25. To be human(e)

One of my rather recent solo LPs is called "To Be Human." It was published via Apple Music et. al. in early May, and now forms the first part of a new trio of LPs, which I might as well just call the "Human Trilogy," for lack of a better idea right now (and also unofficially, so not so important). I've used the designation "Triad" once already this year, and I don't want to call it a "Triptych," since I am not David Bowie and I don't live in Berlin and Brian Eno has never produced me either, so... Okay.

I started working on this LP shortly after returning from Fukuoka for my live show in April. At that time, as mentioned in the above section about my trip, I and M-san did some video/photo shoots together both outside in the rain as well as inside of various buildings around town. One of the most interesting spaces we visited was an old, dilapidated building that was filled with (due to the rain) many leaky rooms. As we walked through the building, me taking audio/video samples with my iPhone, and he filming me as I filmed and recorded (very META!), there were crates full of water that plip-plopped constantly, the rain from outside leaking through the roof... As I love the sound of rain/water generally for sampling (you can find samples of rain on many of my songs and instrumentals) I recorded these sounds for use in some future recording, as I knew I would definitely want to use them later. These sounds made their way onto the spoken word + LOGIC beats track "To Be Human," as well as onto a number of other tracks I would later arrange both for this LP (e.g. "State of Things") as well as for its two related follow-up LPs, which I will write about below. The music video I edited for the title track includes footage that M-san took of me filming/recording inside the building, and it is rather trippy and abstract, due to the way I decided to edit it together. The mix is slightly louder on the LP.

I also spontaneously decided to film a new shorter talk back at my apartment in Tokyo around this time one evening (i.e. after returning from my Fukuoka trip), discussing Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), fragmentation/chaos (in part as a response to an interview with David Bowie c. 2002, in which he discusses this topic in some detail, including Nietzsche's proclamation that "God is dead," followed by humans believing ourselves to be "the new gods" from the start of the 20th century, creating the A-bomb, and so forth), and other such related topics. I did some "quick edits" to this short -- by my standards -- talk, inserting bits of audio/video with sound, and then later utilized pieces of the soundtracks from it, further layering and effectorizing them, and putting them to music with beats, synth bass, etc. 

So much of my recent music had been beatless, ambient/noise, and or acoustic or semi-acoustic, so adding beats and heavy bass was a conscious choice, though the tracks (the opener and closer of the LP, respectively) were anything but rock or pop. For the second of these tracks, the longer of the two, which utilized some of the same musical elements as the opener in the first half of the track, I also included samples from the original David Bowie interview, as well a short clip from an old interview with Kobo Abe (in Japanese) and a more recent interview with linguist/scholar/political commentator Noam Chomsky, discussing the terrifying possibility of a war between the U.S. and China in the 21st century, gun control in the U.S., and other related things. 

"90 Seconds (A Corrective)," my response to the sudden change from 100 to 90 seconds in the "Doomsday Clock" this year and a purely ambient instrumental track (apart from a single line of spoken word) was also included on the LP, as was my follow-up to 2021's "Is Happiness a Verb?" (which featured Sunny's uneffectorized guitar); this time around I created the track completely "solo" and reentitled the new version/sequel "Happiness Is Not a Verb," playing the acoustic in a loose, improvisatory style, atop which I do some also-improvised spoken word and vocalizations (some parts taken from the original duo version, as I remembered it in my head). During mixing, I added a drone taken from the original version of 2021's track "Hope," in order, in part, to further strengthen the connection between this track and that LP, which had included the Sunny collaborative original. Also, Ryuichi Sakamoto had died of cancer in late March (it was announced publicly early in April, which is when I, along with most people, learned of it), and the very night I had heard the sad news I composed/recorded an instrumental tribute to him using my KASTLE analogue noise synth and some improvised piano. This, too, I included on the LP in tribute to the great composer and electronic musician who had influenced me so much over the years.

On May 1, around a week before the "To Be Human" LP was officially released, and a holiday for me, I spent an entire afternoon playing with some instruments and electronic devices, or "toys," both analogue and digital, that I don't normally use much for recording in LOGIC; namely, my Kaossilator synth pad (the only time until then that I had used this device for a home recording, rather than live, was "Da'at" from earlier this year, and only at the end of the track) and the KASTLE noise synth (which I had used before a number of times, including on the aforementioned "To Be Human" LP, but I also wanted to explore more sound possibilities with it than previously). 

