Ian Martin lives in Koenji, Tokyo where he runs his label, Call And Response Records, organizes concerts, and writes about music. He was born in England and moved to Japan in his early twenties where he soon got involved with the underground music scene, working with underground artists like Hyacca and Mir.
Ian was kind enough to answer my questions about his work in the music business, the musical identities of different areas of Japan and why digital distribution hasn’t caught on in Japan.
Could you describe the work you do with Clear and Refreshing and with Call and Response Records?
Clear And Refreshing is a web site I started in 2003. At that time I was mostly writing about UK and US music […], but increasingly I started finding myself going to local bands’ gigs. A year after starting the site, I organised an event in Koenji (the suburb where I live) and then a year after that I made a compilation album with some of the bands I liked, under the name Call And Response.
Now I have the label, of course, and three regular or semi-regular events that I do. First is my label’s live showcase called Telephone Club; then there’s a monthly free DJ night with a couple of live electronic or acoustic bands called Fashion Crisis that I do with a band called Candles and a journalist friend of mine; lastly there’s Switched On! which is a sort of new wave/electropop night that I do with Dr. Usui from the band Motocompo.
You’ve been in Japan for a good number of years now, what made you want to move there? What made you stay? And what made you get involved with music in such a big way?
I can’t remember why I moved here really. I was a really awful, self-absorbed student type, so I think it was mostly that I’d read Murakami’s “Wind-up Bird Chronicle” and I wanted to come to Tokyo and get swept up in a whirlwind of metaphysical adventure. Getting involved in the music scene was just a consequence of being interested in music, albeit really terrible music at that time.
I think the problem at first was that to start with I was looking for bands that matched UK/US bands on the same terms, but I realised gradually that you can’t judge the music scene here like that. The very worst Japanese bands are the ones that try to ape currently fashionable Western music, and the best ones are the ones that just get on and do their own thing.
What music are you really excited about at the moment?
There are some quite young bands that I love at the moment. There’s this band called The Mornings, who are just gloriously fucked up and brilliant. They play about a gazillion shows a month and just tear everywhere that they play apart.
I’m interested in this strange little group called Puffy Shoes, which is two girls being all sort of kooky and quirky, like Afrirampo or Kiiiiiii, except they have some really, really good songs. I find it a bit annoying when girly Japanese bands put on this self-consciously cute facade, but if a band is really sincere about what they do, it always comes across well in the end.
Has being a foreigner caused any extra challenges in the music business for you?
My Japanese is nowhere near as good as it should be considering how long I’ve been here, so that’s one thing where I have to call mea culpa, but I more or less get by. More subtle cultural issues only show themselves more rarely.
One thing is that when I disagree with someone over whether a band’s any good or not, people will often immediately respond, “Ah, that’s because you’re foreign,” when I’m just thinking, “No, it’s because you’re wrong!”
The other is the issue of “sempai” and “kohai”, which pervades the music scene. This basically translates as “senior” and “junior” and means that the longer you’ve been around, the more respect people beneath you have to give. It means that even if a band is really popular, they’ll sometimes find themselves lower in the pecking order than older bands with much smaller audiences just out of respect, and leads to a situation where younger bands are perhaps not as confident in themselves as I think they could be.
You’re based in Tokyo, but can you tell me about the musical identities of different cities in Japan?
I’d say that pretty much any big city in Japan has pretty much any kind of music in it somewhere, and the differences are more in the atmosphere, or perhaps in the influence that certain famous bands have on young bands following them.
Bands like Number Girl and Panicsmile, both of whom came out of Fukuoka, have probably had a kind of influence on the development of subsequent generations of punk and experimental bands there. I’d guess bands like Katsurei and Nohshintoh have had an influence on subsequent generations of Nagoya bands, and the Boredoms and Acid Mothers Temple have certainly had an influence on Osaka music.
One thing that I thought was an interesting observation was when I interviewed Hajime Yoshida from Panicsmile a few years back. He said that bands in Fukuoka basically wanted to be like Tokyo bands but because of the remoteness and the lack of any real flow of information between the cities’ underground scenes, the Fukuoka bands always got it wrong. He then went on to say that this made the scene interesting, because they got it wrong in a very Fukuoka-esque way, so when they actually went to Tokyo, people thought it was something very cool and original.
You’ve spoken of the Tokyo music scene as being fragmented, do you think that Tokyo is disadvantaged in this regard? You’ve mentioned that Fukuoka, for example, has a more unified scene, how do you think this affects musicians and fans in different cities?
The small suburb of Tokyo where I live, Koenji, has I guess about 15 or 20 live venues. Shinjuku perhaps the same or more, Shimokitazawa more than 20, Shibuya probably more than 30. In Tokyo as a whole, I’d hazard a wild guess at about 500 live venues. Tokyo and the area close by it has a population of perhaps 20 million (which is roughly the same as Australia) or if you take the whole urban area that Tokyo is a part of, more than 30 million (roughly the same as Canada).
Fukuoka has a population of 1.4 million and has probably fewer live venues than Koenji. Naturally there are fewer bands in smaller cities, and as a result they’re forced to play together with different types of bands and there’s less scope for fans to pick and choose events according to genre.
