I’m sure I’m not the only mid-30s music fan in Japan up at 7, listening to A Year And A Day on headphones. Sad, but grinning at the lyrics.
Adam Yauch’s influence and talent went way beyond music, and I’m glad he was here, albeit for all too short a stretch. RIP, Megadude.
The Abikyokan lads, the AbiNation, the Abistronauts – call them what you must – will be back and rocking live and cosmic at Asagaya Gamuso on Saturday June 2nd. We’ve been invited by our friends Speaker, and are very much looking forward to playing the songs from and celebrating the release of our new EP, Fear.
This will be available to download for free from June 1st on our Soundcloud and Bandcamp. The songs are In The Woods, Fear and God, Bigfoot. We do hope you can bug out to them.
The video for Fear is already out there on the webs, a lovely thing constructed by our own Craig Exton from parts of a 1972 film from the Soviet Union, Ruslan And Ludmila (Руслан и Людмила). I think it fits the music very well, and our beseeching faces appear only briefly, making it even more of a smash.
Here’s some memories about the recording of the Fear EP:
1. In The Woods
The starting point for this was a beat and sample pattern I made at home, quite drunk, before an Abikyokan jam. I wanted it to be as bass-heavy and misty-sounding as possible. My Electribe emits quite a lot of extraneous noise, which makes recording it difficult, but this time I decided to embrace the interference, possibly influenced by John Maus, whose stunning album We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves dominated my brain last summer.
Both the samples are ones I’ve used before: the bass sample from the intro of Paul Young’s Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home) was employed on Curtains, and the guitar sample is from possibly my favourite record of all time, The Night by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons – and some of you may remember that groove being used to devastating effect in Ian Martin and I’s short-lived but uncompromisingly sexy unit Rizla Deutsch.
I took the pattern to the studio and as everyone jammed a ghostly, strangely latin melody emerged, and eventually evocative lyrics from Jake about childhood arboreal memories. Craig’s elastic bass joined me on my motorik thump-quest, while Tatsumi brought in some unexpected funk on keys. In short, the song that emerged completely transcended my minimal, po-faced beat, and became something more emotional, satisfying and in its cloaked atmosphere and relentless, a pleasurable step into the unknown for Abikyokan.
2. Fear
This song has been around for a while in our live set, the “quiet one” that unfortunately often gets talked over. Hopefully now it’s recorded it will get the attention I think it deserves. It began as solo Jake, and the guitar part and lyrics remain unchanged from Jake’s original idea. We made the original recording quite a while ago: first a live take of Jake’s guitar and my (hopefully) unobtrusive drum part. I tried to play like the cymbals were conversing with the guitar (Ringo Starr influence there, thanks Ringo) and hopefully that keeps the song subtle and the message of the lyrics to the fore. Later we added Craig’s bass (making the song seem to float in a very pleasant way), Jake’s multi-tracked vocal, and an oboe (actually iPad!) part from Tatsumi that took my breath away. It sounded gorgeous by itself, like the intro to a late-60s British concept album or song cycle, and when integrated into the song it sounded great in a totally different way, and added a psychedelic touch to this essentially straightforward (for us!) piece of music.
3. God, Bigfoot
One of Jake’s more outrageous lyrics! It’s all about food…I think. Like In The Woods, this began with me programming patterns at home, aided by Yona Yona and other fine ales. A rather militant beat, an insistent Spectrum 48K sample (one of my favourite sounds, used to death in my solo music and also in Abikyokan’s song Spectrum), and a lovely fat synth bass riff.
Again I took this to the studio and watched open-mouthed as it became a proper song. The special pleasure of electro Abikyokan! Craig’s tremendously apropos New Order-esque bass part and Jake’s startling guitar explosions and ever-soulful vocal, plus a terrifying sound from Tatsumi that I hardly dare guess the provenance of, complete the sound picture. On one level, one of our poppiest productions, almost danceable and, I hope, disgustingly catchy. But you will search for a chorus in vain.
We’ll play all these songs, plus some even newer and some considerably older, at the Gamuso gig. More info on other bands as soon as I have it.
As it’s often rather difficult to get our electronic beats PA’d to our satisfaction at the kind of small livehouses we play, we’ve decided to play the songs in our rock configuration. I’ll once more be manning the drums, hopefully transforming the rigid, technoid beats on the recorded versions of In The Woods and God, Bigfoot into something more African, unpredictable and funky.
Do hope to see you all there.
Synthesmic Mix 1 Cloudcast by Grant McGaheran, posted with vodpod
Evening/morning/arvo to all. February has continued to be very cosmic and musically rich. I’ve started uploading some of my upsettingly unpredictable but hopefully beneficial DJ mixes to my Mixcloud page.
