17. 1,000 Lights (Or, An album of new material that came together seemingly out of thin air)

Let me just say a few words here about "1000 Lights," which was released on March 11 of this year (2023). It is, to my mind, a "minor" release, but still a part of my ever-evolving catalogue of new music (i.e. as opposed to being a compilation).

"1000 Lights" eventually came to include, in addition to the three tracks left over from the recently-recorded "In-yo" (Yin-Yang: Light/Dark) EP, which I mentioned above, some of the other, even newer material I had recorded late last year that hadn't yet found a proper home, specifically two medium-length (well, by my standards, anyway; that is, as compared to longer tracks that can run for 30 or more minutes) ambient pieces. 

The first, entitled "Runanubandha," is a dark ambient instrumental which includes a sample I'd taken riding the train that I had originally planned to use for my recording of "Kether to Malkuth" (a reinterpretation of Bowie's "Station to Station," as I shall discuss in more detail below); the second a track I entitled "The Silent Ones." 

The latter track started out, interestingly, as a backing track I had created to use for two Bowie vocal samples that were essentially "lifted" from someone's YouTube page, the vocals isolated/extracted (by someone, not me...) from two songs written by Bowie and his then-guitarist Reeves Gabrels as part of their soundtrack for the "Omikron: The Nomad Soul"* (sic) video game (these tracks ultimately ended up, in slightly different versions, on the album's b-side -- that is, the b-SIDE of the vinyl or cassette tape versions, not the CD, obviously -- of Bowie's '99 LP "hours..."). As I couldn't release it as an official remix/reconstruction, however different my version was from the original, since I didn't and still don't own the rights to the Bowie vocal samples themselves, I decided, instead, to take the vocals out (including my backing vocals, which I'd added to the remix, save for the final, whispered phrase "the silent ones," from which I derived the title of my original track for "1,000 Lights") and found that it also worked nicely as an instrumental; it was a rather atmospheric ambient track in and of itself, and I liked it in its bare-bones version as well. The track includes some improvised piano tinkles, various samples I had recorded on a walk through the town/city where I work (at one of several teaching gigs), as well as at the train station, and it also had some loops/samples of strings and other things, duly manipulated.

"Haunted Child" music video, with footage from Takuya Mizukami. Included on the "1000 Lights" LP.

Having also recently, at the time, rediscovered some previously unreleased "vaults" tracks, I then decided to work on remixing them, giving them a new, updated sound and, in some cases, even, brand new titles to better fit their radically-altered forms. Tagging the three tracks from what had been the "In-Yo" EP -- along with the recently-recorded track "Inner Peace" from late last year, which includes the voice of the Dalai Lama -- onto the track list, I soon realized that I now had another essentially brand new LP which, somehow, was no longer "1123," but something else, something entirely different. The cover art I finally decided to use, a photo I'd taken that was, essentially, a blur of light, which I further effectorized before adding the title, and a track I had recently rather drastically rearranged** from an older instrumental, retitled as "1000 Lights," rounded out the collection.

"Inner Peace" music video, feat. spoken word from His Holiness the 14th The Dalai Lama.

* Regarding the "Omikron/Omicron" reference: I have been teaching a self-designed course on David Bowie at university every fall for two years running now, and seeing the title "Omikron" from 1999 -- despite the slight difference in spelling, with "k" replacing the "c" -- never fails to make my students giggle, especially after I crack a joke about how DB was, after all, incredibly ahead of his time, predicting the pandemic all the way back in the late '90s. (Omicron actually came in the latter phases of the pandemic, which didn't hit until early '22, so that is perhaps even more incredible to contemplate, no? So, so ahead of his time!!) Of course the term "Omicron" itself comes from the Greek alphabet, and wasn't suddenly created for Covid, either, and of course the video game had nothing at all to do with viral mutations or any such, though perhaps the game had predicted, in some sense, the coming AI revolution? I mean...um, well. Bad joke. Never mind.

** The sound of the rearranged instrumental I've just mentioned, after it was finished, somehow recalled to my mind Coil's "A Thousand Lights in a Darkened Room," released as a side-project. This is a very experimental album I had bought on CD when it first came out in 1996 during my study abroad year in Osaka. Thus, the title (of both the track and the LP itself) became a sort of homage, albeit one which likely only its creator would recognize as such, which is why he has decided to add this modest footnote here!

