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.

 9. Covid-19/Personal hell begins (2020)

Well you sit here in this room

Waiting for nothing...

--Room ('20)

2020: The "Covid Years" (Part I)

After finding two part-time teaching jobs, I endure a loss of work and income due to Covid-19 (one of my two jobs becomes impossible to continue, albeit temporarily, with no online teaching option at the time) as, in March of 2020, the virus becomes an issue, the government recommending (and then more-or-less requiring) that its citizens not travel for long distances by train, to work from home, to stay at home, and to do what is called, in Japanese, jishuku (自粛), self-control, or self-discipline. Do it not only for yourself, but do it for those around you who are maybe not as young or robust as you are as well!!! The virus is a killer, they say.

Perhaps even worse yet, for me, and on a more personal level...

Within months, what I had feared would happen more than anything else finally arrives. Or maybe it is what I had anticipated would happen, and/or had created (and/or worsened and/or expedited) to some extent by my overreacting, not shutting my mouth when I should maybe just have kept it shut, agreed even when I did not or could not agree, or at least had I not resisted things, not openly disagreed, and/or if I had been able to endure the most unpleasant of moments together, swallowed down my pride, put the expectations I had had aside and the doubts and the suspicions, and maybe had I also stayed completely sober, stayed calm, even if/when the other party was unable to, and also (etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.)...

But then, one night, indeed, the shit did finally hit the fan. Hit it hard.

Boom...

Snap... 

Break/broke/broken...

Like the fragile branch of the tree on which accumulated snow suddenly becomes too heavy for it to endure the weight any longer

The straw that broke the camel's back...

And, of course: the stressful, bitter break-up, the insults, the accusations too...

Following, of course: the anger, the regret/s, the confusion, the painful repetitions...

And then, later, and once again: the self-flagellation, the self-questioning, self-hatred, loneliness, and also fear...

Did she lie? Was I played like a fiddle? Were those comments he wrote on SNS just bravado, or proof itself of what I had suspected…

Running from the things that you don't understand

Running from the things that make you hurt...

-- Running (‘19)

Well, I moved out, "ran away"

Always running...

Ran from myself, only to find myself staring me straight in the face, once again, as before I had run...

Now, we are in our first-ever State of Emergency in Tokyo. It is early summer, 2020...

Wearing my mask, worried about everything and half-crazed, in a taxi with some clothes in my little travel suitcase-on-wheels and my computer in a box, off to a monthly rental room, all electric/gas included in the fee, a bed, a cheap desk, a single electric burner for cooking...

Not my home

Only a half year has passed since arriving in Tokyo full of hopes of finally starting a new chapter, the hope of finding a new, stable university job (or else some other, preferably creative job), if possible a long-term contract (this still, at the time of writing, has not happened), if not an opportunity for permanent employment (i.e. "tenure track," and this, too, has still not happened to date), coming to Tokyo together with my "partner," thinking that somehow it will just work out, that we can make it work out, things will somehow... Just, you know, somehow...

Wear your mask! 

Stay at home!

Keep social distance…

Will I ever find love again? Will I ever perform live again? Make friends again? Meet new people again?

Can I afford to pay my bills with such little work and so few opportunities during a pandemic?

My mental state now devolves rather drastically, and quickly, too. Very very fast. 

Frighteningly fast.

In the midst of my break up and moving myself into temporary housing, where I'd stayed, sleeping most days and eating very little, for over two months, I had managed to compose and record a rather dark LP, one of the darkest of my musical career to date. I entitle it, simply, "Untitled." Sunny ultimately contributes guitar to one of the tracks he takes an immediate liking to, what became the opener of the LP, a track called "Room," sending me his parts via file sharing to mix into the already-finished track, on which I had played piano (via Midi) and sang, accompanied by slow, menacing electronic beats and some synth noises. 

The LP "Untitled" is itself filled with long, dark pieces, and the pieces that make up the bulk of the album -- apart from "Room" and the closer, "There Is a Light," a more hopeful tone prevailing within its quiet string arrangement -- are rather abstract. The vocals and vocalizations are themselves fairly abstract as well, all lyrics on the album improvised on the spot, and I think most of the pieces on the LP do not come across so much as bona fide "songs" as they do soundtracks to someone's nightmare, perhaps everyone's nightmare at the time; in other words, it is the soundtrack to living in a time of uncertainty and fear during the first wave of COVID-19, the mysterious "Wuhan virus" that has infected the entire world.

"Covid" (with animation from Takeo Udagawa)

Two Masks and a Wish

When Will They Let Us Out To Play...?

-- Two Masks ('20)

Moving into my new apartment, finally, at the beginning of July '20, the apartment where I now still reside at the time of this writing, and having officially "broken up" with my ex...having also gotten all of my stuff out of her (now it was "hers," rather than "our") place (this after myself having moved into temporary housing twice before finally finding a place of my own to settle into, an exceedingly small but also rather clean room, with three gas burners for cooking, a nice bathtub, and double glass sliding doors leading to the balcony for extra insulation...), I recorded more Covid-themed work whilst struggling with the lingering aftereffects of the breakup, with depression and loneliness during the excessively hot, sweltering summer of '20, blasting the air conditioner nearly 24-7 that summer (I couldn't sleep without it; I would wake up every night sweating profusely and was forced, time and again, to put it back on in order to sleep at all). This was a time when every week, it seemed, there were more deaths reported, more warnings, more shut-downs, if not full "lockdowns" (these are not legal in Japan, though the government "suggested" staying at home as much as possible, over and over, and they continued to call for further restrictions, forcing businesses to close early and so forth)... 

