Trying to avoid avoiding writing in 2020

This year was quite a dry one as far as my writing went. I’ve never been much of one for pitching articles to magazines in the first place — I’ve never really got over the nagging sense that writing about music is a stupid thing to do and feel silly begging for money to do it — and increasingly the conversation about music in Japan is one that has little need for my contribution anyway. Instead of worrying about whether my words are helping whatever media outlet it is meet their targets for page views and engagement, it’s far less stressful to retreat from those anxieties and simply write about what I want on my Clear And Refreshing blog.

The area I can still write about with some confidence is a strange and poorly recognised one that hangs in a sort of no man’s land, the conversation about music in Japan flying over its head. Writing for my blog often feels like reporting from an alternate universe, and that feeling was accentuated by the way so many rough-edged compilations and DIY releases popped up on Bandcamp this year from places all around Japan that people in Tokyo have few opportunities to hear about. If I ever finish a second book (if I haven’t completely retreated into irrelevance by then), that sense of communicating from behind a veil will be a recurring theme.

The other area I occasionally get the chance to write about is overseas music, providing a foreign writer’s perspective on music for Japanese media. I went a long time without paying much attention to music overseas, but over the past couple of years I’ve found myself digging into it with more enthusiasm. The pandemic left me to enjoy music alone at home for most of the year, and as a result I spent thousands of dollars on record shopping and Bandcamp (although the year-end roundups of the overseas music media left me realising I’m just as out of the conversation there as I am here).

The end result of all this was that, a couple of blogging spurts aside, this was the first year of my career when I came out of it really feeling like a failure as a writer. I chipped away at a second book that feels unpublishable in its current direction, wrote a few thousand words of a bad novel that I made the rookie error of showing parts of to people, made a surprising amount of music that sounds good to me and the rest of the world still has time to catch up with me on, and published what felt like next to nothing — all that free time spiralling down a plughole of isolation, doubt and disconnection. It’s perhaps the most insidious curse of 2020 that it provided so much time and space for reflection and perspective. As a wise man once said, “Too much fucking perspective.”

Looking back, though, I’m pleasantly surprised to find I got more done than I had thought, so here’s a summary of what I did manage to scrape into existence from the shattered fragments of my self-esteem.

ELE-KING MAGAZINE
First, there was a handful of contributions to the Japanese music magazine/website Ele-king (roughly speaking, they’re similar to a Japanese equivalent of The Quietus, although their business is more as a book publisher connected to the P-Vine label). Online, they publish my original English text at the bottom of the page if you scroll down past the Japanese.

REVIEW: Guided By Voices - Surrender Your Poppy Field

As with last year, Guided By Voices put out three albums this year (Robert Pollard also managed to put out a country album under his pseudonym Cash Rivers). I haven’t heard the most recent of the three yet (Disk Union, hurry up with that fucking record delivery!) but this one was almost certainly the best, and possibly the best thing they’ve done since the Matador days.

REVIEW: Wire - Mind Hive

Another of my favourite bands, and another who put out multiple releases in 2020. One of the best things about Ele-king is how they allow quite a lot of space for reviews that allows you to get a bit deeper into it than the snapshot comments you usually get next to albums in the media here. That’s not to say I’m a uniquely insightful reviewer, but I appreciate them giving me the space to say what I need.

COLUMN: Saving Music with Politics (Saving Politics with Music?)

Written in the summer, off the back of a heightend period of political protest and crackdown abroad and a growing political consciousness here in Japan. I need to write a follow-up to this, because some of the effects of the pandemic on music that I speculated about at the time are only really starting to show themselves now. This article was also published in English and French on the Canadian music website Panm360.

COLUMN: Can: Intruders from a Parallel World

There were a lot of Can reissues released this year, coming in Japan via the Traffic label. Ele-king put out a special issue devoted to Can, and gave me free rein to write whatever I thought about them on this web-only piece. I always feel intimidated writing about bands like Can because inevitably a sizeable portion of the readers are going to be people way more knowledgeable and dedicated than me. That said, I was never going to turn down a chance to revisit Can and spend time thinking about their music.