18. Segue: Ramona A.I. Drakestone

As an aside:

Copyright...

Who owns it? Who "owns" the copyright to an A.I.-made song or painting, anyway?

A new problem for record labels. The Hip-hop artist Drake does not approve, but Drake's AI has a ghostwriter who did, and who does. As do, oddly enough, his own fans, some of whom liked the AI version better of Drake than they did/do the "real" one! Uh-oh...

Right? 

Right.

Who slept with ghosts? Whose placebo??

Do all of the rights to recordings and such now remain with the humans? Or will A.I. eventually take all of our rights away, too?!

Personally, I think artists who are original need not worry too much about A.I. being "creative," or of overtaking or replacing "human creativity." Commerical art, perhaps. A.I. can do it quickly, and well. But, hey, then again, I don't make my living from my art. I live for and by it, instead. So I personally am not too worried about it at all. I worry more about A.I. being used for other nasty things, since the ones who will use them are humans, inevitably humans who will have rather nasty intentions.

We are the monsters, after all. Frankenstein (in the book) was really the monster, and his monster creation ("Frankenstein's Monster") was only a reflection of the monstrosity he had always held within himself.

We can best understand life through such metaphors, I think.

A.I. are neither good nor bad. Is a knife evil? It depends. What will you use it for? A juicy red tomato, perhaps, its seeds spilling out all over the tabletop? Do I hear echoes of A.R.-G. in my head?

Late April, and it's freezing in my room

Well, let me continue with this darned essay-thing already...

(I quite enjoy writing and revising it, more than you might think. If I didn't, what would be the point of doing it in the first place? Certainly not for profit. An "information superhighway? Don't make me laugh!")

(Skipping section 15, which is non-music-related and may be revised, rewritten, or cut.)

16. Excursions/Evolution

At the end of 2022, I was busy with multiple projects that ended up being released in 2023. And before the year was out, I had finished editing and published not one, but two lengthy documentaries, via my ever-growing YouTube channel. The first took me less time to finish, though it is longer than the second, and each has its own unique angle/s and style/s.

Perhaps similar to my reason (or, well, reasons) for writing this long essay/short book, or whatever it is, I'd felt that I wanted to, at this stage, share some of my personal musical history, specifically regarding my live activities since coming to Tokyo, or, more specifically, from the start of the pandemic in 2020 up until "the present" (i.e. the end of 2022, when I was actually teaching six days a week and on voluntary "break" from accepting any live invitations from any/all venues). In 2020, during the first weeks of the pandemic, I had made a 1.5 hour-l0ng documentary about my musical activities in Fukuoka and up until the (at-the-time) present, since I had had a lot of extra time on my hands and an equal amount of video footage stored on my HD, much of it live footage taken by my friend, M-san, in Fukuoka, but I now wanted to bring things more up-to-date, as so much had changed since then, since separating from my ex-girlfriend, since having the opportunity to perform more in Tokyo as the Covid restrictions became looser (and lesser), and also since coming to feel differently about myself and about the world around me.

And so, I started the first documentary (of two) I would complete by showing a brief clip (one I edited down to less than 30 seconds, and also subtitled in English, as I am speaking in Japanese during the entirety of the interview) where I was answering a question from my interviewer -- a professional photographer/videographer friend from my local neighborhood in Tokyo, and whom I had briefly mentioned earlier, A -- about the so-called "Covid situation" in Japan, particularly as it was severely impacting my, and other performers like me, ability to participate in live performances, save "by proxy" via so-called haishin (配信), or "streaming video," so-called live performances filmed and overseen, of necessity, essentially, by the sound and lighting people at any given livespace (in Japan, these are referred to as "livehouses"), who were not used to doing video, especially not at first, and especially not live streaming video, as it wasn't their specialty to begin with. These "live" videos often (or, rather, almost always) were in very poor quality, both visually and, even more unfortunately, audio/fidelity-wise, and there was also no possibility of any "post-production editing" to improve the audio or flow of the visuals, since the broadcasts happened in real-time, obviously... 

