8. Fast-forward (from late 2017 to late 2019)

There's just so much personal and musical history between the second half of 2017 and my move to Tokyo in October 2019, when my university contract in Fukuoka ran out. This period was covered in my documentary "A Musical Journey," and I've spoken about it many times before on my talk videos at YouTube, so I don't want to spend too much time on it here. Instead, I will summarize some of the "highlights" from these two years, which I spent in Fukuoka as a full-time professor at Kyushu University, making music and enjoying being "single" -- and also having a steady girlfriend for the duration -- for the first time since my 20s (as well as also "drinking too much" and "staying out until the crack of dawn" too often, but I've chosen not to go into that part too much here!). I will glide through this period as succinctly as possible, without hopefully spilling too much of the "juice" in the process, mainly so that readers of this text can at least have a sense of what it tastes (or tasted) like. (We've apparently returned again to "squeeze my lemon" and to "15 minutes"? Ahh...)

Late 2017 (i.e. 2017…continued): 

1. Meet the bass player "JS" the very day/evening after my so-called "label debut" show, mentioned above, at another, completely unrelated all-day music event in my then-neighborhood of K, where I perform three songs solo, electronica-style, with the synth and my laptop for backing tracks and MIDI hookup. JS and I "hit it off," and eventually we will become close friends and collaborate on various projects together for around two years, both recording together and performing live. I will speak about these a bit more below. (Note that JS and I are still very much in touch with each other today. He may in fact be my biggest fan in the world, or at least he is the biggest fan of my music that I am aware of anywhere in the world. Whenever I put new material out, he is generally the first to listen to it, of his own free will, when he has the time, and he also gives me rather interesting and insightful feedback, too. I learn things about myself and my music I had never realized from him all of the time, even today.)

2. Learn how to "master" my recordings on my own and to improve them overall in various other ways as well (thanks, in part, to the three weeks with the label guy, and what I'd picked up watching him work in LOGIC, and also thanks to the fact that the experience lit a fire under my ass, and so I begin now vociferously seeking out and reading LOGIC manuals and so, thereby, very quickly learning about various new tools that are and had actually always been available to me to use within the guts of this incredible DAW which, to this day, I am still learning more about!). In 2017 I also start improving the quality of my self-made jackets for LPs, especially after a music friend says to me one day, "Your recordings are starting to sound really excellent, man, but why not also work on making your jackets look a bit more professional to match the quality of the music?"

Meanwhile, T and I are still collaborating as Another Room. Not many people come out to see our quietly-promoted, low-key shows, and sometimes even there are no people in attendance at all, other than the good folk running the venues we perform at and the artists/bands we are performing alongside -- but, for me, working together with T is so stress-free that I hardly mind; there is never any arguing or disagreements or ego issues between us whatsoever, and both of us can do what we do best and also feel that it is a mutually-beneficial situation, both personally and artistically. T never once forces a particular arrangement or tells me how to or how not to play the guitar, and if either of us ever has any problem or opinion about the music, we can just say it aloud, without having to feel repressed (and eventually frustrated), and then all that's left to do is just to work together on making the arrangements work better for both of us. Further, T is very much a "freeform" improvisatory blues-style guitar player, as I've already mentioned, so there is a great flexibility in his attitude toward the instrument, and he is also very open-minded when it comes to genre, something that is very important to me to this day whenever I work with other musicians -- he sees no conflict in combining blues with electronica, none at all, and is always excited when I come to our rehearsals with new backing tracks or songs to try out, his face glowing as we run through stuff for the first time ever, often creating new arrangements together right there on the spot...

Finally, one day, at one of my solo performances, I have the chance to introduce JS -- with whom I have been rehearsing in the studio for an eventual project as well -- to T, from the Another Room duo project. Things go rather well, fortunately, as JS and T get along great from the moment they meet (as I had imagined they would!) and the three of us, after going into the studio and discovering that the groove is quite agreeable to all parties, rather naturally agree to coalesce into a new three-piece unit, which becomes "Laughing Moon." The name of this project was inspired by Kobo Abe's essay collection Warau-tsuki, a book about dreams and creativity which I had extensively referenced in my graduate thesis paper in 2004, and it is the first project with more than one other member (i.e. a trio, rather than a duo) I have done where I am feeling that this is exactly what I want out of a "unit" collaboration. At the end of '17 we perform a "one-man" outdoor show together at a venue that normally hosts jazz musicians (in Japan, to say that it is a "one-man" performance means that the entire show features only one band or performer, i.e. there are no other bands or opening acts sharing the bill). For this performance, I am on the Telecaster and vocals, using backing tracks for the drums and some synth parts, run through my iPad Mini, just as with the Another Room project and the solo shows I was doing at the time, while the two of them perform on their respective instruments, with T on electric guitar and JS on bass. 