The Synthesmic Mix above is music from and inspired by my DJ set at the first Synthesmic on January 19th. There’s also a lot of extra material, and contributions from my heroes Carl Sagan, Douglas Adams (via Ford and Arthur) and the incomparable Phil Oakey. Give it a shake and see what drops out.
Also on Mixcloud you can hear the first of what will hopefully be a series of New Wave Shapes mixes, plus a special compilation of records which I’ve sampled for use in Abikyokan’s music over the years.
The second Synthesmic event was even more enjoyable than the first, featuring as it did some truly top class music from DJs Niagara, Emerald, Gojya and Amikit*, and a journey into the galaxy of funny creatures that exists within the head of matocotoshuco. I also danced to both Betty Boo and Tim Blake and drank beer from a tiny chocolate cup.
Abikyokan played our first live set of 2012, with all the songs being completely and frighteningly new to the live show, and perhaps predictably we messed up quite a lot. The sound system kept cutting out during Another and In The Woods too, and our opening Our Chilly Season was also defeated by some definitively awful balancing. I’m not too bothered though, as the songs sounded lovely in rehearsal, and everyone at the event was very complimentary to us afterwards. Your Tattoo and Bigfoot Cafe (working title!) came out OK though, as did our bizarre and uncalled-for cover of Bobby Brown’s Two Can Play That Game. Though I introduced it as such, this wasn’t really an oblique and inappropriate tribute to Tragic Whitney Houston, as we’d eerily decided to do the cover a good few days before the soul queen’s expiration date.
A big thank you to everyone who saw the show, especially those who liked it against the odds, and also to the staff at Bullet’s who struggled manfully and womanfully with the sound system for us.
Our next live outing will be at Shibuya Ruby Room on March 31st. The next Synthesmic will be on March 15th, and I’ll be DJing that too. Can’t wait!
Till then, do enjoy the mixes, and these photos what I done took of the DJs (and Abikyokan Jake and Tats) at Synthesmic.
Love you bye!
January 2012 was, all told, a very rewarding month. The Abikyokan lads and I have been honing our brand new, electro and disco flavoured songs each Friday night in Hirai, and will debut them at the second Synthesmic on February 16th at Roppongi Bullet’s. We like them and hope you do too. Even if you don’t, we’ll enjoy blasting them out, by thunder.
The first Synthesmic on January 19th was a real pleasure, and a fusion of so many of my favourite things – a superb quality of music, by turns haunting, funky, trippy and beautiful, a surfeit of gorgeously camp projected visuals, and last but not least, great, great company.
DJs Niagara, Gajya, Emerald and ham&ex played consistently great music that kept with the spacey, cosmic theme of the event whilst also remaining astonishingly eclectic and satisfying. It was also a great pleasure to meet Amikit*, who shares my love of Betty Boo and The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, and projected some majestic 90s space-pop ephemera to accompany the sounds. She’ll DJ next time along with the regulars, and (suitably galactic?) kamishibai performance will be provided by matocotoshuco, who is of course from another planet. Entrance is free and the pleasure will be extreme. Find all the information on Tokyo Gig Guide.
I’m very excited to play this next show as Craig, Jacob, Tatsumi and I have had an unusually productive month, coming up with three new songs in rehearsals, all focusing on a re-found love of disco, electropop and new wave, as well as working up new band versions of a couple of old but intriguing solo tracks. You can hear Jake’s demo of Your Tattoo here, and my demo of Another here, and the Abified, all-singing all-dancing new versions on the 16th. We’ll also play our most recent single Our Chilly Season, its first live outing.
At the last Synthesmic I played a set which expressed my peculiar vision of “space”, including the following tracks. Huge thanks to all who danced and enjoyed my set. It was a huge pleasure to entertain you!
JACQUES DEJEAN – Petite Suite (Danse)
EMERSON, LAKE & PALMER – Tocatta
M. FROG – We Are Crazy
MAGICAL RING – Touch As Much
BRAIN – D.I.X.O.
KRAFTWERK – Trans Europe Express
QUEEN SAMANTHA – Take A Chance
JULES TROPICANA – Come On
YUKIHIRO TAKAHASHI – Disposable Love
VICTROLA – Maritime Tatami
PREMIERE CLASSE – Le fille qui rit
PETER BAUMANN – Deccandace
(and more I can’t remember)
January also saw the return of the Abikyogra Podcast. I spent a very pleasurable and only slightly drunken Wednesday evening with Call And Response Records main human and crypto-journalist Ian Martin playing and discussing some seriously good Yugoslavian new wave music. Hear the results, as we became Slav To The Rhythm, here until March 1st.
