Live Review: Otomo Yoshihide et al
One of the nicest things about living in Tokyo is the chance to catch a local small gig in a neighbourhood like Koenji on a random weeknight. You can drop by after work, sit down at a nearby izakaya for a quick beer and some yakitori, then head down to the show. The venues are small, often down in basements in narrow alley, and they find a way to blend innocuously into their surroundings. But inside them, you’re sure to find an eclectic mix of music genres, fashion styles, and even generations.
Going to a Thursday night gig at the Northcote Social Club to watch avant-garde guitarist Otomo Yoshihide was like the Australian version of that experience. The everydayness of the bar room, with its steak night specials and punters watching the Richmond vs Carlton footy match, co-living with the band room next door, with its bill of low-key noise artists and experimental acts.
The show started with a quintet of a cappella voices in loose harmony creating a choir of strange vocal expressions and random mouth noises. The makeshift choir was led by Japanese composer Tomodo Adachi, joined by the aptly-named Noise Scavengers, a sound art ensemble from Geelong. There was a delicious playfulness to the vocal games they were engaged in, which worked better than the gesture-driven improvisations that followed, once the band started playing their electric instruments. Those reminded me of the fourth hour of a band practice, when everyone is tired and ready to go home, but you don’t want to waste the money you paid for the rehearsal room, so it all devolves into careless, unfocused jamming.
Hearing the Uminari Trio, who got onstage next, I thought of producer T-Bone Burnett’s maxim that “every instrument as a drum”. Although all three musicians were playing what are nominally a set of string instruments—guitar, cello and piano—they largely eschewed melody and harmony and focused instead on rhythm and texture, exploring every percussive possibility from every part of their instruments.
The cello was banged, tapped and scraped. The grand piano was not so much prepared as perturbed, using the whole area under the lid as a playspace to fill with random small objects that will excite the strings. The guitar then filled in spaces with feedback swells and e-bowed drones. 25 minutes into their set, when pianist James Hullick played a sequence of actual notes on his keyboard—atonal, off-kilter, but proper 12-tone equal temperament notes—they almost felt alien among the thick sonic goo the band had brewed.
I wrote in my notes that the soundscape Uminari created evoked “moving fields” and “dream states”, some reverberant and peaceful, others feverish and harsh. There were peaks and valleys in their musical journeys, and they’re a group that clearly listens to each other as they develop their improvisations. Above all, to me, these were very much the sounds of the 20th century: explorations of the unconscious and the cinematic, reached through extended instrumental techniques, amplified resonances, and various John Cageisms.
Lastly, the visiting headliner, Otomo Yoshihide, walked onto the stage without much fuss. He sat down with his semi-hollowbody electric guitar on his lap and, without a word or acknowledgment to the crowd, blasted out a nasty spike of screeching feedback in our faces. With a u-shaped metal rod wrapped around his fingers, in lieu of a pick, he then spent the next ten minutes working that feedback like a sculptor, carving out little pieces and allowing momentary muted rests and fragmented note patterns to poke through the noise.
Otomo switched between three modes of playing throughout his 45-minute set—that initial loud feedback wrangling, a hyperenergetic strumming of moveable jazz chord shapes, and a peripatetic stroll through improvised single-line bluesy licks. He sometimes combined all three within one song, but through all of these variations, he managed to keep the modest Thursday evening crowd transfixed.
After leaving the stage briefly to warm applause, Otomo returned for a doubly surprising encore. He not only spoke to the audience for the first time, but proceeded to actually sing a song. You know, a genuine song, with cowboy chords and a simple major scale melody. It was a cover of a Japanese 60s pop tune, sung sweetly and earnestly at first, but growing more urgent and intense with every repetition of the chorus. By the end, his strumming had once again grown manic and his voice hoarse shouting the words.
The show was supported in part by the Australia Japan Foundation. All three performers were either Japanese or in collaborative projects between Australian and Japanese musicians. It’s the kind of connection I would like to see more of in Australia. I keep asking myself, given its proximity to Asia, why there isn’t a bigger push to bring more independent acts here and develop deeper creative bonds.
It would be nice if this kind of show wasn’t relegated to the festival or the art scene, and if it didn’t require grant money to be organised. If it could just be something that came up regularly, on random weeknights, in small innocuous venues, just like it does in Koenji.