Japanese Innovators: Pioneers in Experimental Sounds

Despite J-Pop’s almost subliminal infiltration into the international pop cultural consciousness over recent years, and despite the occasional novelty hit or surge of viral attention, the West’s exposure to Japanese music over the years has for the most part been with various incarnations of its underground.

The story of Japanese underground music, however, is not a linear narrative so much as an endlessly intersecting garden of forking paths.

One of its beginnings lies in the fading days of the U.S. post-war occupation and the subsequent period of ambiguous, semi-colonised democracy, when experimental artists from a variety of disciplines began exploring their newfound cocktail of freedom and American cultural influence.

Formed in 1951, the Jikken Kobo artists’s workshop positioned themselves as a distinct break from the Japanese artistic tradition, with a self-taught, exploratory approach that drew influences from contemporary and pre-war European and American art.

Among Jikken Kobo’s fourteen members were a number of musicians, including composer Toru Takemitsu, who made early experiments in musique concréte. Takemitsu was also profoundly influenced by John Cage, upon being introduced to his work by fellow experimental composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, briefly jettisoning musical scores for circular diagrams designed to be interpreted by the performers. More profoundly, Takemitsu was fascinated by Cage’s incorporation of rhythms, timbres and silences influenced by his studies of Zen Buddhism, crediting Cage with reigniting his interest in traditional Japanese music.

Cage’s influence loomed large over the post-war Japanese underground, and his work, along with that of Minimalism and drone pioneer LaMonte Young, is audible in the work of sound art collective, Group Ongaku.

Formed in 1960 by composer Mieko Shiomi, Group Ongaku incorporated elements of musique concréte and the noises of furniture and domestic appliances into their performances, not to mention playing traditional musical instruments in any way they could think of but the conventional one.

One factor linking this generation of musicians is that they functioned in many ways as the Japanese branch of an international scene. Composers like Ichiyanagi and Shiomi spent time studying and making music in America, while the influence of composers like Cage and Young was profound on those who remained in Japan. Thanks in part to the influence of Yoko Ono (who was married to Ichiyanagi for a time), connections between Group Ongaku and the international Fluxus collective flourished, with Shiomi herself becoming a member, along with fellow Group Ongaku members Takehisa Kosugi and Yasunao Tone. And in this way the Japanese 1960s avant-garde generation was able to return the influence, albeit in a less dramatic fashion.

At the same time John Cage was having such an extraordinary influence on Japanese avant-garde composers, there were big changes happening in Japanese jazz and theatre, alongside the gradual emergence of rock music.

Jazz had been perhaps the key point of contact with American music for Japanese people in the immediate post-war period, and had formed the basis for the development of the pop music industry through the 1950s and early ‘60s. However, as the ‘60s wore on, artists like pianist Yosuke Yamashita embraced free jazz and in the process blew the horizons of Japanese jazz wide open.

Despite Yamashita’s uncompromising avant-garde approach (he famously performed on a burning piano as part of a 1973 art piece), Yamashita combined international acclaim with a status as a household name in Japan. At the same time, musicians like bassist Motoharu Yoshizawa, guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi and saxophonist Kaoru Abe continued pushing jazz beyond the limits of genre, eventually forming links with the experimental fringes of the emerging Japanese rock scene.

Rock music, meanwhile, had finally begun to emerge as a distinct and powerful creative force after about a decade or more of successive faddish obsessions with first rockabilly, then Ventures-influenced instrumental surf guitar music, and finally the Beatlemania-driven ‘Group Sounds’ movement. The swirling, Doors-y psychedelic balladry of The Jacks foreshadowed the emergence of a new generation of loud, dirty, heavy and mysterious rock music influenced by Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and the emerging Western progressive rock movement.

Perhaps the most influential figure in this ‘New Rock’ scene was high school dropout, Yuya Uchida, who had ridden each successive Western rock’n’roll wave in search of his sound before retreating into an impresario role behind the legendary Flower Travellin’ Band. Buoyed by Uchida’s overseas connections, most notably his friendship with John Lennon, Flower Travellin’ Band were able to tour internationally to some degree of acclaim, and recorded their 1971 masterpiece album, Satori in Canada.

Parallel with the birth of free jazz and rock in Japan was the growing intersection of music and theatre. Playwright and film director Shuji Terayama worked closely with musicians in both his stage and filmed works, with composer and frequent Terayama collaborator J. A. Seazer (real name Takaaki Terahara) combining psychedelia with Japanese folk and traditional theatre music on many of Terayama’s soundtracks – most notably on Sho o Suteyo Machi e Deyō (‘Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets’) and Den’en ni Shisu (‘Death in the Country’).

Consciously or not, what nearly all these artists were engaged in was an attempt to fuse foreign influences into a distinctively Japanese kind of new music, and in the process they helped lay foundations that would endure for decades to come. However, the distinctly anti-establishment or countercultural nature of many of the artists also helped ensure that, while internationally or academically respected artists like Yosuke Yamashita or Toshi Ichiyanagi could rake in awards and acclaim domestically for their experimentation with musical form, a lot of the most forward-looking music of the ’70s was locked out of polite discourse and ghettoised as ‘underground’ music.

