I just wrapped up another tour with Steve Appleton yesterday, along with the usual suspects JJ, Thomas, and Taiki.

Rehearsal day was very long. We only had a handful of new songs, but we were also adding in older songs we hadn’t played before.

The first show was at Shibuya Duo Music Exchange, which is apparently where Jamiroquai used(?) to play a lot. We made tons of mistakes, and that was a little frustrating to me, but the other guys and the crowd were having a seriously great time, so I can’t beat myself up too much over it.

The funny thing about shows like that is, okay, so you mess up a lot, but if everyone has fun, then that’s great, right? My personal philosophy, however, is that it would be even MORE fun if I didn’t make any mistakes!

On Saturday we played the Green Room Festival in Yokohama, at the Red Brick Warehouse area. That whole area is just real cool and it seemed like a grand old time. Newton Faulkner, and the Brand New Heavies were particular favorites I got to see.

We got up to the artist break room just as Miyavi was finishing his set. Taiki techs for Ryo, who was our previous drummer, who also used to play for Miyavi, so they knew each other. Taiki went to say hello, and I sort of wandered over, because I wanted to meet the guy but I’m a nervous wreck 95% of my waking hours. They were talking, but Miyavi looks at me and just says “hey man, what’s up?” and we were off. Very talented, very cool, very nice, very friendly… just a refreshing presence to be around. He was even nice enough to be willingly photographed next to a total dork:

The festival show was probably the ‘best’, just because of the festival atmosphere: drinks, sun, wandering crowds. We had also taken a bit of an advantage of this situation and did a bit more pre-show drinking than usual (just half a beer before going on is enough to cure the worst jitters), so it felt like the show was going to go off the rails at any moment. Luckily, Steve kept it tight.

(please ignore the weight i have gained due to complacency)

And finally on Monday I woke up early and we caught the Shinkansen into Osaka. I’ve been to Osaka many times, but always just on tour, and due to the nature of visual kei, once I’m in the makeup seat I can’t leave, so I never feel like I’ve actually seen the city. I felt the same in Korea. Luckily, this time Taiki, Thomas and I at least went to go have some takoyaki, and then I wandered around some shops for awhile and almost bought some old Transformers. Luckily the price tags dissuaded me. (over $500 for an original Scorponok!)

After another fun show, we wandered around looking for something to eat. Steve fancied the smell of a horumon place we passed, and didn’t mind having to barbecue his own meat, so in we went. They were very nice to us and gave us a bit of good stuff on the house.

This was, however, like, a proper horumon joint. Just plates of guts, really. I could see huge tubed arteries or something coming out of what I was sure was the heart, so I avoided that, but I was pretty happy with everything else, as I already like tongue and liver and kidney and the like. The stomach lining was not for me, although the cheek strips were actually very good. Steve’s manager looked on at us aghast the entire time, though.

Steve is Very, Very Good at guitar and piano and singing and if you’ve never been around someone who is so joyously skilled then you are missing out. I meet a lot of people, musicians or not, who sometimes seem quite jealous of people as good or better than they are, but I just get giddy and giggly. Jamming and singing along to some song as a warm up is almost more fun than a proper show to me, which is something I mentioned in a previous Chemical Pictures-related entry. Music is meant to be shared, yes, and frankly a bigger audience the better, of course, but the importance and affirmation of what I might call ‘campfire intimacy’ cannot be overstated.

We had one day in between each show, which was nice, because I have a day job, and I don’t think I’m used to having back-to-back shows anymore. I like where I am at right now. I have a stable, simple job, and sometimes I get good translation work or a TV appearance supporting an artist or a Steve or Tommy or something else thing. It’s nice and fun because it forces me to go outside and meet new people and those people often say very nice things about you, both to your face and behind your back, and those are the best kinds of nice things that are said. I am also not the main attraction, which means if I get to relax a little bit!

Anyway it was cool as heck and fun, the end

In the last song post, I talked about how there was a period right after Schwarz left where we just jammed in the studio a lot and wrote riffs and put songs together. That was one of my favorite times together as a band, and I think that says a lot about me, if my favorite part about playing music is just hanging out and playing stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZZYsGC2FtE

Tenten wanted a Yellow Monkey-ish thing, Joe started noodling on a riff Tenten said he liked, and then I said it was too simple, and I expanded it into the main riff you hear throughout the song and the verses. In its initial form it was cool but so simple that it would have been mind-numbing, so I’m glad it became a riff everyone liked. 

Even with a simple riff, I’m a huge proponent of making musical phrases as long as possible so you aren’t bored as a listener or a player. Even if parts are repeated or vamped, they need to be a little different every time. Phrases of maybe 4 chords that are repeated endless encounter the danger of being boring. Musically-speaking, a band that is SO DANG GOOD at making long 8- or 16- bar phrases and yet keeping things catchy and interesting is L’arc en ciel. Listen to especially their bigger hits from their middle period, and if you’re musically inclined, figure out how long it takes before the chord progression of the chorus repeats.

