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.

 23. "Triad 2023"

The album completed, I almost immediately started sharing news about it on my SNS feeds, setting the date for the LP's release to, can you guess? February 26, 2023, the date of my upcoming 50th birthday. I put it up for pre-order on BandCamp, submitted it for approval to my new (since last year) distributor, and shared the full-length version of the long improv, without splitting it into two halves, which I had, as briefly mentioned earlier, entitled "A Memento Mori," via my YouTube page, with a photo of my feet (i.e. dark shoes) in front of a wooden board, taken at a local park and, like the cover of the LP, converted to a stark black and white.

From this point, the new album ready to go, with around a month's wait until the official release date (not that anyone was anxiously awaiting it, other than me, but in my own mind there was still a fair amount of time left in front of me before it became available to the public), I started recalling some of the older recordings I'd done with "Sunny" c. 2019/2020, both before and during the first year of the pandemic. I had released two LPs of our material previously, in 2020, and started listening again to both of them via Apple Music, which then led to me revisiting some of the other recordings we'd done that either had never been released or were, at the time, not currently in any sort of circulation via streaming services. I had previously created, via a playlist on my computer, a compilation of songs we'd recorded which I quite liked; I'd even made cover art for it and popped it onto my BandCamp page temporarily. It was 2x-LP length, and I'd considered at one time taking down the shorter LPs I'd initially released via streaming services with my first distributor and replacing them with this newer compilation, now with my new distributor, though in the end I never did. 

Anyway, to make a long story shorter, in addition this year to eventually having compiled three new thematically-consistent compilations of our songs from the past (and eventually releasing them with my new distributor), I ended up also having the urge to play around some more with one of my solo songs that I'd recorded in the summer of 2020 during my "Covidian-blues" period; that is, when locking myself down in my new apartment (such a good boy, right? Actually, I was terrified of the virus, afraid it would infect my lungs, being born an asthmatic...). The piece was called "Self Control," which was my translation for the Japanese word jishuku (自粛), "self-discipline," or "self-restraint," and which was used frequently during the pandemic to reference "staying at home" and keeping social distance from others whenever it was necessary to be in public. 

I'd done a version of "Self Control" featuring Sunny's electric guitar, which I had rather heavily effectorized, using lots of distortion in order to turn it into a sort of noisy drone, and I wanted to use this version to create an updated version now. I searched for the original file to this song, which I'd recorded nearly three years prior on a different computer, in LOGIC, but did not have it, so, as I was about to give up on the idea of doing any remix or new version, I recalled that I still had the piano and vocal-less "backing track" (thanks to iCloud!) I'd used in late 2020 to perform the song live (which in fact I had done, though only once). Locating this, I put it into my LOGIC interface and recorded a brand new vocal atop it, with lyrics now sung in "past tense," updated for the present, and leaving off the piano part entirely, drawing Sunny's effectorized guitar right up in front of the mix.

This is all rather important to how the second part of my pre-50 birthday "triad" of LPs came about (I didn't want to call it a "triptych" or a "trilogy," in order to avoid making it sound too "Berlin Bowie-ish") because, when I was working on the "updated" version of the song, I thought that, if I made a loop of Sunny's "dirty distorted" guitar, it would create a cool backing/ambient wash from which I might construct a new atmospheric track... And, indeed, it did! I started playing around with this, and this then led, in turn, to wanting to do more with Sunny's older guitar recordings. One thing led to another led to another, and so on... 

I had had the vocal line to my last improvised collaboration with Sunny from late 2020 (appearing on "Hope," released in early '21), "Is Happiness a Verb?," in my head a lot at the time for some reason, and suddenly wanted to do something new with the original recording we'd made: a remix, perhaps, or a newly-arranged version...? As I was searching for the original file in LOGIC, although I never found it, I instead discovered a couple of other folders full of files of just the guitar improvs and solos that Sunny had sent me to be used for our various and intense collaborations between '19 and '20... And so, gleefully layering them, then playing around with them in LOGIC with the attitude of a child who makes multiple castles in his sandbox before first demolishing them before rebuilding them once again, I ended up with two new extended experimental pieces, to which I also added a new improvised spoken word part. These became "What Is the Body?" parts 1 and 2, and would be included on the new LP, eventually (the second part of this "triad" I am now discussing). I also eventually would record a third part. But, well, now I'm (once again!) getting just a little bit ahead of myself...

Around the same time, I also started becoming interested again in my own past solo recordings from that same "Covidian" year of 2020, which were really the "dark ages" for me... I revisited my seminal,* darkly-depressive work "Untitled" one day, and soon began playing around with the original files, running them in reverse, speeding them up, slowing them down, layering them, too, in different ways. 

