This is an article I wrote for Japanese music magazine Ele-king, the Japanese version of which appeared in its Summer 2024 paper edition. The theme of the issue was "outsider music", though the editor allowed us to define that term as freely as we wished. Since there's no English version available, I'll post it here for my wonderful fans who definitely exist.
It’s 2006 and I’m in the old Koenji 20000V live venue off Pal shopping street. I can smell the stale cigarette smoke soaked into the walls as I pay my money, collect my drink ticket and a sheaf
of flyers from the guy at the desk, and shove open the main door. I can feel the rough texture of the walls, taped over with archaeological layers of faded, ragged, photocopied posters. I can’t
so much as hear the sound as feel it in my gut as I turn the corner into the main hall, where the jagged guitars and shrieking vocals of a band called Elevation are playing to a crowd of perhaps
sixteen people, shuffling from side to side in the hazy gloom.
It’s 2024 and child born on the day of that show would be graduating high school around now. What summons these Proustian recollections of space and sensation after so long is a mostly unknown
old compilation album called “Electrical Diskahoric Soundtrack”, and there’s something especially vivid in the sort of experiences these kinds of underground compilations can conjure.
Think about compilation albums in general and many of us will instinctively reach for ones like “No New York” or “Pillows & Prayers” — recognised and frequently reissued classics that capture
the imagination long after the times and scenes they documented have passed. I was born the same year as No New York’s 1978 release and yet it can summon a cosmic simulacrum of memory that allows
me to imagine this place I’ve never been and time I never experienced. Would that 18-year-old kid born in 2006 be able to feel the same sense of place and time from an album like “Electrical
Diskahoric Soundtrack”? After all, 1970s New York is a living thing in pop culture still, and the no wave scene’s influence is far more deeply and broadly embedded in popular consciousness than a
handful of Tokyo bands from the early 2000s that no one remembers.
Without that rich supporting ecosystem of iconography for it to slot into, entering a Japanese underground compilation album can be like stepping into an alien world or an alternate timeline.
Nevertheless, they are all snapshots of a specific place and time — perhaps more powerfully so for the sparsity of things like movies, retrospective documentaries and canon-forming contextual
criticism to rewire the memories of the moment in all its chaos.
And just as a snapshot also reveals the location and gaze of the photographer, a compilation tells us a lot about the perspective of its curator, the artists themselves, the audience — it shows
us a map of the social ties that created it. The experience of listening to “Electrical Diskahoric Soundtrack” wouldn’t have been the same had I just heard the Elevation song: it was specifically
hearing it in amongst artists like Habit, Usagi Spiral A and the then-up-and-coming Nhhmbase. This was a collection of artists who didn’t fit into any simple, easy-to-understand genre
classification, who’d found some connection or comradeship in each other, maybe some support in one or two sympathetic booking managers, and wanted to lay down a marker of this thing they were
building together.
In that sense, despite this being undoubtedly “outsider music” in the sense of being outside the mainstream, in a way it’s the ultimate insider music in that it’s music that only really makes
sense to those inside the tiny bubble of its creation. When I first moved to Japan in 2001, I bought anything that called itself an indie compilation in an attempt to find my bearings. At first,
this music that had come together through personal friendships, old university band circle connections or the desperation of live venue booking managers was confusing, mostly terrible, and not
particularly useful as an entry point. I needed that time spent in the live venues, watching the revolving sushi conveyor belt of bands cycle past me, seeing the connections that made albums like
Micro Music’s “Shit Associated Music Vol.1”, Labsick’s “Ryusenkei Crocodile Hour”, Clover Records’ “Pop Jingu” series or the Jerk Off label’s “Shinju” play out in real life. I needed, at least in
what small way I could, to get on the inside.
But inside what? These albums are typically structured around either a scene, a label, a venue, sometimes a specific event, sometimes a city, and occasionally (but surprisingly rarely) a genre.
Of the dozens of Japanese underground compilations I’ve accrued over the years, to my mind the best and most seamless listen is one that combines elements of all the above: the 2012 album
“Ripple”, from Knew Noise Recordings. It’s themed around the city of Nagoya, and specifically the now-defunct music bar/live space from which it takes its title, but it also leans heavily on a
core of (often interconnected) post-punk influenced musicians and bands like Nicfit, Zymotics, 6eyes and Sika Sika. It also makes for a strong statement of intent from the label and its home base
of record shop File-Under Records, which still functions as an entry point into the city for a lot of the overseas music that these bands and their fans were consuming and reconfiguring. “Ripple”
was the sound of a venue, a scene, a label and a store, as well as a city in all its ugly, seedy, shabby industrial glory.
The idea of Japanese underground music as something self-contained and alien partially informs the online compilation series titled “Mitohos”, curated by the Tokyo band Loolowningen & The Far
East Idiots. The series of online-only compilations is now up to five volumes of what the curators call “Galapagosized sounds”, and where “Ripple” and File-Under Records is partly a funnel
through which overseas sounds enter and get retooled in the hyper-local environs of dingy Japanese bars, “Mitohos” and its US-based label Deaf Touch have the ambitious aim of building a bridge
between distinctively Japanese underground sounds and foreign listeners — of releasing it from its bubble.
There’s maybe something paradoxical about the idea of finding appeal in the very things that make these scenes difficult to enter in the first place, but it’s at the heart of what fascinates me
about all these albums that continue to fill up my CD shelves and hard drive — and what makes them far more than a Spotify playlist could ever dream of being. A Japanese underground compilation
is like being stuck in a tiny dark room with a dozen bands making an ungodly sound, one after another. It’s a act of curation made entirely in the moment, an impossible attempt to see the forest
when still in the thick of the trees. The quality of the music is usually variable at best, but they’re places where fragments persist of artists who otherwise lie scattered about forgotten
shelves, on rotting, no-longer-listenable CD-Rs. It’s a document made to last but which, by its nature, is instantly out of date. It’s a memory struggling to retain an anchor in the heads of a
tiny number of people, but listening to it is still to immerse yourself in the chaos of the now.
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