In addition to these two electronic devices, I had also purchased a used san-shin (三線) some months prior at the music shop where I go to have my guitar cleaned up, the Okinawan version of the Japanese three-stringed shamisen (三味線), but had only employed it twice during live improvisations (i.e. for both of my performances with the Butoh dancer, including my 50th birthday live), so this recording session also gave me an excuse to take it out and play around with it some more, recording it this time directly via LOGIC, so that I could add reverb and other effects to it later. The sessions that resulted from this day-long exploration of abstract sounds and textures (though ultimately I also ended up playing my acoustic guitar, as well as improvising a bit of vocals and spoken word, too) resulted in a freeform/experimental 35 minute-long collage/soundscape. After thinking about a title for the work, I decided on "Man & Machine," as the recordings not only included electronic elements, but also acoustic elements and voice. I also, as previously, very much had the theme of what it is to be human, and not an "A.I.," in mind, though, of course, I was also employing many "non-human/technological" devices in the recording itself, such as the Kaossilator synth pad for both beats and synthesized sounds, the KASTLE noise synth, and indeed the very recording equipment itself! (USB mic, LOGIC for mixing inside my MacBook, etc.). I therefore felt this title to be quite appropriate indeed.

As I ended up video recording the entire "sessions" at home via a stationary iPhone (and iPad, simultaenously) while I was recording the audio directly into LOGIC via the MacBook, I also some days later decided to fairly quickly edit together a "Making of..." video for my YouTube page, which can be viewed below.

The 35 minute "Man & Machine" piece, along with one song from 2016 I decided to attempt to rearrange that same day while recording "on the spot," craving a bit of pure melody and vocals in an A/B/chorus "decided" pattern (obviously it was my own original song, and also my style of arranging and performing these older songs is decidedly much looser now than it used to be) was to have been released as a short (40 minutes or so, total) LP entitled "Man & Machine." However, and though I had originally uploaded it in audio to YouTube as such, separating the one long track into shorter sections without breaks, it has now ended up as part of another release that I will discuss in a few moments, below. 

The "Man & Machine" audio-only video, with the cover art I had originally planned for it, showing me in my room recording on various instruments and "toys" (screenshots of my filming of the sessions), is here:

Although, as by now the observant reader will understand, the development of what was to follow did not happen in a linear fashion, but I will talk about the LPs in the order in which they will be released, since I now consider them to form a "linear" trilogy (the second trilogy this year, you might say, after what I had labeled the "Triad," i.e. the three LPs leading up to my 50th birthday anniversary). 

I had first created an EP I called "Humachinations" that was initially to have been a sort of remix LP for "Man & Machine," but what actually happened was a bit different... Instead, I ended up linking parts of the ambient piece that had become "To Be Human," into which I had added beats (but now with the beats removed, and somewhat remixed and rearranged), with one long unused section from the May 1 "Man & Machine" sessions. I also took the spoken word section of the track "To Be Human" which, in the original, at times is hard to hear clearly, due to the booming drums and surrounding noises, and placed it atop a more ambient, beatless backing, so that it became very clear and easy to understand what the words are (the spoken word section was completely improvised, by the bye, though there are references in it to other of my works and to/on the theme of what it is to be...human, yes!). I also added, to the final section, a spoken word section that comes from a talk I did about Ryuichi Sakamoto in Japanese shortly after his passing, which then links this track up in some ways with the tribute piece on "To Be Human," though in fact this did not occur to me until afterwards, since, again, initially this "series" was not planned as a "series" (this is not the first time I have said this about the so-called trilogies and tetralogies in my catalogue, right?!). This sprawling piece, "Humachinations," now runs for nearly 30 minutes...