I could not perform live, I could not meet people, nor could I "make new friends" in Tokyo. I had, at the time, only been living in Tokyo for less than a year, and was craving some sort of social interaction and stimulation, but it was then impossible. I also could not find much work apart from the few part-time classes I had and was conducting online via Zoom at one university... It wasn't enough income. I drank too much, buying beer at the convenience store or supermarket in my neighborhood, sometimes wine or harder liquor as well, and drinking it alone whilst rather depressed in my apartment room. I vented my frustration and anxiety and fears about contracting and maybe even dying of Covid via SNS; I repeatedly pissed off some people I had considered good friends, realized also that some other people I'd thought were close friends were not actually my friends after all, realized, too, that I myself had acted rather toxic in many instances, pushing people away, and, gradually, as the year progressed, I began "working on myself" more and more, chipping away at my assumptions little by little, tried, as much as and whenever possible, to take a step or two back from myself, as it were; I listened to many, many talks by people much wiser than myself online, to Indian gurus (especially to Sadhguru and to Krishnamurthi, RIP) and to Buddhist monks (the Dalai Lama, some Japanese Zen teachers), started recalling some of the things I'd learned from my studies in Buddhism and Daoism, not so much as a graduate student approaching it academically, but more from the meditative and contemplative side of things, as well as the concepts of, in Sanscrit, shunyata, or "emptiness," and of, in the Japanese language, as frequently encountered in Zen parlance, mujo (無常), or "impermanence," and applying what I could to my at-the-time rather perverted (in the sense of twisted, or distorted) thought patterns, in order to better recognize the mind traps I had been setting for myself for so long now. I embraced Stoic philosophy, tried online therapy for a bit, took long walks daily (mostly at night, since the daytime was too hot, and sometimes for two or even three hours, with music of some sort always in my ears), eventually stopped taking all medications I'd previously taken for depression (the medications had had some rather nasty side-effects, including having gained a bit of weight around the waist for the first time in my life, though I am generally slender of build, experiencing thinning hair, and a host of other awful side effects, too, some of which would last for a very long time thereafter and cause me a great deal of physical, as well as mental, suffering, though I won't go into the details here)... 

And so, slowly, as 2021 approaches, I begin gradually, bit by bit, to start "finding the light," the light which I had sung about on the final track of the "Untitled" LP.

There is a light

On the other side

What lies beyond

All your worries

And all your fears...

--There Is a Light ('20)

The light was there, must be there, somewhere, if only I would persist in my search for it, unwaveringly seek it out...

I would find it.

I had to.

My life, literally, depended on it.

Starting in the summer of the same year, I also took part in a collaboration -- creating an EP together and performing at two year-end live shows together -- with a guy I was supposed to have collaborated with live before the pandemic had hit full-force, at which time our planned performance together had been, much to my disappointment, canceled, a State of Emergency declared for Tokyo, with all of the livehouses temporarily shut down. I was, as I explained above, in a very bad mental state by this time, and it was no doubt quite obvious to anyone who was reading my SNS feed that I was now alone in my small, sweltering apartment all of the time and "not doing very well" either. Not good at all...

And so, one day, this acquaintance I'd only met once or twice at events before the pandemic started contacted me via Messenger and asked me if I'd like to collaborate with him remotely, to which I readily agreed. He sent me some audio files of himself improvising what I considered rather "acid-jazz-esque"; they reminded me of John Zorn recordings I had once upon a time heard. The instrument he was playing was not a regular saxophone, but, rather, what he termed a "reed-sax," consisting as it did of the body of a Western-style flute with a saxophone mouthpiece on it, an idea he himself had apparently come up with. The name we took for our project was Lower Than God, a combination of "Lowe" from my last name, and "Goda," from his (stage) name. I took the chaotic, improvised samples he'd sent me and shaped them into instrumental, electronica tracks. Adding lots of fast beats, mixing and layering and effectorizing the samples I was given to work with, I also added my own piano parts, some samples (for instance, one piece features the voice of Donald Trump speaking about how all Americans had the “right” to choose not to wear masks in public during the pandemic, as "Americans must be allowed their freedoms"), noise elements, and so on. The final track was quiet, almost ambient, with sampled nature sounds in the background, he now playing a standard, breathy flute, along with my improvised piano flourishes, bathed in reverb, and some subtle jazzy beat loops I added. This track remains my favorite on the EP.

Although we had gone into the studio a few times and also twice performed live together in late 2020, along with some rather heavy Covid restrictions -- everyone wearing masks, disinfecting their hands frequently, having their temperatures taken at the door, etc. -- after 2020 we never collaborated on this project together again. However, I used some of the recordings he'd sent me to use for the initial EP (there were still quite a few from which to choose left over in the folder) to arrange new abstract instrumental and/or spoken word pieces that ended up on some of my own solo releases the following year.

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.