At the end of 2017, I also begin recording a series of solo LPs as This Dark Shroud, a side-project that will pick up more steam the following year, when I decide to also try it out live. This Dark Shroud (TDS for short) is a moniker for a new sound I had recently discovered and begun to develop that is in some sense darker than previously and that also emphasized a "Neo-Industrial" style, featuring loops, samples, vocal effectors, and all sorts of other electronic beats and effects. The concept and sound of TDS is influenced by artists such as Nine Inch Nails, Skinny Puppy, Coil... Essentially, things I had first started listening to after meeting "S" in Osaka as a study abroad student in Japan many, many years earlier. In addition to composing new, mostly instrumental pieces, I also eventually begin to do remixes of my own solo material, both past and present, in a style that fits this project's concept and style. The jackets of the LPs -- I will complete a series of six in total over a span of time lasting around a year, from late 2017 to late 2018 -- uniformly do not show my face, but are abstract, mostly in stark black and white, in keeping with my image for the project.*

* As a side-note, as I sit here tonight revising this essay in late May, 2023 [May 27], I feel I should add that I have very recently revived the This Dark Shroud moniker/project name with a new LP entitled "Vanity," featuring some brand new tracks in the TDS style, albeit updated, along with remixes/rearrangements of some of the "classic" ones I had done c. 2018, most notably, perhaps, "Undo," which was the first-ever track I recorded under the then-new moniker. I am also now planning to perform as TDS for the first time solo since 2018 in June.

2018: Laughing Moon performs our second-ever, and unfortunately what will end up being our last-ever, full show during the first part of the year. For this show, I am mainly on keyboard/vocals, along with some backing beat/synth tracks, though I also play on a "backpacker" mini-acoustic I’d recently purchased for one or two songs (it sounds, to my dismay, extremely thin on stage, and I never again use it live, selling it during the pandemic of 2020 when living alone in a monthly rental hotel room and super hard-up for cash...). A few weeks after the show the guitarist doesn't exactly quit the project, but tells me/us that, because he is so busy with work and family, he will have to take an indefinite leave from it, and so JS and I decide to start rehearsing again as a duo, performing our first shows together as "Marc Lowe and JS," though we also discuss at one point calling ourselves "Blue Skullz" (sic) in the future, the phrase taken from a lyric in my electronic song "Red Signals," though we eventually abandon using this project name altogether.

I make a ton of new solo "electronica" recordings during '18 at my home studio (i.e. via my MacBook, AT recording mic, and the Korg USB keyboard and/or the Yamaha MX49 I have purchased for live performances, which is also Midi-capable), too many to now recall.* In any case, many of the individual tracks from these agglutinations of songs/sounds have since been distributed (or scattered) between various compilations I have more recently released, such as, for instance, as part of last year's "Reincarnations" Parts 1 and 2 (about 30 tracks in all), "Past Life," "In the Meadow," and also this year's "A Glass Sun," a suite in three parts, which is a DJ-like mix that walks the listener through three years' worth of tracks from the vaults ('17-'19), replete with fade-ins/fade-outs and palimpsestic remixes/re-mashes, running for a total of over three hours when played in sequence. (The series is currently only available via my YouTube page as an audio-only video, but will eventually be made available via the usual streaming channels via my distributor.)

Listen to "A Glass Sun (First Movement)" here.

* If I wished to talk about them all in any detail here, I would need to write a much, much longer essay, starting with a catalog of songs and the albums they had once been on, firstly as a reminder to myself as to what form or forms they had originally been in, a too-daunting task with too little benefit to anyone... Indeed, I'd created a series of LPs the world has never (and will now never) experience in their original forms. I think perhaps my gf at the time, as well as JS, my bassist, are the only two people on earth who had heard most of them in their original form(s) and had seen their original cover art!

JS and I also, rather significantly, shoot our first-ever music video together in 2018, for the song "Black Nail." I star as a sort of dark magician/wizard, a concept JS (who directed it) had had for the video, and the video, too, is really dark and cool and fits the song well. At the end of the year, another acquaintance of mine, an artist/designer who does television commercials professionally as his day job, shoots and edits a video for one of the handful of electronic mixes of "Chaos" I'd done at the time. He chose the mix he wanted to do from a pool of mixes/versions I had recorded to-date and had sent him files for, going with the one he felt would be the most accessible for viewers of the video. In 2020, I replaced the soundtrack to the original video with a noisier remixed version I had more recently done and liked better at the time. And then again, just last year (2022), I revisited and retweaked, again, the first mix, adding the soundtrack to the video from 2018, but this time around myself making some changes to the visuals as well as the audio). We film it in a public parking lot, with me standing with my back to a brick wall, located in my then-neighborhood on a dark, freezing (as I still recall!) cold night in December, the wind blowing my hair into my face as I lip-synch the lyrics to the song ("This wind around me, swirling about me..."). He presents the finished product to me, which is nothing short of amazing, at the end of the month, right before the year-end holidays, texting, along with a link to the completed video, "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lowe."