Interview on Feb. 7, 2020. Interviewed by Akiko Honda. Japanese language-only.

At the risk of taking up too much space on this perhaps seemingly-outdated topic here (I am, in a sense, engaging a bit in the proverbial act of "beating a dead horse," perhaps, since the situation has drastically changed since late '20/early in '21, when the pandemic was presenting both live venues and performers with new challenges, both welcome and perhaps mostly unwelcome...but, well, you know, if I take this stance too firmly, then the same could be said of this entire essay/book/writing exercise itself, and so I shall continue to justify making the point I wanted to make at the time for just a little bit longer!)...

Ahem. 

Okay, well then, to be completely honest... 

All of this "live remote video performances" activity (paid for, essentially, by the performers to the livehouses) just created, I felt, rather lifeless and livid-looking, poor-sounding so-called "live shows," presented in a rather staid, drab, unexciting video format usually filmed via 2-3 stationary cameras that were usually placed at boring, unimaginative angles (the same for each and every performer or band, regardless of their setup, in most cases) and, generally, programmed to change angles automatically every X-seconds, with no excitement for the viewer/listener, no artistry, and nothing to recommend them at all, I felt, except the mere fact that bands were given a chance to perform "at a livehouse," i.e. on a stage, though, again, without any guests in the venue to watch, listen, and/or respond. Without any of the alcoholic drinks people would normally have happily imbibed at the venues, without the shouting, laughter, annoying-but-necessary chatter during performances (in Japan, at least, audiences are generally pretty quiet and polite, especially in comparison to "abroad," but when there are foreigners in attendance, well...), the 15-30 second videos taken via iPhone and uploaded to people's Twitter accounts during the performance in order to prove that they were in fact there and "having fun," and, most especially, without the ear-splitting highs and boot-shaking lows that one gets to experience from the large woofers and tweeters of the livehouse's whopping speaker system(s)...the whole idea seemed rather pointless to me; that is unless the videos themselves were to do or to offer something different to the viewer/listener from what could be done at the livehouse itself; to offer, in short, a new viewing/listening experience that would utilize the strong points of the format to make the videos special and also worth the fee one was required to pay in order to view the performances.

In other words, and I'll try to gracefully close out this topic in this paragraph, the videos themselves demanded, at the very least, proper creative post-production editing, I strongly felt; they also needed to have superior, or at least better, sound quality than they generally had at the time in order to be of any sort of value to anyone other than to the performers themselves, who might as well just have paid a few hundred yen per member to go into a rehearsal studio somewhere in town and filmed their "live" rehearsals themselves with a stationary iPhone or iPad or camera on a stand and then edited them (even "shoddily edited" would have been better than what the livehouses were doing, since they were presenting videos that were not edited at all) in a freeware editing program such as iMovie, which is definitely good enough for anyone to create very decent-looking live videos. In any case, this was my line of reasoning, and this is essentially what I wanted to convey to my interviewer on camera, though perhaps I expressed it a bit differently at the time. I also wanted to sound as proactive and positive as possible about my own ideas for how one might, alternately, present a live show in the "age of Covid restrictions," rather than badmouth the livehouses, who were struggling enough to make ends-meet as it was during the pandemic, and also in the full knowledge that pretty much everyone at that time would have preferred to do the shows with an audience and with the beer taps flowing.

...A and I, the afternoon before the interview, had collaborated on filming our "live-in-studio" video, one that, to this day, I am rather proud of (this was in February of 2021). I was really "chomping at the bit" to perform in front of an audience with the audio-visual backdrop I had prepped over a month earlier for a show that had been canceled due to (yet another) "State of Emergency" declaration by the government, but could not, and so I asked her if she would be willing to do the "in-studio live" video with me, and she (thankfully) agreed. I later edited the footage that A had filmed of me performing, which had many zoom-ins/zoom-outs, with close-ups not only of my face and such, but also, tastefully, of my hands on the keyboard, of the video footage projected onto a large white cloth we draped/taped over the rehearsal studio's mirrors (the cloth was hers; she sometimes used it, she told me, for professional photo shoots), etc. 