I’d have to say in the end that it’s an advantage to Tokyo just because of the sheer volume of great music that you can find. The greater number of bands means that genres can develop with the support of a more dedicated fanbase and with the inspiration and support of more like-minded bands. For someone entering into the scene though, it requires a lot of dedication to just find out about all the different scenes.
In any case, in Tokyo it’s easier to find a niche or a space to do your own thing, whereas in a town like Fukuoka it’s perhaps a bit easier to find a sense of community. In Tokyo you often have to build up your own community from scratch.
That’s a good point. I think it’s easy for me, as someone from Toronto, to see Tokyo as a similar city, just bigger. But you’re right to point out that that the Tokyo area has as high a population as Canada – which makes it very different than anything I’m used to. Is it more accurate to compare the differences between neighbourhoods to the differences between Halifax and Edmonton or between Brooklyn and San Francisco?
Probably more so in the past than now, but some districts still hang onto a musical identity. The net has made it much easier to spread information about shows, so people can find out about gigs pretty easily just by following their favourite bands’ web sites rather. As a result the music has become more and more divorced from its location.
The reputation of certain areas and certain venues does do a bit for the local flavour of places like Koenji or Shimokitazawa though, but it’s fading. Shimokitazawa’s undergoing redevelopment, which will probably end up making it much more like the rest of Tokyo, and if rumours are true, the last two proper punk venues in Koenji closed down after the fire there the other week.
It seems like you really promote the music you love, and not necessarily what will make money – for instance, you released a tribute to Wire, but have admitted that “no one in Japan knows who Wire are”. Do you think you’ll ever want to work with more commercially successful artists?
I exaggerated a bit there. Lots of people know Wire, although they’re not anywhere near as influential in the Japanese music scene as they are in the UK or even the US. The Pop Group seem to get way more kudos among bands I know, which is nice for me, coming from Bristol, but Wire’s icier, more cryptic and ironic approach doesn’t seem to translate so well into the Japanese way of doing things.
As for working with more commercially successful artists, I don’t know. I’d love it if Mir and Hyacca became really successful. My wife would certainly love it if all those boxes of unsold CDs would stop clogging up our closet. I release stuff by bands first and foremost whose music I love to bits, who I get on with as people, and who I feel share a similar kind of philosophy with me. I have no ideological problem with working with a commercially successful band as long as they fit all those criteria.
You’ve criticized the music press in Japan, but do you think the internet is improving things by making it easier for bloggers and writers to publish a variety of opinions?
The Internet makes it easier to do that, yeah, but it still needs the people to come out and actually do it. At the moment, Internet media in Japan still seems to follow the same uncritical, offend-no-one model as print media.
Media in Japan generally takes a way less confrontational approach compared to the UK, where people are often just dicks simply because they can be. That’s not in itself a huge problem, especially since nowadays people are just going to check it out on Myspace anyway rather than take a journalist’s opinion as gospel.
The problem in Japan is the general lack of fan involvement. Fans and musicians interact on a much more equal footing, and in a much more communal way compared to the UK, which is great, but the fans don’t feed back into the scene and proselytise about the groups they love through fanzines and such to the same extent. It’s not that Japanese people don’t do this kind of thing though: just look at anime and manga otaku. They have an awesome fan infrastructure and if music fans could borrow just a bit of that attitude (although please rather less of that awful Hatsune Miku stuff), it would have a huge impact.
Have you released any Call and Response artists outside of Japan?
Nope. I’d love to but I haven’t had the opportunity. I’ve tried to at least set up some kind of method of making my CDs available abroad, but so far every attempt has floundered on the problem of how to accept payments from overseas. PayPal has been the be-all and end-all of money transfer for people I’ve spoken to so far, and unfortunately I’m the only person in the world who can’t use it.
What is the best way for fans outside of Japan to get ahold of Call and Response music?
Good question. I have no idea (see above). In Japan they’re available through Tower Records, HMV Online, Amazon, Disk Union and some smaller independent stores, and you’d think some of them would export overseas.
Obviously none of these options are ideal though. If any of your readers own a small-scale, Japan-based online indie CD export shop, preferably one with a strict no-visual-kei policy and without any cutesy fake anime drawings on the web site, contact me by all means.
I often wonder why more Japanese labels don’t set up international distribution with stores like iTunes - Do you mind if I ask why that hasn’t been an option for you?
In many ways Japan has been quite slow to catch onto the Internet, and digital distribution just generally isn’t a big deal with customers yet. Until recently CD sales have been holding up better than in the west, although that’s really starting to break down now. Major labels make the situation worse with their general suspicion of all things electronic (DRM hatehatehate!) iTunes isn’t a big deal in Japan at all, and I think only accounts for about 10% of the download market or something. Most of it is mobile phone downloads, and most of that is distributed through one company, which is run by the major labels and excludes almost all independent music.
Added to that is the fact that indie music fans in Japan are among the most conservative in the sense that they generally seem to prefer having a physical CD in their hands. The main reason though, is that a CD sells for 1,500-3,000 yen and gets you 7-14 songs, which works out at a bit over 200 yen per song. Digital downloads go for about half that, so I guess labels are scared of harming their CD sales by making a cheaper version available.
I have no objection to making C.A.R.’s stuff available for download though. I will at some point, it’s just that it hasn’t been a priority for me when shifting the CDs I already have here in Japan is more of a worry.
Thanks Ian!
Links: Ian’s articles at his website Clear and Refreshing and at The Japan Times.