Other than that, I’ve been walking, cycling, taking photos, and drinking beer. More of that, I hope, in February, fewer hangovers, and even more music and aceness than this first and promising week of zero 12. Chairs xoxo
Happy 2012, all! Hope the New Year has been kind to you so far. I’m spending the first month of 2012 in Space, making new and cosmic grooves with the Abikyokan lads, and getting ready for my first DJ splashdown of the year at a brand new, regular acby event, Synthesmic!
What does Synthesmic mean? I’ll be straight with you. I haven’t the faintest. But! The theme of the event – “synthesizer, cosmic, galaxy, spacey” – certainly appeals to my Sagan-loving, motorik-drumming soul, as does the offer of “all-you-can-read space books”!
What will you play, Grant? Well. I’ve been reading JG Ballard short stories. And taking inspiration from video magic like this:
and, goodness me, this:
The event is free and takes place within the opulent splendour of Bullet’s in Nishi-Azabu.
Free on Thursday night? Come join us in the cosmos.
SYNTHESMIC
at Bullet’s
Free entry
19:00-23:00
DJs
DJ エメラルド
DJ ナイアガラ
ham&ex
ごじゃ
Grant McGaheran
and more★
Info: Bullet’s 03-3401-4844
or follow @acby on twitter
Looking backwards at 2011 through a special Abikyokan lens.
DECEMBER – We reached the winter holidays with another change of sound. Our final recording of the year, and my favourite of our singles to date, Our Chilly Season, was a return to our electronic roots, but also sounded a new tone. The disco beats are back, joined by the feel for ambience and space we haven’t explored since Novaya Zemlya. At some point in November we’d all decided to head in a new direction, having spent a year playing live shows mostly hewn from heavy rocks. Some of us fretted about what a return to electronics and metronomics might mean, but in the end the obvious Abikyokan thing to do was to jam together and see what came out. Nominally a Christmas single, Our Chilly Season came together through two long jams in the studio. It didn’t make sense to me until the mixing stage though when, suddenly hearing it as if through new ears, I was taken aback by the sounds. Here, back in golden pants, is the dancefloor-loving Abikyokan of The Takedown and Body 6000, plus the ambient melancholy of Flood Plain and Shark Church (“He’s ready to make the jump…”). Quite unexpectedly. If this is to be Abikyokan’s sound for 2012 then I’m a happy Gra indeed.
NOVEMBER – Events, dear boy, events. We went to a lot. We played live at Koenji Dynamo, with one of the worst PAs and one of the best audiences we have ever faced. Craig and I DJed at A Chain Brick Yard’s 13complex and acby night events, reconnecting with magic old friends and making some equally magic new ones. Heaps of inspiration came Abi’s way, and also a kind of epiphany, when our friend ham&ex DJed our 2010 collaboration with Makino Eri, Candle Ghost. I was fooled into thinking it was great because I didn’t remember at first that we made it. It sounded futuristic and strange, and oddly assured, and I couldn’t believe we’d forgotten it so easily. I immediately re-uploaded it to the Interwebs, where it now sits proudly on our SoundCloud page, both the experiental past and possible future of Abikyokan.
OCTOBER – saw the release of our single and video The Room. An odd fusion of 60s pop, dub space and motorik rock, the single version was a quieter and more thoughtful beast than the song that had become a live favourite during 2011. Speaking of live, we played a hugely enjoyable show at Mizonokuchi with our friends’ Misfits covers bands at the end of the month. This show saw, to my delight, a return both to Jake’s electric Miles-influenced trumpet playing and long, psychedelic disco jams. Listen to it here.
SEPTEMBER – After the long, hot and mostly idle summer, we reconvened to record our next single The Room, and a remarkable video filmed by Craig. On a hot, sticky, mosquito-rich holiday Friday morning we gathered with our various hangovers under a highway between Hirai and Shinkoiwa stations. The bleak vista, Chinese women practicing singing and moth-bitten cats seemed to fit our aesthetic. We also danced around and rode a bike. See the results here.
JULY – As the astonishingly hot summer crashed in and holidays beckoned, the Abi workload accordingly decreased. I summoned just enough energy to record and release my first Abikyogra Podcast.
JUNE – We released the first single from our phantom album Star Panic, and initiated our new way of doing things: that is, no album, but a flow of stand-alone singles and videos which might, mysteriously, form a coherent collection of music called Star Panic in the future. What is Star Panic? It’s our rock and roll repertoire, basically, recordings of the drum-based, pop and noise-loving songs we’ve been playing live for the last couple of years. First up was Fine Girl, a real vampiric soul blast with an accompanying Craig video which agreeably lightens its dark and foresty message. I was really happy with the recording of Fine Girl, particularly the truly thumping bass and fizzing keyboards. It’s somewhere between Under The Cherry Moon by Prince and Let Me Roll It by Wings, but all Abikyokan in its diabolical pomp.