"Live-in-Studio" collaborative video (full - 30 mins.), with Akiko Honda. Feb. 7, 2020

This video, as with all of the videos she shot of me between the beginning of '21 and summer of '22, displays what I consider her "signature" filming style, in which the lens of the camera comes into and out of focus during the performance, is manipulated and moved to film things from unique and interesting angles, etc. I recommend (to the reader of this essay) taking a look at the 2021 live-in-studio performance video (above, though I look a bit like a caveman, with long hair and a thick goatee, since I was those days spending most days alone at home...), as well as at some of the other videos we shot together, which are all on my YouTube page, such as the "Hope" and"Broken Wing" music videos, and our live "Acoustic in the Park" series.

So then... Perhaps I should now return to my discussion about the documentary?

And, yes, so, after the "Prologue" (mm...where was I, now? do you remember?) and one song from our 2021 in-studio "Live-in-Studio" collaboration video, discussed in the paragraph above (I decided to include a performance of "Room," a song from the "Untitled" LP of 2020), the documentary -- which runs for a total of around 2.5 hours -- moves to various other excerpts (full songs or, in the case of longer improvs, lengthy excerpts) from live videos that are all available in full on my YouTube page starting from early 2021, including a number of clips from other videos filmed in collaboration with A, some self-shot "in-studio" things I attempted on my own, with post-production editing, and so on. Gradually, it moves to clips from shows performed at the various livehouses where I had begun doing live shows once again post-"State of Emergency" (that ought to be plural, actually, as there were many during 2021, off and on and on and off again, endlessly...), moving all the way through to the autumn of 2022, with video footage from performances at livehouses I frequently performed at in '22, such as Nepo in Kichijoji (吉祥寺), Sangatsu-no-mizu (三月の水), a curry shop in Jinbocho (神保町) run by an Indies record label guy who did (and still does) music events (he would host my birthday live performances for two years in a row: first in 2022 and then again this past year in 2023, when I turned 50 -- I will discuss this event a bit later in this essay), and so on... 

My first solo live performance at NEPO, filmed by Akiko Honda, April 21, 2022

49th birthday improv. live performance, with guests Tanao (guitar) and K. Saito (sax)

Some songs from my "one-man" show in January of '22 at Suizokukan (水族館 -- this means "aquarium" in Japanese, but it was actually a live bar, albeit with a lot of live fish in tanks along the walls!) were also included in the documentary. The show was special in that it had featured some guest musicians during the third "stage" (I performed solo during the first two, first on keyboard with video backing, and then solo acoustic), such as a guitarist from my neighborhood who performed electric guitar with me on my original blues song "Lonely," as well as the guitarist I have referred to as "TN" and the guy I'd collaborated with in 2020 on the instrumental EP who played "reed-flute" and other instruments. The documentary also features a number of substantial-length excerpts from a number of improvisational shows I did in '22 (using backing video, electric and/or acoustic guitar, playing the keys, improvising on kit, or on my Kaossilator digital synth pad and/or Kastle noisemaking mini synth modulator, etc.), many of them filmed for me by the aforementioned photographer/videographer, "A." 

"Third stage" feat. guests @ Livehouse & Bar Suizokukan, January 9, 2022

"Blackstar" live (from "First Stage") @ Livehouse & Bar Suizokukan, January 9, 2022

The entire video is "narrated" sans my actual voice and, although I could just as easily have done a voiceover, I would then have had to subtitle the entire thing in either English or Japanese, depending on which language I used for the audio, which would have taken me quite a bit of extra time. Instead, I opted to create a "narrative" solely via bilingual Japanese/English "text windows" (white text on a black screen) which appear before each live clip, providing some context to each song, improv, or segment (making the video a documentary, rather than merely a collection of live footage from 2021-22, as indeed it tells a story...). All of the performances in the documentary are presented in true chronological order, forming a veritable timeline that one can easily follow/trace, though I did not include every single performance that was filmed between the set of dates the documentary covers, in order to keep the video to a "reasonable" length. My goal in fact was to keep the film under three hours, which indeed it is, at 2.5 hours (split into three separate sections).