OTHER JAPANESE MEDIA

CONTRIBUTION: My 3: 7 music writers/buyers choose

Outside my writing for Ele-king, the Japanese website Mikiki (connected to Tower Records, I think) asked me to contribute to a feature on Yo La Tengo, who seem to be having a few reissues of their own, as one of seven writers each picking out our favourites. The page is in Japanese only, but I’ll add the English below here  for anyone who wonders what it says.

"Yo La Tengo are many things. They can be mellow, fierce, soothing, discordant, accessible, challenging, nostalgic, experimental, pop — sometimes one or two of those things for a whole album at a time, sometimes dragging you through all at once. But for me, Yo La Tengo are a band I associate with the feeling of musical possibilities being blown wide open.

Like many people of my age, my entry into the world of Yo La Tengo was through the album I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. Coming out in 1997, just as the commercially ambitious soft nationalism of Britpop was fading away, I Can Hear the Heart… was a strange and intriguing album for me, and one that I found difficult to fully understand. Instead, I found myself returning to it over the years that followed, each time discovering something new, each time broadening my understanding of music just a little bit as it helped me make connections with other music in how it linked The Velvet Underground to krautrock to post-punk to The Beach Boys and beyond.

I discovered 1993’s Painful later, and that album gave me a sense of new musical worlds being opened up in a different way. Yo La Tengo had been a consistently good band for many years before, but Painful is feels like the band themselves exploding into a new sonic world. It opens softly and unfolds with such gradual confidence that you don’t notice the full magic of what the band are working around you. There’s a point where the realisation hits you though (for me it was about half way through the Spacemen 3-esque I Was the Fool Beside You for Too Long) that you’re inside a masterpiece, and it’s made even more thrilling because you’re sharing the band’s own first explorations of this new creative territory.

The other way Yo La Tengo have regularly blown my mind is onstage, and the experience of seeing them live is one I always associate with their 2006 album I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass. Opening song Pass The Hatchet, I’m Goodkind takes a simple, catchy, almost conventional rock bass line and hammers it into the ground relentlessly, robotically for eleven minutes, guitars hacking and slashing away at the song as it goes. Onstage, this combat between accessible and chaotic elements of their music is incredible. No record can ever really replicate the live experience, but I Am Not Afraid of You… does an incredible job of delivering a similar sense of excitement in the explosive contrasts between all the different things Yo La Tengo represents."

OTHER WRITING

Undrcurrents’ Guide to Bandcamp, Part 2

I also made a guest contribution to the Undrcurrents music blog for one of their regular Bandcamp roundups. Undrcurrents is a small blog but always interesting and one that I use personally as a regular source for new music suggestions, so even if I hadn’t contributed, I’d still be happy to recommend checking them out.

OTAKU USA: Every Urusei Yatsura Film Ranked

I like writing about film when I get the chance, and this piece on the cinematic entries in the energetically surreal Urusei Yatsura media franchise was especially fun. For some reason it seems to be inaccessible from any of the Otaku USA website's menus, but it went out in their newsletter and it remains lurking there, silently, for anyone in the know (or with the URL).

POETRY: By This River

An unusual one for me, the French webzine Archimou asked me to write something on the theme of water for their new issue. Since most of my writing is about trying to extract some sort of comprehensible narrative and logic from how I feel about the subject, I tried to write this in a looser way. The title By This River is a Brian Eno song (I covered it with my band Minitron earlier last year too) and I used Eno’s lyrics as a set of images to loosely guide it, using recurring dreams as the starting point. I enjoyed doing this.

SHORT STORIES: Melody Albertine’s Adventures on the Serpent Walks

I didn’t write these this year, but they’d been sitting around, burning a hole in my hard drive for years, along with Laurence Jenkins’ lovely illustrations. These were also written from dreams (the first two almost in their entirety and the third spun out of a single scene in a dream), which I know can be an insufferably pretentious or precious sounding way to talk about your writing, but what can I say? If you feel like reading a trio of short stories written as a loose pastiche of old fashioned children’s books, about the metaphysical adventures of a girl and a robot, then you might enjoy these. If that sounds like an irritatingly whimsical hipster indulgence in The Current Situation, you’re probably right. Even at the time, I thought of them as confections and was worried that I’d written something vapid and pointless, but I’m fond of them, if only because they remind me of a time when I felt whimsical enough to write something like this in the first place.