At one point, I had scrapped the idea for the "Humachinations" LP completely, as I was considering incorporating sections of the longer piece into another LP (i.e. what became, and is now, the third part of the series, which I will soon come to). However, after I rethought and rearranged the third part, changing the track listing any number of times, I ultimately realized that the LP was already "full" and could not take on the longer ambient section (the part in which I had inserted my talk on Sakamoto-sensei) after adding the full version of "Man & Machine," so instead I returned to "Humachinations" in its original, full-length form and later tagged onto it two additional "outtakes" I had had and wasn't sure where I should release them. The first of these is a piano improvisation (with synth backing) called "Ayumu," and written in Japanese kanji as 歩む, which means something like "to walk," or, metaphorically-speaking, to "move forward/move ahead," and the second is calld "Search for Control," which is a palimpsestic collage of songs from the past, both recent and slightly more distant, that I had further "destroyed" and condensed for the "To Be Human" LP (it is included on the "Triad" compilation on BandCamp, but not officially released elsewhere). Once again, these links, however tenuous they might seem to some, between the tracks across the three LPs proved beneficial in terms of having the ability to consider the three LPs as a trilogy that is interlinked not only thematically and in terms of their sound/genre (i.e. dark ambient, noise, improvisational, etc.), but also in terms of their repetitions of melodic or textural or lyrical themes, all of which had become part of their very DNA.

The third part of this "triangle" is the LP that I had been working on already at the time I had first demolished the original "Humachinations" LP and was considering releasing as an unrelated release, albeit one that I felt and also understood was linked thematically in some ways with the "To Be Human" LP. This new LP, entitled "Beyond the Body," opens with a fragment from "Humachinations" featuring a portion of the spoken word section of "To Be Human," except that here it fades in with beats, and then fades out after just over three minutes' time. It serves as a brief introduction to the LP, and also provided the LP with its title (part of the improvised spoken word part included goes: "...searching for something beyond the body"); it also rather conveniently links the LP to both of the other albums. In addition to this short track, I included what was the opener of "Man & Machine," an improv for the san-shin and some improvised vocals (as well as other sounds, like me dropping a coin onto the table, etc.), in two versions: one is more-or-less without too many added effects or layers, basically just some reverb and a single overdub of san-shin at one point, and the other adds in some beat-making and other synth noises from the Kaossilator, again an unused/left-over section of "Man & Machine." These serve, after the intro (title track), as the "bookends" of the album. The LP also, of course, includes the full version of "Man & Machine," this time presented as a single track without the divisions, as well as two collaborative tracks. Let me say a word or two here about these, as they are in some ways what makes this LP stand out from the other two, apart from the "Man & Machine" solo session.

The artist who is featured on these tracks goes by the moniker "Katakamuii," the name he uses for his solo ambient project (side-project, apparently). He is a quiet young man (compared to 50 year-old me he's still young!) I met recently at an event where we had both performed. After listening to him perform solo -- his style reminded me a bit of TN's style, and yet of course he had and has his own sensibility in terms of ambient guitar and also other styles of playing the guitar -- I suggested perhaps we collaborate sometime. As he does not live within the 23 wards of Tokyo and it isn't easy for him to meet me (I myself had and am still rather busy with classes, teaching six or sometimes even seven days a week), we opted, for now, for the "remote/file sharing" method of collaboration. Actually, the sample of his guitar I used for the first of the two tracks, which I entitled, using Japanese characters, "Tomei" (透明), which means "Transparent" or "Translucent," was a recording of him I myself made when I saw him perform live at NEPO, a livehouse where I myself frequently used to perform (I filmed a video for him, later editing it and tweaking the sound in LOGIC -- this was the audio from that video I had done for him). I combined it with some other material of mine I had had, slowing it down significantly, much as I had warped older material in similar fashion for "Without Beginning or End" in the "Triad" series, and hence the track was born. The second of two was one of the files he sent me as-is (I could not separate out the sounds), originally called "575," which could very well refer to the number of syllables found in a traditional Haiku, and so I added my parts, noise and synth and so on, and renamed it "57577," which is the number of syllables found in the older, longer-form (and perhaps more "formal," too) version of Haiku called Waka.

And so, this combination of tracks, then, became the LP "Beyond the Body," and, in typical "non-linear" fashion, after completing it and even releasing it in some form via BandCamp, I later returned to "Humachinations," made the appropriate changes, and created this as a series of three dark-ambient/experimental LPs linked by sound and theme to be released in the coming weeks (update: both have now been released and are available on all major streaming services).

