Last weekends three concerts in southern france went well. All the things I’ve grown to expect from France, delicious stinky cheeses, drives through precious little towns with wooden-shuttered windows, and excellent treatment of artists.
This mini-tour ended at a very special place called Mix’art Myrys. Their story is this… a collective squatted a building for years in central Toulouse, eventually made a deal with the local government to swap, they left their inner-city space in exchange for a big factory space on the periphery. So many inspiring stories like this in europe, how people have struggled and actually won something from the process.
Fotos are of the bar, the bathroom, and the shipping container that was our hotel room for the night.
This place and these people are just right. Bonus that I was joined onstage by a pair of excellent tribal-fusion belly dancers Nadyka.
Yesterday was a disaster, on arrival in bcn I could only see the shitty face of it- the rudeness, the pollution, the tourism, and, over all, the wreckage of my personal life here. Then i realized I hadn’t slept properly in about 72 hours, which was just one long day that covered three-quarters of the distance around the planet.
I did a hard reset, went to sleep in the afternoon and woke up at 5am today, went to the beach to do some yoga, drink mint tea, and greet the sun. Much better.
Everyone might by now already have it, but the latest album by Daedelus is brilliant. Free of bpm/genre slavery, it’s rambling creativity earns respect even when it (often) strays into styles I don’t like.
The straight line of conventional narrative is too often an elevated expressway permitting no unplanned encounters or necessary detours. It is not how our thoughts travel, nor does it allow us to map the whole world rather than one streamlined trajectory across it.
Last night we were greeted at a rural train station in Kyushu by a couple with a sign written “filastine”. The only other souls on the platform were two hunched grandmothers.
Holding the sign was Sano, described to me as a captain of team Kyushu, a crew of deejays afrom Japan’s south. A big guy who used to ride bmx bikes, now he and his partner have dropped out rural style, farming a plot of land and fixing up a classic wooden house. We drove an hour through sleeping mountain villages, communicating in pidgen and gestures. Dinner on arrival was a three hour onslaught of deliciousness, most dishes consisting of wild local plants and roots, and of course locally-caught raw fish, and then there was tempura with batter made from kudzu roots, and plenty of sake.
After dinner Sano talked about their trip for next week, an obligation to visit the family shrine that memorializes his grandfather, a kamikaze pilot. He was sent to attack the Americans in Hawaii with a one-way tank of gas and a bomb permanently fixed to his airplane. He showed me diagrams of the airplane & some historical fotos from books.
Later talk led to the bundle of contradictions that is Yukio Mishima, the writer who founded his own quasi-fascist army and also happened to be gay. If you haven’t read anything by him you need to fix that, his stories are brilliant & he’s available in translation. He killed himself in by seppuku (suicide by samurai sword) in a public ritual.
foto is co-host Ayaka behind breakfast.
Before we sat down to eat it, an 86 yr old neighbor stopped by to stare and talk about me. She pointed to her eyes, saying “it’s a long time since I’ve seen eyes like that.” I was charmed.
The rest of the day was spent on the rim of a volcano crater. And of course our daily hot water soak, this one in a muddy natural spring.
Later in life I want to live in the countryside and spend my time gardening and tinkering. Being old in the city is godawful stupid. And I’ve got to repay my hosting debt, clearly in the red.
– Addendum: no internet for a few days so the experiences are stacking up…..
Before the soundcheck in Kitakyushu we were hosted for tea at the traditional-style house of a renowned calligraphy artist named Honda. He’s a collector of asian antiques, we sat together in his parlor and talked about the fancy surrounding things, the garden visible through the opened walls, the tea, language, music, customs, etc.. all the while plied with sweets and labor-intensive tea.
Frantic gig that night & a huge huge honor to be supported by Dub Marronics & deejay sets from Hifana, who are some of the best in their games (guitar/noise improv & beat juggling respectively).
It’s hard to write about Japan because there is such a battery of stimulus.
For instance urban planning, or lack thereof, the 3D chaos of paper shacks abutting luxury glass skyscrapers, everything wallpapered with insistent signage and threaded with a spider’s web of utility cables.
Or bathrooms and their etiquette- each toilet has it’s own set of corresponding slippers so your feet are properly shod while sitting at toilet seats with controls like airplane cockpits.
Or the transit infrastructure. High-rise shopping-mall train stations with a hundred entrances, Shinkansen bullet trains coming and going every few minutes on different floors and in different directions.
The scarcity of right angles and parallel lines is common to all of asia, what’s odd about Japan is that since the 1950’s they’ve had the resources and social cohesion necessary to build on such a massive scale.
Perhaps the only thing Spain and Japan have in common is a negative birthrate. Capitalism is just a giant ponzi scheme, it always needs new humans entering at the bottom of the pyramid. Spain’s avoids collapse with immigration. Japan has yet to play it’s hand. If they stick with their policy of racial homogeny (& don’t start breeding more) it could be amazing place to visit in 20 years. Imagine Tokyo with 70% occupancy, the less desirable residential towers left empty, taken over by birds and feral cats.