Anyway, I am not a genius, so I just had this riff that has tiny changes each time. By the way, that’s me shouting ‘ow!’ at the beginning of the song.

Lyrically Tenten said that the words to this one came to him quickly, a story of a war so vivid or crazy it might look as if a painter had done it. I took the ‘painter’ theme and kinda ran with it and came up with the spoken-word bit at the end.

I love love love Joe’s guitar solo on this track.

A nice bit of trivia about this song is that it’s missing a chorus! Tenten only recorded the last chorus and forgot to do the first two. We had no idea, and he didn’t realize it until we were already in mastering. Haha.

Another thing to is, when we played this song live, at the end of this song was the ‘aori’ section, which is, you know, when a visual band milks some crazy part for all its worth so the fans can go nuts on an exact schedule. Confession: we started playing it like this in the studio after a silly discussion about vk tropes we thought were stupid, and then we did it for real. I would not be surprised if the reason a lot of vk tropes continue is because the band is secretly actually mocking those tropes (I will also concede that some bands still do them wholeheartedly!).

Anyway I really like this song a lot and I stick by it today. It’s just good ol’ cool rock. It’s definitely in my top 5.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3zfyUJc-l8

We decided to do a 5-month release to hit the ground running. After Schwarz left, we had written a bunch of songs in the studio in a sort of jam setting, but we also decided that we wanted to try a few things: we wanted something that sounded over-produced and heavy, precisely because none of us had any idea of how to do that. Except we did already have Yamu Sora under our belts, but that was a Tenten song from long ago he brought into the band. Anyway, out of that came My Harlot Broker, Artbreaker, and Bellamy.

The basic idea was to put a big emphasis on the vocals and the toppings; it was a song built very much from the top down. Tenten sang some melodies in ‘fake’ English gibberish and I said I would find words that kind of sounded like what he was saying in order to preserve the ‘mouth-feel’, if that makes sense. He gave me the Japanese words for the verses and I built the chorus and backing vocals on top of that. From there, Joe and Shiun worked on the sound effects, and then the instrument parts themselves.

It’s very simple, almost boring to play. But that’s intentional, as anything else would really get in the way of everything else that was going on. As a concession, I arranged that part in the middle with the weird stops and time signature bars. It’s no prog rock, but it was enough to keep us interested when we played it live.

I composed the background vocals and harmonies on a keyboard, recorded those at Joe’s, and just gave that file to Tenten to figure out. We had some leeway when recording the first disc to do it like this but for everything else we were on a schedule so I had to come up with stuff and teach it to him during recording.

The actual recording was actually really very fun, as we had a simple demo version, and the sound effects/etc. tracks we just gave to our engineer and he made it sound better. It went very smoothly. Shiun is a machine on drums; he gets everything right in one or two takes and then a few fixes, and he is almost never off-tempo. I tend to get my tracks over with very quickly, but that’s the luxury of bass. Joe and Tenten then each take a lot more time respectively, and obviously.

Guitars for this were pretty easy, although typically Joe had to come up with other guitar parts on his own. I of course was on hand, and if he was trying to figure out if a part worked with another part, he’d ask me to play a riff on another guitar, and we’d work something out. I don’t take credit for any of that, I was just like a tape recorder. But it was a lot of fun to say, like, ‘hey hold that note longer’ or ‘try this fingering instead’ or whatever, and see him run with that and come up with something.

Anyway, I like the end result. It’s pretty slick.

Lyrically, this song set the stage hard for the concept all 5 discs would follow. We sort of BS’d some details in magazine interviews, but the basic idea of our world being bought and sold by itself? and wants to die or something? and how to handle that? Also the world is actually a person, walkin’ around? It reminded me of how the character of Nyarlathotep is portrayed in Lovecraft’s stories, though I’m pretty sure Tenten’s never read Lovecraft.

The theme as a whole sort of loses steam for good reasons around disc 5, and while I don’t think we ever actually discussed it amongst ourselves, I think having a ‘theme’, no matter how vague, really helped the cohesiveness of how we programmed the order of the songs as a whole.

To be honest, the period in which we wrote those three songs was really weird for a lot of reasons—that one guitarist we had in the band for like a weekend, various personal stuff—but man if some good ideas didn’t come outta that.

Now that I have comments enabled, if you have any questions or anything you can post ‘em there. Or the good ol’ ask function is just fine too!

I had no idea comments were not a thing on this web site. They are now enabled with Disqus! Feel free to take your time and comment to your heart’s content! I will most likely respond, or just sit here and nod my head or shake my head—really, the trajectory and path of my head movements are entirely up to your comments! You can control my head remotely!

I should have written this when it was more fresh in my mind. Sorry.

Also I will absolutely continue the CPS song series but I don’t want to burn out.

Chemical Pictures is a band I was in once. They broke up for good in December.