"Live Excursions" documentary (full)

The second documentary I finished in late '22, and which ended up taking me quite a bit of time, ultimately, to complete, as in this case I did do full subtitles, had started out as a regular talk for my "talk series," one that I'd recorded in a single sitting, as I usually do for such regular "talks." I had originally planned to upload the video within a day or two of filming it. However, once I started editing it, I found that, after inserting one or two clips from "outside the talk," I kept wanting to insert more and more such external video clips at various points within it, in order to better illustrate and support audio-visually what I was discussing in the video. (By "external" I mean live video clips, static photographs -- jacket art, for example --, as well as excerpts of music videos I'd created that were relevant to what I was discussing.) And so ultimately I decided, as I liked the way the additions made the talk feel increasingly "documentary-like," not to mention that the talk itself became easier for the viewer to follow and to understand and absorb, gave it a more interesting flow, etc. -- that I would just "keep going" with the editing process in this fashion, time-consuming as it was. I also decided to subtitle the entire thing in Japanese, since I was taking the talk "to the next level" by making it into a documentary in the first place, and I didn't want to later regret the fact that many of my potential viewers in Japan would not be able to understand most of the talk/documentary had I left the subtitles off. This part took me the longest to complete, as I knew it would, but it was, I believe, well worth it. I also decided, later, to break the lengthy talk (parts of which I eventually edited out, even as I added other types of visuals between the "talking head" sections) into four separate sections, or chapters, for further ease of viewing and better flow/organization of the content of each distinct section.

"Evolution" documentary (full)

I entitled the documentary "Evolution," as this seemed its theme in so many ways. It focuses primarily on the "making of" for an LP I had been planning over time that I'd planned to call "1123." The first "false start" eventually morphed into a different album, the double-album I had entitled "The World Was Not the Same," which I discussed a bit earlier (section 14) in this essay and which is discussed in some detail in Part 3 of the documentary. Some of the material discussed in the fourth and final part of the film that I had in fact been planning to include on the "1123" LP (three then-new songs I'd included on an EP entitled "In-Yo" [陰陽], or "Yin-Yang") later ended up on a different "new release" from this year (2023) called "1000 Lights." I also this year released what finally became the "1123" LP, with the same cover art I shared in the documentary -- showing little droplets of water on the ceiling of my bath-room that I later effectorized, and with the numbers 1123 written in Chinese characters --  but with only some of the material I had originally intended for it, mixed together with other tracks from the vaults.

Essentially, and to make all this seem less complicated than I've made it sound in the above paragraph (something I have a tendency to do at times!), "1123" ended up as essentially another compilation of older material, while "1000 Lights" (see my discussion in the next section) became an LP of mostly new material... If the details of what ended up where or why is confusing to the reader, don't worry: It is confusing to me, too! The greater point I am trying to make here, perhaps, is that my entire process of creating, revising, reshuffling, and so on, is, in fact, all very much precisely what I do... This is my very evolution both as an artist and as a creator, and this essay, too, is the story of the story I wish to tell, which is ever-changing, always under revision, like the writing itself, this sentence I am (re)writing right now, at this very moment (slipping, even as I write/revise it, into the irreversible, unretrievable past, no more than a memory, an energetic imprint of a past action, a karmic activity)... 

"Dance of Death" (audio) from 1123

Blink, and the present moment is gone, or, rather, the present has become the past, the future the present.

Let's move on, then, shall we?

14. "The World Was Not the Same" + compilations...

The last "new" LP I completed in 2022 was a double-length release including both newer tracks and rearranged things I'd done, entitled "The World Was Not the Same," the title my adaptation of a quote from Oppenheimer's famous speech about the development of the Atomic bomb. (As an aside, this year Hollywood has been advertising their version of the story, directed by Christopher Nolan, the Batman guy, but this was before I even knew about the existence of the film version, and so, of course, I had not and, at the time of writing this, have not yet seen the film. If anything, I remembered the audio from Ryuichi Sakamoto's 1999 opera called "Life," where he used the Oppenheimer sample in a cut-up fashion during one part of the musical, which I saw performed live in Osaka during that year, the same year I had just gotten myself married before starting graduate school.) 