About abandoned cities…. I was finally on my way to Gunkanjima (Hashima Island), but after years of failed attempts I’ve failed again. Gunkanjima is a tiny urban island, an ex-coal mine company-town. In fact it was the most densely populated spot on earth, now just a miniature ghost city. By good fate they just opened the first public tours last week, so I immediately booked train tickets to nearby Nagasaki, only to discover that the tour boats are full, no chance. Japan must have many descendants of Gunkanjima families, or the simply curious, who have waited 60 years to visit.
Anyways, a visit would be anti-climactic, what I really want is a residency or a performance there. While I’m fantasizing- I’d like to park a container-ship floating autonomous republic there for a season.
I’m on tour in Japan now, joined by Nova, a rapper/singer from Java (indonesia). With luck she’ll be along for some future tours in other nations, dependent on promoters $€ and her availability. Jakarta and Barcelona could be the two most distant points one could find on the globe, so it’s not a very logical collaboration, but then there aren’t many women rappers who can also sing in bahasa and come from a DIY/activist perspective.
Getting her a visa to japan was no easy task, there is a little bit of historical animosity. Japan invaded and thrashed Indonesia in their WWII-era expansion, and their government isn’t big on apologies. In fact they barely teach school kids here about their imperial adventuring. At least they seem to have learned from their past, which is more than can be said for my fatherland.
The tour started in Hokaido, which is like japan crossed with alaska, more of a wild west free spirit engendered by all the open space, not to mention the plentiful weed. And there are vestiges of Ainu culture, which seem so similar, in art at least, to the tribes of the Northwest coast of the North America.
Sapporo’s memories are partly obscured by the fog of jetlag, as I nodded off in any five-minute vacancy of tasks. There was a great gig in an izakaya (kind of a pub) crammed with enthusiastic peoples, memories are hazy but here is a foto of dinner.
We spent the following afternoon at an onsen (outside natural hot spring) the next day, surround by snowy mountains, set among sculpted gardens with trees as carefully trimmed as poodles. Always great to sit around naked with a bunch of japanese men with elaborate tattoos and stoic expressions, steam rising from the rock pools.
The gig that night was full-on japan underground hiphop style, tiny black basement venue with massive sound, organized by the super friendly B.I.G. Joe. He composed his album in an Australian prison as he served his sentence for heroin smuggling.
This my fourth tour of japan, I burned up all the initial freakout on the first few trips and now it feels oddly familiar. I’ve only just arrived, changing planes in an airport, but I’m overwhelmed by the politeness and over-service. Every menial job has double employment, one person to actually do the job, the other some well-groomed girl to smile and hand the purchased object, indicate the proper direction to walk, or just stand there and occasionally bow. Nowhere could be farther from spain.
Today I recovered from a hedonistic weekend by climbing a modest mountain near Seattle. The problem is that this is one of the few mountains that is not still buried under snow, and on a warm spring sunday afternoon it was humanity overdose. Too many people testing out their new Xtreme gear- gratuitous hiking poles and other high-tech crap. A number of men (it’s always men who have a big disregard for others) walked through the forest with their mobile phones blasting music.
Our senses are easily kidnapped by the loudest colors and fastest movements. When a herd of us humans are around it’s impossible to notice the subtler animals, and forget about noticing the details of rocks and trees. A failed adventure.
In a few days I leave for a dense tour of Japan. It’s a tactile pleasure to flow with the masses in Tokyo or Osaka. It’s all about environment and expectations.
(Maga) Bo just released another of his mini-docs. He gets great results using only his point&shoot camera on video mode, plus a decent audio recorder. He miraculously makes these videos on top of his usual workload of producing, remixing, touring, booking, artist self-management, promotional slog, and paid labor as sound recordist for documentary film. Text below from his release notes.
The timing is perfect for readers in the PacNW. Ghislain will play Seattle on friday April 17th @ Chop Suey. Don’t sleep on it.
I’ve been a big fan of Ghis’ full, round and sturdy minimal beats for a long time. He’s curious and open to new sounds. He does tropical tracks. In Montreal. He’s a sweet, friendly and open guy, which, I think, is a big reason why he’s made all of these great tracks and collaborations. He makes the effort to get out and connect with folks from all over the place. It shows in the music.
With this series of mini-docs, I want to demystify the music production process a bit and bring out the humanity of it. After all, music is a manifestation of history. of choices and relationships. This is common to any art, discipline, individual, group or society. Through communication, real and imaginary differences and similarities become clearer. Separatist ghetto exoticism cannot exist in this space. Tamu juntos e misturados.
The concerts in portland, seattle, and seattle’s afterparty all went super well. Video clip from Portland, April 10. Skip forward 1 minute to start.
All this high-density real life experience has put a cramp in my ability to log, and definitely stifled my “status updates”. I’m on twitter now and you can follow me. Stating the obvious, but the less interesting physical life is, the more time and energy I have to twitter about it. Silence just means priority to the moment.
On friday I gave a presentation of my production and performance methods to an all-girl catholic school. This was “good friday” coincidentally. It was surprisingly fun, they seemed curious and appreciative. Part of their homework the previous night was to read the part of my blog titled “How I Built a Dirty Bomb.” I expected some ironic results from the record’s bombastic title, but this was above and beyond.
