24. [Continued]... (On my return to Fukuoka in March, 2023)

I decided that I would return for a few days to my home "stomping grounds" of Fukuoka this year. It would be the first time I visited since the pandemic struck three years prior, in early 2020. The last time I had visited (in large part to visit my daughter, who at the time was still living in Fukuoka with her mother, though they have since moved...) I had performed on my 47th birthday, in late February of 2020, with some guests: both the guitarist and the bassist from my former Laughing Moon project had joined me onstage for a couple of songs, as had Sunny on guitar, who improvised on one "composed" song (with prepared backing tracks) as well as on one longer improv, where I not only played the synth and sang, but also got behind the drums to pound out some polyrhythms at one point. This performance occurred less than one month before the first State of Emergency was announced in Tokyo, and so, in the intervening years, I had not again had a chance to see people or to perform in Fukuoka. 

Live in Fukuoka, February 26, 2020 (my 47th birthday) with guests

And so, I booked a flight this past March and returned for a few days, hanging out at some of my old neighborhood digs, chatting with old friends and acquaintances, eating some delicious "Hakata-style" foods (the region is known throughout Japan for being both tasty and reasonable, and indeed it is!), and also making time to do both a photo and video shoot with my old friend M-san. (It was raining on both days, so we were mostly "stuck indoors" or else outside in the rain -- that being said, we also ended up going to some places we otherwise would never have gone to, and I later used some of the video and audio samples captured during my visit to make stuff with after I returned to Tokyo.)

I also performed live again, at Utero, the same livehouse at which I had performed my "final show" at the end of 2019, and also the birthday show "with guests" I mentioned in the above paragraph. I was completely alone on the stage this time, 100% solo, so to speak. The two former members of my Laughing Moon project, J and T, with whom I had performed on the same stage together in 2020, were in attendance as audience members (not to mention as friends!), though Sunny (whose birthday fell on the very day I performed) had had prior arrangements, and unfortunately could not be there this time.

My main instrument, which I brought with me from Tokyo, was the Guild acoustic, rather than the Yamaha MX49, as it had been three years prior. I accompanied myself with some audio/video backing that I had prepared, projecting images onto the large screen at the back of the stage during much of the 40-plus minute-long performance. One major difference as compared to the 2020 show, at which I had also used my own video projections and backing tracks, was that this year's performance was overall much more improvisational. I started off the show with a 15 minute-long improv sans video, one that was much in the same style as "A Memento Mori" from the "022623" LP and/or the improv I had included on "Abstrackt Distracktions" -- fragments of songs, spontaneous speech/spoken word, and other sections that, quite literally, seemed to come out of nowhere (such as when I began playing a section of Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused," which my ex-bassist immediately recognized and shouted out a comment, as I expected him to!). 

This year's solo performance in March

As for the rest of the show, apart from two "beat-laden" songs from my backcatalog on which I played the keys (I used Utero's Roland keyboard for this, which they kindly lent me for the occasion), the backing audio tracks (synched with video) were mostly different kinds of ambient washes, sans beats, over which I allowed myself to play the acoustic in a much "looser" style than I had in previous years, maintaining some degree of balance between pure "improvisation" and performing full "songs." I also decided to include one cover song in the set, "Hallelujah," for which I used a sample of a rainstorm in the background, synching it to the video M-san and I had literally filmed the day before and sharing it less than 48 hours later with everyone who came (again, in the rain!) to see the show.

The trip overall was, for me, a lot of fun; some very good vibes, and the live event, too, in its totality ended up being a great success for me, certainly on a personal level. This was not only because many of my friends came out to see the show, despite the rain that had continued to fall that night, but also because the performance itself went rather smoothly, the feedback I got afterward from people who attended, both friends and others I had met that night for the first time (there were a few), and also from the livehouse people, was extremely positive, and, further, M-san had filmed the entire thing for me, so I had a very nice video to edit once I got back to Tokyo. (M used to film nearly all of my performances when I was living, and regularly performing, in Fukuoka, often at Utero -- this was all before the pandemic, of course. He had filmed not only my solo performances, but also many performances I had done with my collaborative units, such as TDS with J on bass in 2019, and the shows I'd performed with Sunny.)

The Fukuoka show on March 22 this year was actually so much a success to my mind that my motivation, upon returning to Tokyo, to once again start regularly performing solo, where it is so much more difficult for me, even after several years, to draw a crowd to shows (by "a crowd" I mean at least two or three people!), and where, in many cases, I am also asked to pay something merely for the "privilege" of performing began to diminish.*

* Let me just explain the "livehouse" system in Japan a bit more here, for those who might be completely unfamiliar. 

Performers are charged at many of the venues in Japan, especially the larger venues, but sometimes even small ones, if they cannot draw enough guests by themselves. All artists are essentially expected to do self promotion, something, as I've discussed at some length, above, I am not very good at. Having to pay a fee after lugging all of my stuff to the livehouse and doing the performance itself, regardless of the response of whoever might be in attendance to see their friend who plays before or after me or whatever, begs the question of what the point of performing live really is for me, when I could instead just spend the same time and energy working on new material in isolation, or writing a book, or doing a talk for my YouTube page, etc., without having to pay the livehouse or feeling somewhat depressed, or at least let down, by the fact that no one decided to come out in support. Ideally, yes, doing shows from time to time and having people come out to see me perform because he/she/they actually want to is ideal. But when the pattern becomes one of me showing up, performing, and then paying for drinks -- plus an additional, sometimes not-insignificant fee -- it gets to be a real drag, and after a time I have become less inclined to do regular shows under such conditions.)

And so, since returning to Tokyo last March, I have really only performed a handful of times, usually acoustically and with little fanfare indeed. Instead, I've been spending my time recording new material, including a new trilogy of LPs and two new This Dark Shroud LPs, all of which I will discuss in more detail below. 

This book, too, is something I've wanted to do for a long time.

I am very thankful that I am now making a bit of time to finally work on it. 

It is my singular pleasure to do this, as there is no deadline and no pressure to sell it, either.

As Frank Sinatra once sang, “I did it my way.”

I always have, and I always will.

June update: I recently returned to doing live performances as This Dark Shroud. Performing again this year as TDS is both, in a sense, reaching backwards and forwards at the same time; I had only once to-date performed solo under the TDS moniker, at Utero in 2018 (and then J and I continued the project as a collaborative duo in 2019, before I left Fukuoka for Tokyo), so this time around was the first time ever performing as TDS in Tokyo. I now, of course, also have new material from the two new LPs to perform, as well as some brand new arrangements of older TDS material I remixed for this year's project (some of which I had never performed live on a stage before, either), not to mention that both I and the world has much changed since 2018, a more innocent time before Covid, a time before the war in Ukraine, a time before the Doomsday clock had reached 90 seconds... I plan to continue “updating” the live TDS show over the coming months.