* Note that, to me, the "Untitled" LP truly is "seminal"! I still consider it one of my most interesting, albeit scariest-sounding, solo albums from around this period in my musical development. It was a transitional LP to be sure, but my music would never again sound quite as it had before I'd made this LP once I'd crossed this particular threshold, both in terms of sound, concept, and also compositional technique (or, rather, perhaps it was more my "way of thinking about" composition than it was any sort of specific "technique," since much of the LP was in fact improvised "on-the-spot," as it were, particularly the vocal parts). There were a couple of other things I recorded in late '20 that would chronologically fall between this LP and the somewhat more hopeful Tetralogy that would be the focus of my musical activities in '21, beginning with the "Hope" LP. Nonetheless, in my mind, the albums "Untitled" and "Hope" are inextricably linked, almost as though the latter had followed directly after the former, even though, in fact, many of the songs on "Hope" were actually developments of tracks that had been recorded after the Untitled album in late '20, also after I had moved into my new apartment and was living alone during semi-lockdown, so this is obviously not the case. I think that maybe I have this feeling that they are so strongly interconnected because "There Is a Light," the final track of "Untitled," and the opening track of the "Hope" LP both deal lyrically with finding "light," alternately "hope," despite my having possessed at the time only a rather limited ability to view the world in this way; I still had viewed it through a very dark glass, indeed. (And yes, I am meaning here to indirectly reference Bergman's film, if not also the Biblical expression from which Bergman took his cue, for it does very much apply to my state of mind at the time I made both of these recordings.)

One more thing I'd like to add (this is a footnote, after all, albeit an important one, as are all footnotes, generally!) is that I also feel that the Untitled album somehow possesses the strange ability to both bridge and -- at least partially -- to explain (i.e. in both musical and conceptual terms) the gap/transition that occurred between much of the darker electronic work I'd done between 2017-2019 and Tetralogy in 2021. Something radical had shifted with the creation of "Untitled," an album I made when I was, literally, "in transition," moving away from my former partner of the last few years, my former place of residence as well (and this included many of my possessions, which I ended up relinquishing, all but a few pieces of my furniture, which I had been using for several years prior to my move to Tokyo and whilst living in Fukuoka, such as my bed, refrigerator, etc.), moving away from the security of having steady teaching work (Covid had slashed more than half of my classes at the time, hence more than half of my income as well), unsure as to what I should do next, scared of the virus, scared of everything, perhaps most especially scared of myself, and very much lingering somewhere between "hell and purgatory" at the time of the creation of this dark work, which was itself created in less than a week total... In any case, this mysterious "something" that the album possesses is something that even I cannot precisely put my finger on, not even now, despite there being a fair amount of distance between "it" and "me" (i.e. the "me" of the here and the now, the "me" that is today writing these sentences), though certainly it may be, at least in part, because it marked (in my mind) the start of the "Covid era," what I would come to refer to as "Covidian times," and so also the start of my own "falling down," i.e. the break-up and the move and the horrible depression, self-blame, etc., that followed the split, and so, by extension, it must then also have marked the beginning of my recovery from “falling down,” which is, of course, itself a good thing, or ultimately it turned out to be so (since I survived it and became more able to endure adversity and to stop beating myself up over things so much, as well as to become much more independent in my way of thinking). Perhaps, if I try and take a much broader view of this work in context of “the world outside,” I might also add that the LP marks the end of what had been our (collective) "age of innocence," i.e. our = the world's, in the sense that Covid was, for many, the beginning of the end of trusting our governments, our media sources, our pharmaceutical companies, and so on and so forth.

To accompany the first track I'd made during this experiment, a sort of sound collage incorporating two different tracks from the Untitled LP (the opener and closer, respectively), I created what might be called a sort of "video mashup" from the same two music videos I'd self-shot and edited originally for those same two tracks from the Untitled album. In this year's version, I put the images side-by-side in split-screen mode, run in reverse, the speed adjusted to fit the new mashup track, which I entitled "Thereisalightinadarkdarkroom" (the original tracks I had used to create this new, dark sound-tapestry, were "Room" and "There Is a Light"). I also did a rearranged/reinterpreted, slightly slowed-down mix of "2masks," now clocking in at over 20 minutes (the original version was also rather long, at 15 minutes, but they are definitely rather distinct from each other), retitling it "Death Does Not Become You." The loop of Sunny's guitar I'd used from "Self Control" eventually became a sprawling dark-ambient/noise piece called "Dark Currents" that ran for around 30 minutes. I kept experimenting, eventually melding together elements of "Phantom," from the recently-recorded version on "022623," with other things, ending up with yet another 30 minute-long dark ambient soundscape, and so on. At first I had what I thought was an LP and an EP, then it became two LPs, and then, having the idea to combine all of them, I ended up with a 2x-length very experimental LP I entitled, "Without Beginning or End."* Although it is only 9 tracks in total, the LP runs for over 2.5 hours.