 24. Now I am officially old (Or, “Now I am officially timeless and old”)

[Pt. 1 of 2]

And so, finally, the day arrived.

February 26, 2023...

I made it.

That evening, my improv live show, the one I'd been anticipating for several months...

Me, TN (with whom I'd collaborated in '22), a young saxophone player I'd met at the end of '20 at an event, and who had also performed with us on my birthday the year I'd turned 49, though not again since then...

And also, of course, the Butoh dancer I had earlier mentioned, with whom, just four days prior, and for the first time ever, I'd also done a different sort of improv live collaborative performance at a different, even smaller venue, with me playing, alternately, the acoustic and an out-of-tune piano (the event was completely "unplugged") and also singing from time to time, improvising lyrics and melodies and/or singing some of my own songs in fragmentary fashion, while the dancer did his contortionistic, improvisational "dance of darkness."

After the birthday show, which I filmed from multiple angles and later edited together, also creating a LOGIC-worthy audio version (currently available on my BandCamp page), I felt pretty darn good, not because there had been any great turnout (there hadn't), nor because anyone had treated me to birthday cake with or without candles or a nice meal, or even bought me a beer (no one did any of these things, in fact; the year before was the same, though at least a few friends had come out to the show that time), but, rather, because I was a.) in an elated state of mind, generally, feeling much better about myself and my life this year than last (having battled, and then learned to stop battling, the inner demons, rather than due to any external circumstances that had improved per se), b.) I was happy with the performance itself, no matter the lousy turnout, and the fact that these three excellent artists had agreed to perform together with me on this momentous occasion (momentous for me!) and, lastly, c.) a woman I had recently started communicating with/seeing "long distance" had come to see the show that night (the only "friend" who actually showed and wished me a happy 50th in person).

The next day I wrote, via private SNS messaging, to the owner to thank him. He is a friend with whom I've been connected for a couple of years now, not only having performed at his place and eaten curry there, too, many times, but also, more recently, I'd written a "curry-themed song" acoustically, with Japanese lyrics, that got me a chance to perform in front of many people at a large event he/his cafe-bar had participated in (he won an award for his coconut pork curry that evening, though this had absolutely nothing to do with my little song!). In any case, he was kind and positive as always, but also (half-jokingly) made a comment to the effect of, "Next year, if you want to do a birthday show again, I'll have to ask you to bring at least 15-20 guests with you!" Though he had likely meant it in jest (he has a rather quirky, often sardonic sense of humor), I realized that, in fact, he had not only not made money on the event, but had likely even lost some money on it, and so also, by extension, on me and my inability to draw a crowd, even for my "big" 50th birthday performance, advertised as "Marc Lowe and Friends"... And while I apologized to him the next time I saw him in person, he just shrugged it off and kindly said that it was a good show, and that he was glad to have done it together, which was rather kind. Indeed, his words made me feel a mixture of gratitude and, well...I really don't want to use a word like "shame" or "guilt," but perhaps also some sense, from a business perspective, of responsibility for not being able to have at least pulled in a few people to the event. (Of course I, too, was disappointed that even some of the people who had told me they were coming did not, in the end, show.) Perhaps this is why, since February 26, I have felt overall less enthusiastic about accepting offers for live shows, or actively seeking them out, as I once did.

(Okay, so here goes a little itty-bitty diatribe/rant-like thing. If I may...)

This is my gig now, right? 

Right.

I mean, I don't need to sell copies of this book, since it is 100% my gig, correct?

This is how I function best. 

I know my personality, and I have zero business sense, nor any excess energy to waste on being a people-pleaser. I won't do it in order to get folks to come to my shows, either, and it's very likely the main reason why I also can never sell my CDs, no matter the quality of the packaging or of what's inside, musically-speaking. I have tried different approaches to my own "marketing" or "branding" or whatever, but it never works. I have only sold things on the rare occasion when someone has approached me after a performance, already eager to buy something, i.e. not because I had enticed him or her to do so via any manipulative promotional-terroristic means, but rather because that person had already decided for him or herself that he (or she) wanted to buy a CD to listen to at home. This is how I have made sales in the past. Not by plea bargaining, nor by begging or cajoling or by making such commercial music that people who watch me perform live just can't stop humming those oh-so-catchy Marc Lowe tunes afterwards and just needs a f*#%@ CD...right now!!!

