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.

As you get older, social media can become a cavalcade of tributes to the dying heroes of rock, and it's easy to tune it out. The death of Damo Suzuki this year hit me hard, though, partly because he was one of the rare ones I'd actually met and spoken to. More than that, his vast network of sound carriers had included many people I know, so his musical spirit had touched the lives of many people around me in tangible and untangible ways.

I hadn't written for The Japan Times in many years, mainly because I can never be bothered to pitch stories, but I'd interviewed Damo for them in the past and always enjoyed talking to him. Perhaps remembering that, the JT found my email address, possibly under a stack of dusty indie band CD-Rs somewhere, and asked me to write his obituary.

OBITUARY: Damo Suzuki forged a path outside of mainstream pop and rock

Before the sad news of Damo's death, I'd already been writing about Can because of the new live album Live in Paris 1973, released by Mute Records in the UK and with a Japanese edition from Traffic. The Berlin-based writer Wyndham Wallace wrote the official liner notes for Mute, but thanks to Japanese labels' convention of having a local-based writer contribute additional notes to the Japan release, Shoe from Traffic asked me to write an essay of my own about the album. If you buy the album, you can see Wallace's article in English and Japanese, but since mine's only in the Japanese booklet, the label have kindly allowed me to post the English text here.

My last update to this site was three years ago. This is partly because no one really reads blogs anymore, and author websites are only really useful for active authors. This second part is relevant because I do actually have a new book on the way, which means I've also remembered this website exists.

I've also remained active in my other writing work over the past few years, primarily for Ele-king magazine. Some of them are available online, while others were published only in the paper edition, but here's a rundown of what has been published, with links to the articles where possible:

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.

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.

Work has commenced, albeit in fits and starts, on my second book, but my occasional pieces for The Media are still coming out every once in a while. Here are links to all the ones I can remember.

After a long, long wait, the English audiobook edition of Quit Your Band! is now available. Currently, it only seems to be available via Audible, but I think it's due to go up on iTunes soon.

In addition to occasional writing gigs, and despite Quit Your Band! fading into the past in both Japanese and English editions, I've been featured in a few different things as well over the past few months, in my capacity as a journalist and as a general Tokyo indie scene face. I'll put some links and explanations below:

While this site has been quiet, there has nonetheless been a fair amount going on (follow me on Twitter to get news as it comes in, in among the occasional 2AM political rant). I've written a few articles. Here's a summary:

Following the death at the age of 60 of Mark E. Smith of Manchester postpunk band The Fall, Japanese music magazine ele-king asked me to write an article (an obituary, I suppose), about him. I can't claim a deep or extensive knowledge of his enormous back catalogue of music, but nevertheless I count myself as a fan, not least because he was one of the most extraordinary poets in the English language of the modern era. For Japanese-speakers, the ele-king article is here. I'll post the original English text below the fold.

Last week, on the one year anniversary of the English edition’s release, the Japanese translation of Quit Your Band! came out, with the title バンドやめようぜ！ ("Band Yameyouze!”)

When writing Quit Your Band! I made a conscious decision that the book wasn't going to be a guide to the music itself so much as a book about the world musicians inhabit and the background against which their music exists. Under this structure, the artists I talk about really function as examples for broader points I want to make about trends in music culture or aspects of how the scene’s infrastructure work, and they fall into two main categories.

Over the past few months, I've had the interesting experience of being on the receiving end of quite a lot of media coverage about the book, mostly from Japan-focused web sites, magazines etc.

I've heard that book trailers are a thing, so I made this out of a pile of old film & TV footage, iMovie, and a set of vague memories of Godard from film studies classes.

My January column for The Japan Times was about legendary 90s pop producer Tetsuya Komuro, who has a new album coming out and who, since his unceremonious plummet from the limelight, I’ve been finding myself feeling a bit more affection for than I used to at the pinnacle of his 90s ubiquity.

You can read it here.

A bit late posting this, but my 2016 indie roundup column for The Japan Times is available to read here.

My Japan Times column for November coincided with the release of my book, Quit Your Band!, so I was faced with the awkward task of trying to tie the latter in with the former without being dreadfully cheesy about it. The approach I took was, rather than talk about my own book and make the column essentially an advert for myself, to write about other books people have written about music in Japan.

You can read the article on The Japan Times site here.

My Japan Times column for October was about the "Mama's Tattoo" event collective, but also about women in Japanese music in a broader sense.

Read it here.

Hello. This is a web site, and this is me writing on it. I'm a writer, so that's what I do, when I'm not finding creative new ways to avoid being creative. I'll write more on it when I have more writing to write about.