* And the title of this essay, obviously, makes reference to this, yet the two are not, either, equivalent to each other, obviously, nor should they be thought to refer to each other per se, and also no work, be it an album or an essay, can actually ever be complete in any definitive sense anyway…)

Thus, "022623," though not yet released, was now also not only not my latest LP, but the newer double-length LP, being highly experimental and mostly electronic, stood and stands in almost complete contrast to the mostly-acoustic "022623," though both gave nods to my musical (and, by extension, personal) past, while also looking ahead to whatever the future might bring.

To preface what I intend to be a relatively brief explanation (two paragraphs!) of the inception and creation of the third part of this triangular triad, let me just say that I hadn't initially planned on doing a "triad" of albums at all. (Then again, this is not an untypical pattern for me, as I hadn't planned on doing a tetralogy in '21, nor on the"Six Symphonies" -- plus one -- I finished last year either, but...) Honestly, I hadn't even planned on the "Without Beginning or End" LP in the first place, a 2.5 hour-long "double LP" which I amazingly ended up finishing prior to my 50th birthday anniversary (it started, as I said, as two or three separate projects utilizing both previously used and also unused material from the vaults...a complete experiment!). So, the LP just sort of "happened," as so often is the case when I get into experimenting with sounds and playing around with stuff, old and/or new, in LOGIC. (Let me add that my saying this is not "ego" or prideful boasting, as some people sometimes have wrongly, and also quite rashly, assumed in the past. I consider music as "play," which is maybe why I am able to make so much new stuff so quickly, and also perhaps since it is not my "day job" and I am not working for anyone but me -- in other words, there is no financial or commercial or contractual reason or reasons I have for doing it, hence no pressure or rules to which I must conform, either. This is the best formula for making "good art" I think, regardless of popularity and/or other monetary considerations.)

About "Abstrackt Distracktions" (paragraph 1)

Sooo0 then...as an extension of my recent experiments with taking older tracks and running them at different speeds, layering multiple tracks atop one another, with or without additional effectors, etc., to create new things, I attempted the same with my "classic" electronic track "Black Nail." Actually, I played with three different versions of the modest-length track, running 2021's remixed version at high speed in reverse (Blknailskin), then taking a piano-only version from 2018's "Always" LP and combining it with part of another track I'd done for the 2021 Tetralogy, in which I had spontaneously sung part of the song between a spoken word section, then grafting the introduction to my piano/vocal version of Nine Inch Nail's "Hurt" onto the end of it (Blknailhurt). I also decided to remaster (for sound) a mashup I'd done late in the previous year of a remixed version my "producer" from the label I was briefly on had done for me/his label's EP, with elements of two of his other remixes of my songs layered in palimpsestic fashion (Blknailkaos). Then, there was also "Blknailnoize," which is an excerpt of a noisy remix I'd created in 2019, combined with some acoustic guitar elements which comes in a bit at the end. The latter three of these ended up scattered throughout the final LP ("Blknailskin" was completed later, to be included on the "Triad" compilation that is now available via BandCamp, as a sort of b-side/bonus track, and more recently I further morphed it into something new for my This Dark Shroud 2023 LP, "Vanity"). 

About "Abstrackt Distractions" (paragraph 2)

The LP also included one of my recorded live-at-home recordings, done in one take, a lengthy medley where I am talking/playing at turns, a little like I had done for the "022623" medley, yet this medley is almost completely different, not to mention that it was in fact this time a completely off-the-cuff improvisation, filmed with the iPhone as a video recording, the sound later extracted, tweaked in LOGIC, and added to the new (previously unplanned-for) LP. The date of the recording for this track is "022023," six days before my 50th birthday, and I put the date in the title. Another "dated" track (the final one I recorded that ended up on the LP) came literally 48 hours before my birthday, on the eve/morning of Feb. 24, which also happened to be the very anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine (though certainly not an occasion which called for any sort of celebration, as the term might seem to imply). This particular improvisation was recorded in LOGIC, with true separation of all audio elements, and I later added some electronic backing -- which was actually the Ukraine piece from exactly one year prior, run in reverse. It consists mostly of spoken word atop some very abstract guitar and additional organic sounds, and in it I talk about the ongoing war, the plummeting economy, and some other things around health and aging as well. 

The title track, too, consisted of a long improv, and again it included some electronic samples plucked from my own backcatalog, with some added beats and a spoken word track taken from a recent talk I'd done for my YouTube page blended into the mix. This improv I entitled "An Abstrackt Distracktion," the LP itself becoming"Abstrackt Distracktions" (plural), and then, just days before my 50th birthday and the release of "0226" (the title quickly adjusted to read "022623," literally two days before publication), I got the second and third parts of the now-completed series into my distributor's online distribution system post-haste, quickly adding numbers to their respective titles to denote that they were a sequence (01., 02., 03). And then, and then, and then...days later, all three of the LPs, including the long-running double, were released in rapid succession, one per day, right up until the very end of the month of February this year.

Did anyone notice this?

 

Well, now at least you, dear reader, know.