You see...

Ahem.

I am not good at PR (see what I just wrote, above), have never been good at PR, and very, very likely will never be good at it.

Nor am I good at adjusting to other's expectations of me musically, or in any other way, really, though I am willing to compromise when compromise is necessary and/or the right thing to do in a mutually-agreeable relationship... (But this is not the ideal way to make music, IMO.)

Nor am I willing to so easily give up on my vision of what my music (yes, it is "mine," mine in the sense that I am the one who is creating it and spending so many days and weeks and months and even years thinking about it and crafting it and tweaking it and arranging/rearranging it, etc.) should sound like, or about how it should be arranged (by another), etc. 

(Let me here restate/clarify that, in a true mutual collaboration, when the input is 50/50 from the outset -- this is what "collaborative" generally is, though sometimes, depending on the piece or the inspiration, it might be more like 40/60 or 60/40 or some other fraction -- and when something works, I am absolutely thrilled to try things differently, including my own songs or arrangements! More recently, most of my collaborations have, therefore, been improvisational, and so I feed off of the other person's energy and vice-versa. It's an experience and an experiment for both parties, and often times it is both surprising and extremely inspiring to collaborate in this way with "like-minded" musicians. However, I won't bend to so-called "peer pressure" to appease an imagined audience, or to make a sale, or because the other person or persons insists that his/her/their version is "better" for whatever reason, and without any real discussion or compromise on the other side as well as on mine.)

Please also understand -- and, if you've been paying any attention to what I've been saying all along, this won't really come as any surprise -- that I do not ever (ever) give a second's worth of consideration to what is popular "this week" or "this year" or "in Japan/Tokyo" etc., all of which is a load of transient rubbish, in my opinion, and has no place in making or performing music.

(Exhalation...)

And so, currently, as I spend more and more time alone, and less and less time (and energy) around frivolous groupthink and gossip, and as I socialize less and less, rushing out less to others' shows or events in order to curry favor with other acts and/or with people who might invite me to perform at the livehouses themselves, etc. (although, you know, I definitely do go to shows on occasion, i.e. when I really want to see a particular performance or performer, or if I really want to support someone with whom I have maintained some sort of relationship over time, some sort of mutual friendship, though, more times than not, the gesture is not necessarily reciprocated -- which really is not the point I am trying to make... Which really is also exactly the point I am making, if you get my meaning?)... You may easily imagine, then, how it has become more and more difficult to ask people to come and see my shows, no matter how much preparation I do for them, no matter how many people might enjoy it/them if they only decided to come and see what was happening...

On the other hand, maybe not.

Maybe my constant flirting with this style and that one, or doing things that are not readily classifiable, and which often change, has proven "fatal" to my fanbase and attendance record at live shows. Maybe I simply make too much music for people to keep up with it. (This I have been told on multiple occasions over the years.) Essentially, I never do the same show twice, or that has been my basic "standard" or rule of thumb to follow... If I am doing two or three shows back-to-back, I will still change the setlists around and do different songs or styles. Depending on the venue and the setting, and also depending on who else is performing on that night and what the main genre or genres appear to be emphasizing, I might also intentionally play different instruments, make one performance completely acoustic, the other completely electronic (which could be improv, beatless ambient/noise, programmed beats, etc.), sit in on the drums during one show (if the venue has a kit on their stage to use, and if they don't charge me extra to use it!), and then focus on singing behind a keyboard during the next, etc.

I am not a beggar. I am not doing this for the "numbers" or for the superficial (and ultimately fleeting) feeling that I have somehow risen in the ranks of...what? What does it prove??

This is not why I do this. This is not what making music is about.

And so, do as you will. 

I shall do as I do, too.

If someone wants to come, they should come.

If they don't, fine.

How's this?

No expectations = no disappointment.

No disappointment = no problem (for either party involved, or, rather, uninvolved)

Which brings me to the next thing I wanted to talk about...

(Oh, and this officially ends the "rant." The rest is written in a rather more positive, or at least a much less "rant-ful," tone.)

[Continued...]

(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?