The LP consists primarily of remixes of past work I'd rediscovered on the hard drive of my old laptop and some newer things too, including a new acoustic version of Bowie's "Lazarus," a new cover/radical reinterpretation of "Heat" from "The Next Day," with a few verses of "Heathen" thrown in for good measure, some in-studio "live" recordings, including a drum solo with electronic backing tracks, and a new version of "Inner States of Mind," with improvised guitar; it includes a couple of dark ambient soundscapes as well, the longest of which has at its center a lengthy spoken word sample taken from a talk I did for my YouTube channel about pain and the body. (I discuss this release in detail in my 2022 documentary "Evolution.") 

"Inside" music video (self-shot)

"Ashes (of the Past)" music video

"Heat[hen]" music video (Bowie tribute combining "Heat" and "Heathen")

[Read a rather thorough review of the LP here.]

Between the time I released the above "Symphonies" series and this final 2x-length LP last year, I also released a number of compilations, remixes, and so on, as I had indicated earlier, including a large swathe of material from previous years. One such compilation, which featured a new mix/version of "Contaminated," for which I recorded a new electric guitar part, a new piano part, as well as a completely new vocal recording (with slightly-altered lyrics), was entitled "Past Life." The compilation LP also included a new mix of "Chaos" (a remix of the electronic version that was used in the original 2018 video), "The Dial Is in the Bathroom," and "Red Signals" from the Laughing Moon project (originally recorded back in 2017, with J and T from that project on bass and guitar, respectively). I also decided to include an acoustic song I'd written and recorded in 2018 on the compilation, a song called "The Ties That Bind," a sort of love song, albeit lyrically a precarious and uncertain one. For the version included on "Past Life," I added a new vocal line atop the one I'd previously recorded, making it, in essence, a duet between my current and former selves. Further, I made videos for some of these tracks, most notably for the new version of "Contaminated," which shows the PLA in action, in the air and on the ground, juxtaposed with footage from Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan earlier in the year.

"The Dial Is in the Bathroom" 2022 Ecdysis Mix (from "Past Life" LP)

"Contaminated" 2022 version (audio)

"Red Signals" (w/Laughing Moon c. 2017) - 2022 Mix

Another compilation I released, after sifting through many hours of vault material and deciding on a suitable track listing, and it took me quite a bit longer to settle on than I'd initially anticipated, was the "Reincarnations" two part series (released separately as "Reincarnations" and "Reincarnations II"), a total of 30 tracks in total. There were also two Bowie tribute LPs: The first featured a brand new recording of “Five Years” -- presented in three mixes: one the full version, with both vocals and acoustic kit that I’d recorded at my friend’s studio, one drumless, and one instrumental, with only backing vocals -- as well as a number of other covers I had done in previous years, including some Bowie Berlin-era instrumentals, as well as new or different mixes of things I’d recorded for the “I’m a Blackstar” LP, along with a new cover of “Sunday,” from 2002’s “Heathen” LP. The second tribute LP was a compilation of all of the other leftover Bowie covers I had done but not published, starting chronologically with “Space Oddity” from ‘69 and moving through to the final track, “Where Are We Now?” from 2013’s “The Next Day.”

Further, there would be more (original) compilations to follow, right up to the very end of 2022, such as "In the Meadow," a collection of songs that included a new ambient mix of my original "electronica ballad" from 2018, "Only Three," a piano/vocal-only solo "cover" version of a friend's (Sunny's) song I'd re-entitled "Upside Down," (the original version had been called "Blackbird," which I'd thought might confuse listeners into expecting a cover of The Beatles' classic song, which this was certainly not), as well as a handful of other "vaults tracks" I had still wanted to release that hadn't been included on either "Reincarnations" or "Past Life." On the final day of the year, December 31, I also released a mostly instrumental/dark ambient collection entitled "The Day Before," which featured one new instrumental track (the title track) and other things I'd done that were mostly from previous years. The compilation also included one very recent track -- "Omicron," from 2022's "The Way Out Is In" -- here for the first time appearing alongside its even darker cousin, "Covid," from 2020's "Untitled" album. I also last year recorded a new version of “Hallelujah” and “Forget Her,” a Jeff Buckley original, and released them, along with an earlier recording of “Hallelujah” and some other Buckley covers, on an EP marking 25 years since his death-by-drowning in 1997.

(RIP Jeff Buckley: 1966-1997)