"Black Nail" (2018) dir. Joe Shotaro

"Chaos" (2018 video/2020 audio mix) dir. Mitsuhiro Nagano

2019: The main focus this year, musically, in addition to my solo output, is on two main side-projects: This Dark Shroud, this time as a duo, and my collaboration with guitarist "Sunny."

1. This Dark Shroud (or "TDS," for short), the moniker I had used for my dark and experimental solo recordings from late '17 and '18, is now turned over to my new duo project with JS on "guitar-bass" and myself on synth/vocals/acoustic guitar/occasional live drums. We record three LPs as TDS during our time together, enjoying each other's company and hanging out a lot after doing recordings at my apartment, or shooting video around town, as we also sometimes enjoyed doing together, since JS was, at the time, especially, becoming very interested in film and wanting to make music videos together with me (he also filmed and produced a "mini-documentary," of a mere five minutes, in which he interviews me at home; it is called "Another Room" and was subtitled in English). We are, essentially, best buddies, despite the age difference (he was in his late twenties, I in my mid-forties, at the time), and there is absolutely no senpai-kohai stuff between us, something he is especially grateful for (as I am older, but never give him shit as his "senior"). We also go through a rather difficult spot together when his then-girlfriend, who is also a mutual friend of mine and who had come to our first Laughing Moon show in '17, not to mention that she had been quite enthusiastic about my/our music and had always "spread the word" via her FB page, tragically takes her own life toward the end of the year, in her room at home. I create an LP for her entitled “Requiem.” RIP, Usagi.

This Dark Shroud, w/Joe Shotaro, Live in 2019

2. Having performed together live twice in 2018 -- once acoustically, with "Sunny" on a classical guitar and me on vocals-only, a second time much more improvisatorily, with Sunny on electric guitar and me on keys/synth, vocals, and drums -- he and I start creating recorded music via file sharing, first together producing a covers EP which includes songs by artists we mutually enjoy, especially from the '80s and '90s (e.g. Massive Attack, Japan/David Sylvian, etc.), and eventually a bunch of original material as well. After my move in late '19 and continuing into '20, while the pandemic rages and everyone is forced to, essentially, "stay at/work from home," we continue our collaborations via file sharing, ending up with three full-length original LPs, in addition to the covers EP. Sunny also contributes guitar to various one-off tracks for some of the solo LPs I will produce in late '19 and into '20, becoming a “regular contributor” to my work during this period.

Marc + Sunny performing "Hallelujah" live, 2018

(As a rather minor, though for me rather troublesome -- at the time, though I no longer give a s**t -- aside, I also inherit an online stalker/impersonator from the beginning of the year, a psychotic ex-pat born from the ashes of the turbulent days of my ex-band, but he is not worth wasting any more words on, so this is my final mention of him in this essay. If ever you encounter any fishy-looking videos, reviews, or comments on social media using my image or name, rest assured that it is his doing. Obsession does not begin to describe it.)

I decide, toward the end of '19, to move to Tokyo for work when my full-time contract at Kyushu University officially runs out (something I had known about, and had been dreading for a time as well), leaving me, essentially, jobless, save one part-time gig at a second university in Fukuoka, not enough to survive on alone, and with few other immediate prospects. Kyushu University, by the bye, is the top school in all of Kyushu, the southern island of Japan, and I'd felt that I had hit a sort of dead end and now needed to get out of Fukuoka. My girlfriend at the time also decides that she wants to accompany me, to live together, and, though we often fight and are having frequent problems with the relationship, I reluctantly agree to give cohabitation in Tokyo a try. 

Before leaving for Tokyo in October of 2019 with my then-gf, I perform one final solo show at a livehouse where I had become a regular performer since going solo, called Utero. The applause from the friends and supporters I have made over a period of time at the end of the show this time is roaring, overwhelmingly intense, literally bringing tears of happiness to my eyes. I leave Fukuoka with a mixture of elation and heaviness in my heart...

Will Tokyo be a good place for me to live and to work? Will I like it there and be able to make new friends? Will I have enough money to make a decent living? And will my girlfriend and I really be OK when we are living together, rather than just meeting on the weekends, seeing each other's faces when we wake up every morning and then also, again, before we go to sleep at night? 

Questions, questions, questions...

So many questions without answers.

Life.

View "A Brief Guide to the Fukuoka Years: Live 2017-2019" here.