved in the goo.
Minitron - By This River
Minitron is the non-musician half of Trinitron, which is to say this Brian Eno cover was all arranged, played and recorded by me, while the vocals are all by K. I always spend a couple of hours listening to the Young Marble Giants, Raincoats and Kleenex/Liliput before starting work on anything with Minitron in the hope some of it will rub off in the form of fragile, shambolic charm rather than just sounding terrible.
(Children of the Eternal Psychic) Strasbourg - Pi-po Anthem
(Children of the Eternal Psychic) Strasbourg are what my partner in the band, Ralouf, and I call punk-ambient, in that it's mostly beatless, abstract soundscapes thrown together cheaply and without taking itself too seriously. Ralouf is a strong proponent of the idea that ambient music is fundamentally anti-fascist in that it seeks to dissolve the ego in a passive way rather than into some directed will. There's a lot of contradictions in this way of thinking, but it's an idea we both always try to hold in mind while we're goofing about. This track was made for a compilation that Ralouf's new label, Pipo Records, released in the spring. The label name comes from Pipi-kun, the Tokyo police mascot character, and this track samples Pipo-kun's theme song (as well as mining some other police-related sources). Of course the world exploded in righteous anger at the police soon after this, leaving our giggling schoolboy contribution to the discourse looking pretty weak. How strong you can really make a message with ambient music (even punk-ambient) without undermining the appeal of the music's passivity?
May
Gold Star For Robot Boy - Voided By Geysers
Voided By Geysers is the name for the Guided By Voices tribute band I sing in, along with some other local music scene weirdos, currently including guitarist Carl, drummer Sean (from Tropical Death and Sharkk) and bassist Tomo (from Santa Dharma). This was for another fundraising compilation I put together, and we recorded it piece-by-piece, each in our own homes. It's reassuring in a way that this song originally came from an album as rough and unpolished as Bee Thousand, but then again, GBV were such a key band in defining lo-fi as an aesthetic that covering them like this feels a bit like taking on a master on their own territory.
Minitron - Hand in My Pocket
A band like Minitron covering Alanis Morissette was always a bit of a goof — taking a singer as famous for her emotional rawness as Alanis and giving her words to a vocalist as dry and emotionless as K was one of those decisions that hangs on the edge between outright joke and a tentative "maybe the contrast is interesting?" The way K stumbles over clusters of words that Alanis delivers with a conversational ease is something K cringes over every time she hears herself, but which I'm adamant is part of it's rough charm. We tried to approach making a shambling post-punk/krautrock/indiepop tune out of this as sincerely and seriously as possible, but since neither of us are really sure how seriously we can take the original (we both love it, but the lyrics are so damn teenage), that sense of not-quite-serious, not-quite-a-joke hangs over the whole thing for me.
June
Révolution musicale - Nocturnal Pollution
Révolution musicale is a project of a French musician called Kismyder, and he described this album, Les tubes de l'été Vol.2, as "not a compilation album, but an album with many people in it". This seemed a bit abstruse to me at the time, but after hearing the finished thing it made more sense. There's something in the choice of artists who contributed tracks and the way the flow of the album is linked together by the various songs Kismyder himself made that gives the album the feel of a collectively produced single work. This one, Nocturnal Pollution, is a (Children of the Eternal Psychic) Strasbourg track built around a Ralouf poem about wet dreams, and is somehow one of the classier tracks on this magnificent album.
September
(Children of the Eternal Psychic) Strasbourg - The Chaos Engine
Ralouf and I had recorded a lot of abstract noise in the summer of 2019 with the idea of making an album of it, but kept getting distracted. We came back to it in 2020, inspired by a spate of urban rampages by wild boar in Japan and Germany, and boiled it all down into a short album over the space of a couple of weeks in the summer. The image of the "savage pig" felt like something to aspire towards: an agent of chaos and liberty who lives innocent and free, uncool and unworried. The opening track was the Communist Manifesto passed through about a dozen languages on Google Translate, track 2 is part of a poem by French dadaist writer Benjamin Péret, Wazzag is from a Ralouf-penned and Super Mario-flavoured parody of Pierre Guyotat's obscene literary masterpiece Éden, Éden, Éden, and closing track, Steal Like a Pig, was a confused manifesto. This album is a mess, but probably the thing I made this year I'm most proud of.
December
Rizla Deutsch! - Largerine Eclipse
Rizla Deutsch! is a bedroom synthpop duo that I do together with Grant from Barry Zogon Band. For both of us, our musical taste leans very heavily on Krautrock and 1980s avant-pop and similar new wave-adjacent art-trash, but we're also both haunted by the sort of British Saturday evening family TV that we both grew up seeing all the time as children. With Rizla Deutsch!, what we've ended up doing is pouring fragments of the poorly remembered latter through a filter of the cheaply mimicked former and wrapping them all up in a kind of distorted fantasy of an eternal "nineteen-eighventies". The deaths of 1980s TV comic Eddie Large and German industrial/EBM pioneer Gabi Delgado Lopez earlier in the year both merged together in our heads. I'm never sure how disrespectful we're being by making these silly, broken pop songs that reference and distort these people's lives towards ends that probably aren't always very clear, but it's not without affection (and some sadness really, at losing the past to the obscurity of memory).
Minitron - No Xmas for John Quays
These last few tracks were taken from the last of the quarantine compilations I helped put together this year, which we themed on Christmas songs. The Fall are one of the bands I always look at for inspiration at how to make music without really being a musician, so covering them is quite difficult without just copying them. I don't have the talent to play with feeling though, so inevitably everything ends up being about turning rock'n'roll into something cold, fragile and emotionless. This is another one that K gets really embarrassed by her vocals in, but which I think she did exactly what she needed to do for the kind of track it is.
(Children Of The Eternal Psychic) Strasbourg - The Christmas Goose
This track was based around a poem by William McGonagall, who's famous for being the worst poet in the history of the English language. Ralouf and I both fell in love with this poem, and the way McGonagall strictly rhymes every line with no real attention to the rhythm or metre accidentally creates a tension between freeform and rigidity that I often try to achieve deliberately in my writing. For the music, I recorded some Christmas Muzak that was playing over the speakers in my local 7-11, mixed with the industrial hum of the refrigerators, and then fed in this growing panic of a dozen different Christmas hit songs all distorted and layered over each other. I have no idea what we were saying here. The longer we're left making these tracks remotely at home, the more unclear it gets and the more the stupid jokes we make in the music become about that fuzziness and lack of clarity.
Rizla Deutsch! - Platoaks ov Mirror (Inner Christmas)
One more last-minute Rizla Deutsch! Christmas song snuck over the line just in time. Grant had an electro track he'd made on his smartphone and just had lying around. I wanted to make a tribute to the recently deceased experimental composer and pianist Harold Budd, and we somehow thought it would be a good idea to join those two ideas together. My position is that trying to pay tribute to Harold Budd with a "Budd-lite" track of my own composition would be far more insulting than doing the absolute opposite kind of music and using that as a vessel for the message. It's a party song about being too scared and stressed to go out at Christmastime, and the healing power of Budd's music to bring relief from those feelings. I'm quite proud of the lyrics on this one.