While Yuya Uchida and Flower Travellin’ Band were courting overseas attention, back in Japan more sonically out-there bands like former Fluxus/Group Ongaku member Takehisa Kosugi’s drone rock collective Taj Mahal Travellers and noise-rock pioneers Hadaka no Rallizes (Les Rallizes Dénudés) emerged from out of the late ‘60s/early ’70s commune scene.

Despite rarely addressing politics directly, Rallizes in particular were dogged by associations with radical left organisations such as the Red Army Faction and its successor groups – a source of much public anxiety and police attention after a series of high profile terrorist incidents such as the Asama-Sanso hostage incident.

Partly as a consequence of this, and perhaps partly as a simple result of sole consistent member Takashi Mizutani’s reclusive personality, Les Rallizes Dénudés developed a reputation as a band shrouded in mystery and secrecy, their releases initially confined to ultra-lo-fi live bootlegs, soaked in banshee wails of feedback.

More broadly, mainstream suspicion towards underground music in the 1970s may have contributed to an environment where progressive rock was never able to reach the pomp and sonic excess of its British contemporaries. Instead, a distinctive Japanese underground musical tradition was formed where artists who emerged from the psychedelic rock scene like Lost Aaraaf vocalist Keiji Haino could collaborate freely with artists from diverse backgrounds such as folk singer (and occasional Shuji Terayama associate) Kan Mikami and improvisational jazz bassist Motoharu Yoshizawa.

The underground nature of much of the experimental music from 1970s Japan also perhaps explains why there is no clear cut-off dividing 1970s rock from punk in the way there was in the UK.

Bassist Reck and sax player Chico Hige of ’70s underground band 3/3 were among the key players who helped kick off Japanese punk after a period living in New York, where they played with and absorbed the influence of no-wave pioneers Lydia Lunch and James Chance. Returning to Japan, they renamed themselves Friction and helped produce the Tokyo Rockers compilation, which was a critical album in defining the first generation of Japanese punk.

Parallel to these roots in the ’70s underground, however, was a thread of influence from more mainstream sources.

One of the most important bands in helping to define Japanese mainstream rock music was folk-rock band Happy End, led by Haruomi Hosono. In 1978, Hosono teamed up with Yukihiro Takahashi of somewhat respectable glam/prog rockers Sadistic Mika Band and producer/composer Ryuichi Sakamoto to embrace electronic and synthesiser-based pop with Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO).

Despite coming from a thoroughly mainstream background, the members of YMO – in particular Hosono and Sakamoto – would go on to play a key role in the emerging punk and new qave movement, with Sakamoto producing Friction’s first album Atsureki as well as some early material by Osaka experimental musician Phew (real name Hiromi Moritani), formerly of atonal art-punk band, Aunt Sally.

Hosono’s career as a producer, meanwhile, helped forge a new kind of synth-based Japanese avant-pop out of the new wave era. Through her work with Hosono, pop singer Miharu Koshi made a swift transition from inoffensive 1970s-style pop into sparse, icy, synth-led deadpan experimental pop. Hosono also produced Pizzicato Five’s 1985 debut Audrey Hepburn Complex and In Action EPs, which helped bridge the transition from new wave to the next generation of experimental pop, influenced by French pop, British indie-pop and 1960s movie soundtracks, which in the 1990s became known as Shibuya-kei.

While Sakamoto in particular gained huge acclaim as an experimental and ambient composer, YMO were never really considered either underground or truly avant-garde. What they did do, however, was open up a space in mainstream Japanese culture for leftfield musical ideas to filter through for the first time since the late ’60s.

Suddenly pop was a legitimate arena for artists to play with experimental ideas in, and the experimentation incubated in the 1970s underground began to manifest in a flood of playful, oddball releases skirting the fringes of pop, by artists such as The Plastics, Chakra, Mariah, Wha Ha Ha, Jun Togawa and more.

Some met with success at the time and others less so, but years later it provided a fertile ground for revival by crate-digging vinyl fanatics.

The Japanese experimental music that emerged from the 1970s and ’80s, provides most of the core building blocks for the underground scene of the 1990s and beyond.

It was really those ’90s children of the underground and avant-garde who formed the image of Japanese music that came to dominate the West’s imagination.Some artists who emerged from the ’70s underground like Keiji Haino are still active, prolific and evolving, while the ever-shifting line ups of Acid Mothers Temple continue the lineage of heavy Psychedelia pioneered by the likes of Flower Travellin’ Band and Les Rallizes Dénudés.

However, if there is one factor that unifies much of the post-’80s Japanese underground, it is an omnivorous approach to musical styles that in many ways reflects and expands upon the Drugstore mode of creative listening, taking delight in hurling together eclectic sounds or rhythms, whether to dissonant or complementary effect.

Nowadays, experimental music is firmly back in the underground, but nearly all these kinds of music co-exist, overlapping in time and space in tiny live venues, cafés and rehearsal rooms in all major Japanese cities from Sapporo in the northeast to Fukuoka in the southwest.

Artists small in audience, with careers which are more often than not short in lifespan, but they’re there, more than ever, and making a noise.

Listen

In a three part mini-series, we take a look into the record collections of three Japanese music enthusiasts, taking a journey of sonic discovery from 1970-2000, exploring the diverse tapestry sounds that have emerged from the country. Featuring interviews with Japan Blues' Howard Williams, Light in the Attic Records’s Yosuke Kitazawa and Ian F Martin.

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