Joe invited me to a one-man live for a band called Ensoku.
Back when I lived in Saitama and was still scoping out the scene, there was a band called Ensoku that seemed to have started recently, they built up a following pretty fast based on their weird songs and the singer’s angrily shouted, quick banter. Imagine if Dancho got mad, basically.
Somehow I got to be friends with their first drummer, Dan, but he dropped off the face of the earth.
They had some super strange songs, amongst their usual mix of heavy local VK stuff and more modern pop songs, and they would interlude into them in funny ways. One of their songs is called “This is a pen.”, which is pretty much the only lyric in the song, other than a quickly-spoken fake dictionary entry of ‘pen’. This is probably the first sentence they teach you in junior high English class in Japan, the equivalent of これはほんです.
Another was a song about fireworks, the chorus of which was just them making firework sounds with their mouths.

When I joined Chemical, sometimes they would be playing the same day, and we were friendly. When Joe told me he would be joining them, it was definitely a surprise at first, but I guess it made sense. I had thought if he was going to do another band, it would be a non-visual band, but there he was, all decked out in a blue dress with Malice Mizer-style blonde curls and bonnet.

He did a great job. Of course, he is not lead guitar this time, and it was his first “official” live (though he had played with them in secret as a support member in full-body green tights for awhile before), so sure he might have been a little nervous and not used to the costume, but it was fun. Rui and Taku were there with me, and Rui was laughing his head off at the singer and his jokes.

It’s a little surreal that a friend of mine I played in a band with for a couple of years would join a band I used to see a long time ago, but that’s the scene for you. It is very small.

A few days later was Tenten’s final live with his two temporary bands. While Chemical was in their hiatus, he had two projects going with our buddy Jun, who we actually considered as Schwarz’s replacement for awhile and in fact performed with us as support once during a New Year’s event. He is very good and if I were to place bets on ‘nicest dude in VK’ I would probably drop a pretty penny on his ticket. One was called Hone Kari, and the conceit was that they were skeletons. The other band was called kiss my way, and they were a more “normal” band, though quite heavy and with a lot of hardcore breakdowns and dubstep bits. Tetsuya from Skull was the support drummer and we caught up. I like him and his drumming.

I helped out with a few songs for both bands, like “Pretty Joke”, “Yuugure”, and one that might have been called “Frankenstein”? I’m not sure, I haven’t asked for the finished songs yet.
One thing that was funny about helping out with the English that day was that we took a break and Tenten and I went outside for some air, and he sat me down and apologized if he was ever too hard on me. My mother has said something similar to me. Sure, he and the other guys were hard on me, but weren’t we all hard on each other? In any case, I never took it personally, but it was a surprising but nice thing to hear. I told him not to worry.

The show itself was crazy; for two self-described temporary bands, they sure got a big following fast. Once again Rui and Taku were there with me, along with a few other faces I had not seen in a loooooong time. Hone Kari’s set was half-live, half weird drama. Weeeeird. Funny though: the other vocalist for Hone is very talented and I hope he does more.

By the way, I suggest taking some time to look up some 骨（仮） videos on their youtube channel for a sense of just how weird they are. I wish I had those kind of guts.

When kiss my way came on, it was clear Tenten was having the most fun I’ve ever seen him have. That didn’t make me feel bad at all; Chemical was a different beast with different expectations. I think the self-imposed limit of KMY was freeing for him in a way. I knew that was a genre he had always wanted to try, and it seemed like a good fit for him. They also played Planetarium, by the way.

He pointed me out during one of his MCs and we had a little fun banter. It was something that would never happen at another VK show, that kind of interaction, because there is usually a big wall not only between the stage and the crowd, but between the crowd and the VIP section. Not only that, but the fact that it was Tenten and the fact that it was me made it okay. The whole show felt intimate, but that helped.

Both bands are fond of something called a “wall of death”, which is where the crowd is parted like the red sea and then commanded to slam into each other. The Hone vocalist usually stood in the middle of these during the kiss my way set, but during the encore Tenten hopped off the stage and dragged me into the middle. Keep in mind I initially formed my first band for the sole reason that I didn’t want to get hurt at concerts! Anyway, former fans and fans I didn’t know alike slammed into me and I went down, because I am weak. They helped me up immediately and applauded. Honestly if it had been anyone else I would have been embarrassed or upset, but it was funny and I like to think I did my little part there to make the show fun.

I have rarely seen that much work go into a VK show. It was also something very unique: two drastically different bands, with ostensibly the same members (though for logistical reasons, for this show, there were support members), who stated at the very beginning that they would release one single, play a few shows, and then be done… It’s a huge amount of work for a temporary thing, but like I said before, I think that was very freeing for everyone involved.

I don’t have anything philosophical to say really. I saw two of my friends play some music with some other friends, and it was fun and made me proud.

EDIT: HAHAHAHA literally right after I posted this, Tenten linked this on twitter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkP8r5SGepk&feature=youtu.be