| $21.01
new to stock as of
may 9th, 2007
threads:
outsiders-deviants
bedroom
lo-fi
psych-prog
sound-poetry
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| | | sakura wrechords (japan) #sakura c-05 cd yximalloo “the worst of 1982” compact disc - a fire #12 (2:58)
- a bird (1:49)
- a-e-a-e #1 (2:15)
- a water #8 (3:40)
- offer incense sticks #6 (2:29)
- wa-matsuri #10 (1:47)
- moon loop #1 (1:01)
- a ghost (1:45)
- a horse #9 (1:25)
- a wood #7 (1:59)
- offer incense sticks #9 (3:11)
- a dance (1:04)
- ton-ten-kan (3:13)
- a fish (0:45)
- dead soldier with red lipstick (4:02)
- o'rhythm (2:34)
- a horse #8 (1:35)
- fish loop (2:14)
- a fire #4 (0:45)
- a-e-a-e #3 (2:08)
- a grass (2:09)
- a moon (0:32)
- jet (0:54)
- ti-tzu #2 (5:44)
- not so easy #10 (1:10)
- moon loop #6+#7+#8 (1:55)
- wa-matsuri #8 (4:18)
- a fire #6 (1:01)
- a horse #7 (1:34)
- reggae kills the weird music in jamaica #6 (4:06)
- a water #9 (3:21)
- plague (4:43)
| earlier title by yximalloo; containing some of his earliest recorded moments. i had only heard a little bit of nao’s music before meeting up with him last week here in cambridge; he’s a young old soul with, in my mind, more in common with the outsider canon continuum (wölfli, moondog, jandek, johnston, yeah of course but also high-functioneers like ghedalia tazartes, der plan, suicide, etc...) than the 80s/90s japan-wave.
the pieces on here are all exceedingly lo-fi blurts of effected guitar, drum machine, electronically harmonized murmur-vox; and yes, sure, you can name a million contempo acts going along this grain, but i truly believe nao’s motives were far more personal when he laid this stuff to tape back in the early 80s...
a neglected pioneer if’n you ask me. |
| | sakura wrechords press release... |
| thought for the daywho? yximalloo!
il a un bon tete, yximalloo: the head of a clown on the wiry body of a circus acrobat. in the fierce afternoon sun of tokyo he looks unlike anyone else, though his shy, apologetic air belies this distinction.
just as i write this an e mail comes in from him: 'the reason why i did hesitate to meet you was i would destroy your imagination. because i'm such a man you can see everywhere in a street.'
this is far from true. he resembles other people i've met -- howard devoto, perhaps, or the rock writer kris kirk -- but nobody on the aoyama dori. he's neither salaryman nor consumer. his look is as 80s as the day-glo record sleeves jad fair designs for him. he's wearing a sort of garish b movie top and heavy beige pleated trousers with a big-buckled belt.
he's waiting for me on the steps of spiral, the slick tokyo department store with its art spaces, ambient music and curated record store full of neu! reissues and bossa nova. they don't carry yximalloo's records; these odd self-published releases fall into no existing genre, and have never attracted influential curators. he presses the cds himself. one thousand of each title, of which, he tells me, he's sold about one hundred so far, mostly to other music in new york. his only source of exposure seems to be wfmu, the eclectic college radio station based in new jersey.
yximalloo asks me to suggest another cafe: 'perhaps somewhere cheaper!' on the walk to nadiff he tells me that he's been living with a man in tel aviv, but that he outstayed his welcome and was chased out. as the conversation goes on, it transpires that this is a pattern in yximalloo's life. far from the recluse i imagined, living chained to his home studio, he leads a life of constant globetrotting: from israel to london, from london to denmark, from new york or oregon, from oregon to philadelphia. he forms friendships with people, moves in, and, finally, when their patience wears thin, moves on.
we sit at a table in the basement courtyard of nadiff, soothed by a big yellow wall and the faint sound of minimalist electronic music. yximalloo produces a box containing a dozen of his cds: two collaborations with jad fair and several of the 'worst of ' series, one for each year of the 80s, all released on his own sakura wrechords. he also presents me with a pair of panties. 'most artists make t shirts,' he says, 'but i make panties.' these ones are very skimpy indeed, and are printed on the bum side with the names of yximalloo and costes, the french performance artist.
