Nobukazu Takemura feat. John Herndon from Tortoise and Matt Lux from Isotope 217
w/Bobby Karate, Kento
Tues April 8, Chop Suey, $10 adv, 9 pm.
For over a decade, Japanese musician Nobukazu Takemura has produced a prolific stream of electronic music that's managed to impress hard-to-please experimental-electronica heads and enchant indie rockers who, you know, like a good tune to whistle while vintage-clothes shopping. But it would be wrong to say Takemura's music splits into such a neat dichotomy. More often than not, the playful/tuneful elements become enmeshed with the baffling tonal experiments, and on his new disc, Songbook (out April 22 on Bubble Core), even the heady dynamics of '70s British prog rock color the compositions. Takemura confirms this last observation. "In my teens I loved Canterbury music [Soft Machine, Caravan, et al.] and was influenced heavily by it. I think that my sense of harmony and melody comes from a mix of jazz, rock, and classical music, and is a lot different than American jazz-fusion. I especially love Mike Westbrook."
The Kyoto-based producer's most recent burst of creativity has resulted in 10th, a rollicking, melody-rich opus with bizarre, synthetic vocals flowing through it, and the aforementioned Songbook, a painfully sweet song suite that's as quirky as it's naively childlike (Takemura's own label is tellingly called Childisc). I ask him if he's lost interest in the more abstract/exploratory sound of 1999's Scope and 2001's Hoshi No Koe.
"I have always loved all types of music, and have been making different types of music every day," Takemura replies. "When I compiled the songs for Scope, I chose more 'experimental' songs, so that is how that record came about. I was signed to Warner Records Japan back then, so obviously they turned down the experimental-sounding music that was on Scope. [Chicago indie] Thrill Jockey picked me up instead. Whatever the music sounds like, whenever I am making it, I am having fun. The focus of 10th was to make the computer sing, and the focus of Songbook was live playing and the human voice, and that is how I differentiated between those two albums.
"For our live performances in America, Aki Tsuyuko will be singing, but on 10th, I made it a point to generate all the vocals from the computer," Takemura continues. "I wanted to exclude the human presence from the sounds. When music is devoid of a human presence, it leaves space for the listener to enter the music subjectively."
As if 10th and Songbook weren't enough for the first half of 2003, Takemura plans to issue yet another disc of experimental and improv-based music under the name Assembler in April on Thrill Jockey.
The Thrill Jockey connection will surface on this North American tour, as Tortoise drummer John Herndon and Isotope 217 bassist Matt Lux join Takemura and Aki Tsuyuko (vocals, keyboards) onstage. In contrast to past appearances, Takemura will play guitar and synth, so don't expect a static laptop gig. "The live set is made up mostly of live playing, with a bit of electronics," Takemura explains. "I was stressed out in the past with live shows using computers, because the processes going on in the computer were not visible to the listeners. The visuals for [this gig] will be done by Chris Clepper, who did the live shows for Tortoise with Casey Rice. I feel that live performances should have a strong relation to physical elements, so the excessive attention on laptop musicians these days is strange to me." With war raging in Iraq, getting into performance mode must be hard. Takemura agrees. "From the end of last year, I had a terrible feeling that something bad was going to happen, and tried many times to cancel my tour. But I knew that this would cause problems for a lot of people involved, so I figured that I had to go on tour. It is hard to even fathom doing music in such times. A lot of musicians in Japan are protesting against the war, but I feel there is something hypocritical about what they are doing, and [I'm] very suspicious about their motives. Even if the message may sound like it's great, I dislike the mixing of doctrines and principles with music. But actually there is no real relation between the music and those doctrines. I even feel that a lot of these 'passionate' musicians are actually utilizing the war to advertise their own music."
Whether computer-generated or not, Takemura's music speaks for itself, no dubious causes necessary.
