10. Finding the Light (2021)

This hopefulness, for me and you...

--Hope ('21)

2021: The "Covid Years" (Part II)

By the end of 2021, I will complete what becomes my "Tetralogy," a series of four LPs about my experiences not only of being alive during the era of the pandemic, of bar and restaurant and livehouse shut-downs, "social distancing" (which, for me, literally meant staying away from people almost entirely most of the time; apart, that is, from when I was able to start teaching face-to-face again, post 2x vaccination in the fall of '21, and also to visit my daughter for the first time since February of 2020, when I had seen her for one single, wonderful afternoon in Fukuoka), obsessive hand washing and masking, the Tokyo Olympics fiasco during the deadly "Delta" variant outbreak in the summer of '21 (I barely left my apartment all summer, except to do food shopping for myself or to take long walks after sundown...or to go into the studio a single train stop away from my home alone, my head and belly often filled with beer, to play my guitar or to practice the keys and/or to film "live-in-studio" videos I would later edit alone in my apartment room, tweaking the sound in LOGIC, something that kept me active musically, not to mention more or less sane...), and also my ongoing personal struggle to recover from a break-up that was by now (i.e. by then) only anymore/any-more "alive" in my own head and imagination, yet it still possessed me. I was struggling to understand what "love" was, what "attachment" was, what "loneliness" was, and why I still had so many negative and self-defeating thoughts going round and round inside my skull, especially regarding the breakup, but also just in general. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had been having such negative thoughts all of my life. 

I needed to do something about this. It was quite literally, in some sense, a matter of life or death for me, I felt.

(I am getting a bit closer. Day by day, month by month. But certainly not yet there. Not quite, not quite...not yet.)

In any case, "Tetralogy," as I came to call it, with a capital T, was not initially planned as a tetralogy ("tetra" meaning "four," by the bye, in case that was unclear), nor even as a series with any sequel or sequels, at least not yet at the time I had just completed the first of the four LPs, "Hope," in early 2021. This LP ended up including some collaborations, all done "remotely" via the computer, including one track with Sunny on guitar that I had solicited an improv for toward the very end of 2020 (which became "Is Happiness a Verb?"), and another featuring my friend and former collaborator’s reed-flute (this was used for the third and final part of a three-part song cycle I entitled "Mental Ward," which I had created between 2020-21; the version on the "Hope" LP is subtitled "Breathe"). 

The title track of the album, which has itself since become for me, in many ways, a song as important as a part of my catalogue as songs from previous years such as "Chaos" or "Want," or even "Black Nail," appeared in two versions on the LP as “bookends”: the first was vocals backed by some dark ambient atmospherics, the second completely a cappella. Later in '21, I would do other arrangements of it, a remix with tabla/beats subtitled "Pray for India," and also versions on which I improvised on guitar whilst singing it in a freer, more improvisatory style than on the original. Another significant piece included on the "Hope" LP was a long dark-ambient instrumental entitled "Exodus," for which I also edited a video that includes animation from a former collaborator, blended with some film clips taken from the open source digital online market that added, I had thought, some context and a more "story-like" feel than just the abstract animations alone would have provided.

"Hope" (filmed by Akiko Honda)

"Exodus" (with animation by Takeo Udagawa)

In any case, as time went on, and as I began to play the acoustic more and more, both at home and in the studio, I also decided to rerecord some of my earlier songs, remixing electronic pieces from the past (in some cases ending up with, essentially, completely new compositions), and I found that I was able to use the guitar as an improvisational instrument and even as a percussive one, tapping out rhythms on the body and so forth. I also started doing my first "talk series" at home in the summer of '21, in which I discussed, alone in my room in front of my iPhone camera, perched on a plastic iPhone stand, first, the LPs in this new series (my first-ever talk, which was in English, is a discussion of the first two LPs I'd until then completed as part of the cycle, "Hope" and "The Sun Is Coming"), my thoughts on the pandemic and the vaccines that were soon to be in all of our arms, the politics of the Olympics, etc., and then, over time, broadening the range of subjects to include other things as well, such as loneliness vs. aloneness, Japanese culture, Buddhism, Stoicism, philosophy and literature, and so on... Further, while some of these talks were presented in English, I also decided to record some of the talks in Japanese, primarily targeting a Japanese audience, the first of which focused on why I came to Japan in the first place and about what I love, as well as what I definitely did not love (such as the senpai-kohai problem, etc.), about my chosen home.

"What Had You Done" (home performance)

 

"Plagued" (with video footage from Takuya Mizukami)

2021 was, if nothing else, for me, (yet!) a(nother) year of transformation, quite as I (spontaneously, and improvisatorially) sang on the title track of the first in the series from Tetralogy, "Hope":

This year, you see, it's a year of change

It's a year of making things turn

Toward the light...

Did things eventually turn "toward the light"? Well, for me, in a sense, yes. For the world, well, maybe not. (In terms of Covid, the answer would have to be: yes and yes. But today, we have even more serious issues to concern ourselves with, unfortunately. And also, as I revise this text right now [May 28], the news is saying that Covid has been making a comeback in China lately, and that the WHO is preparing for another possible pandemic? Hmm... I hope this is just hyperbole, a way to get people to watch more news, rather than a serious concern we all need to be having now?)

I could spend a lot more time on Tetralogy here, but I've spoken about it at length in my talk series many times before (particularly the series from '21), so I will move onward, forward, focusing my energy now on 2022 up through to the present.

View my talk on "Covid & Music" (a discussion of the first two LPs of the Tetralogy, i.e. "Hope" and "The Sun Is Coming," the "Plagued" EP, which was eventually incorporated into the third LP of the Tetralogy, i.e. "The Answer Is Inside," and a bit about 2020's "Untitled") below.