it seems unsurprising that yximalloo should have performed and recorded with costes, a man i saw perform in paris the most extreme live show i've ever witnessed. writhing naked dancers splattered the audience with spinach disguised as shit, and sprinkled us with real piss. the first six rows of spectators took flight half way through the show, and cowered at the back, eager to avoid more body fluids and physical impacts. i interviewed costes afterwards, and he was as shy and self-effacing as yximalloo. the demon came out only in his art.
yximalloo pieces his english sentences together carefully, with closed eyes. (later he tells me 'if i like a man, i cannot look at him'. most of our conversation he's able to look me in the eye, though. i don't think i'm his type.)
of course, i try to bully him. he gives me an inch -- agreeing with my classification of his work as unpop, and my definition of unpop as a kind of pop -- and i try to take a mile. i tell him what's important in his work is this double identity he assumes: part anthropologist, part tribe. i try to get him to admit that his aesthetic choices are in themselves political, the result of his being japanese and gay. i suggest that his longevity as an artist, and the odd emotional tones that come through on the records, must be related to the fact that, at the age of 46, he's still single, still unrooted, with no vested interest in pop's usual lexicon of normative, reproductive values.
but he's having none of it. his work is intuitive, he says. he stopped working with other musicians not just because they all got married and settled down years ago, but because he knew he couldn't offer them any kind of security. his sound is original because he's very poor and can't afford to keep up with what other people are doing. and he's a country boy from kyushu, and doesn't keep up with the urban trends.
when he started in the 70s he used to hang out with ymo. he even worked for a spell programming live shows in shibuya, but this only convinced him that the live format was boring. now, when people ask him to play live, he likes to work for a week getting together new backing tapes of his songs. his most recent shows in the states were cancelled because he couldn't get anyone to give him a week of studio time to do this. he's toyed with the idea of putting on more theatrical shows in the costes tradition, but he's too shy to get naked in front of people.
yximalloo's favourite film director is charlie chaplin, and his favourite band is the beatles. he also likes mel brooks, cliff richard, and greek music from the 1920s. he makes his records by singing ideas onto a microcassette. then, when he's actually in japan long enough and has a place to stay, he puts his little home studio together and records. if it sounds like african music it's not because yximalloo is a world music fan, but because poverty forced him to build his own instruments. he tapes huge amounts of stuff, bouncing back and forth between two 2-tracks, then curates it all years later (that's how the 'worst of the 80s' series got made). now he's upgraded to four track. he's never heard of harry partch, although he could be his japanese pop brother. he's a pop anthropologist meeting a pop tribe. he's got an army of me.
the trouble with japanese pop, yximalloo says, is that japanese are brainwashed by caucasian culture. in japan, 98% of people are following trends and only 2% of people are setting them. he recently heard pizzicato 5 for the first time, and looks disappointed when i tell him they've split up. but he's not a holy innocent or wholly ignorant. he's heard of oval and likes mouse on mars, the ata tak label and the cologne sound.
when i get the cds home and put them on i'm not disappointed. yximalloo is the closest thing we have in pop music to a visionary outsider artist in the manner of howard finster or henry darger. like them he's compelling because his lack of any sort of training or socialisation, his failure to follow any of the 'rules' of pop music, brings him directly to the centre of its innate strengths and primary colours: idiotic repetitions, primal grunts, chants, children's songs, simple splashes of tone colour put together in unexpected ways, odd but successful combinations of ethnic music and synthesizers, covers of springsteen and the stones which restore the rough, sexy, baroque angularity of rock all the parodists usually lose in translation. he's john lee hooker with a synth, wild man fisher with a bone. he's totally central and totally unknown.
he's too fresh to die, yximalloo, and one day, i'm convinced, more than 100 people will hear him. let him be your kitsch shaman. or at least let him stay a month in the spare room.
momus. |
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