MAY – saw us lurking in the scuzzy backroom of Hirai izakaya Ponpokopon, filming our video for Fine Girl. It was great because we were able to stay sitting down and drink lots of beer. The results were amusing and very us. We played live in May too, at (the bar of) Loft in Shinjuku, danced to by a single nutter, and Craig, Jake and I DJed with Timebred and Makino Eri at another Wild Mood Swings bash in Shibuya. Hope that varied and consistently ace event will make a comeback in 2012. Do it, Timebred!
APRIL – found us back at Gamuso for a startlingly poorly-received first-band-on performance. Still, we got to DJ and see the bloke from Young Fratellis writhing on the floor. On a brighter note, we remastered (that is, turned the volume up on) our 2004 album track and live favourite The Takedown as part of the ongoing Abikyokan Gold series. Listen to it here, and also enjoy our drink-eroded memories of those heady days.
MARCH – The massive disaster of the 11th was obviously a shock to us all, and we reacted to it in various ways. I luckily had moving house the next day to keep me occupied, helped enormously by Jake and his big arms. As well as helping me shift my heavy stuff he also found time to put out a strange and delightful pseudo-live performance allegedly recorded at a livehouse called Give Me The Shelter… Tatsumi made a simple but beautiful video of his son Raven dancing for our 2006 song One More Way, and Craig brought together Makino Eri & Friends, TropeN and sundry mates for a hugely enjoyable charity Farm Party at Gamuso. The music was superb, but most of all it was great to escape for a few hours from the creeping dread and darkness of those awful post-earthquake, post-tsunami, post-nuclear disaster days in power-cut, food-shortage Tokyo.
FEBRUARY – we emerged from wintry hibernation to have some serious rehearsals, coming up with a new song, The Room, in the process. We also reconnected with an old friend, our first ever song, the fruity electropop stomper Comatose Baby, setting in motion a new venture, Abikyokan Gold, whereby we remaster and make available old Abikyokan songs that have only previously been available on CDRs owned by about 23 people. Hear Comatose Baby and read our memories of it here.
JANUARY – I began 2011 alone in the studio, diligently laying down the appallingly difficult drum parts for our song Dog Latin, which was to be part of our forthcoming album Star Panic. As the other members returned from vacations and deep, jungly burrows, we gathered to lay down all the parts to this, our most progressive rock number, and then promptly forgot about it. Why? Jake and I also laid the foundations for a new, thumping, drums-and-all version of our 2009 song Spectrum. This, too, fizzled out. Will the cold weather and the rolling around of 2012 awaken these tunes from their cryogenic sleep and sending them thundering onto the internet, to be liked as much as 3 times on Facebook? Stay tuned, jazzbots.
It’s Croco Christmas! It’s the Abikyogra Christmas Podcast! And what better way to unwind than with the dulcet chat of me, Abikyokan quarter Grant McGaheran and my fine friend and inspiration, the magnificent Timebred, AKA Chris Carlier?
Well, oi, before you answer that again quite so abruptly, check out some of the lovely tunes Chris has brought in his festive sack, and hear some of the terrible puns and traumatic insights we managed to add to this gorgeous aural collage…
You can listen to and download the Abikyogra Christmas Podcast on my SoundCloud until January 4th.
I sincerely hope it warms your yuletide nuts. Now: pigs back in blankets, please.
TRACK LIST:
INTRO : LES KILIMANBOGO – Christmas Day Pts 1 & 2
TIMEBRED’S SELECTION:
REN & STIMPY – Decorate Yourself
LOU MONTE – Dominic The Donkey
AKIM & TEDDY VANN – Santa Claus Is A Black Man
LEE “SCRATCH” PERRY – Santa
AUGUST DARNELL – Christmas On Riverside Drive
ALAN VEGA – No More Christmas Blues
SPIKE MILLIGAN – I’m Walking Backwards For Christmas
EL VEZ – Feliz Navidad
CAN – Silent Night
BGM:
LA DUSSELDORF – Das Yvönnchen
AZTEC CAMERA – Walk Out To Winter (Long Version)
SAINT ETIENNE – My Christmas Prayer
JIMMY DONLEY – Santa! Don’t Pass Me By
KURTIS BLOW – Christmas Rappin’
FAT DADDY – Fat Daddy
