Style betrayal

[imomus]

Last week I got a nice mail from Aurélien Estager, who works for the Sonore record label in Paris, and alerted me to an exhibition by the excellent Daisuke Ichiba which has just opened at Paris gallery-bookshop Le Monte-en-l'air (6 Rue des Panoyaux in Menilmontant). Daisuke -- whose sexy, perverse work I first stumbled across last June in a Koenji junkshop called Animal Yoko -- is presenting his own drawings in Paris alongside four other Japanese artists he makes common cause with: Norihiro Sekitani, Takashi Nemoto, Daisuke Tamano and Ayano.

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Aurélien also wanted to send me a record Sonore have just released by Akane Hosaka, a Tokyo-based laptop musician whose first album -- Niko Niko Denki Muzic -- Sonore released in June. It seems they sent a bunch of promos out to the french press and got pretty much zero response. Since I'd mentioned Italian designer Bruno Munari and Manhattan Research electronic pioneer Raymond Scott on Click Opera -- and since these guys are apparently the main influence on Akane Hosaka -- it seemed I'd be the perfect audience for the CD. A mention on Click Opera might well be the only "press" the album would get.

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In fact, Patrick at Chipple has already given the album a plug, calling it "a must for those who love Popcorn and Baroque Hoedown (Disney's Electrical Parade)". I must say that when I got the CD yesterday I was dismayed by the sleeve, which looks like one of Holger and Marcus' less impressive Bungalow sleeves from 1998.

In fact, the whole thing has a 1998 feel -- it must've been in 1998 that Kahimi Karie referenced Bruno Munari on one of her sleeves, about 1998 that Raymond Scott records started getting re-releases, 1998 that we were all listening to Popcorn and library Moog records, 1998 when Perry and Kingsley's Baroque Hoedown fed into the style I called Analog Baroque. I think one or even two of these influences, mixed with something else, would be fine. But put them all together and the matrix says "1998" just a little too strongly, and put that together with a sleeve which looks teleported in from 1998 (that retro-70s orange! Those rounded boxes Quark XPress introduced so you could do 70s-retro shapes!) and the whole thing feels uncomfortable. (Tujiko Noriko was so far ahead of the curve that she was able to parody crappy late-90s graphic design on her 2007 album Solo. At least I think that's what she was up to.)



Sonore's press release doesn't help, either: "With her lunging rhythms and deliciously retro melodies, Akane Hosaka catapults us into a world of gleeful wallabies and drummer-boy monkeys. Her discovery of music came through song, and only later led to instrumental experimentation. References to her early influences, the 60s and 70s precursors of electropop, are deliberate, there for all to see: Raymond Scott, Perrey & Kingsley or Yellow Magic Orchestra. Nevertheless her true inspiration is from the visual world and lies in graphic forms and architectural fantasy: Keiji Ito, Archigram or Bruno Munari. For her, these images evoke music that she then sets about transcribing. Naturally reserved, she’s a perfectionist in her work. Seeing her in the studio is like watching a blacksmith in the smithy, as she bends her music into the required shapes. Her compositions are like pastel-coloured soap bubbles in extra-bright Super 8."



Archigram! Super 8 film! Casio Baroque! It's all stuff that would have made Hosaka my favourite artist ten years ago, but now troubles me. And the fact that it troubles me troubles me too. If this stuff was good in 1998, why can't it be good in 2008 too? Surely fashion has nothing to do with the inherent qualities of a work of art? Aren't you just being a snobby hipster, like bitchy Lou Reed screaming in Hanging Round "you're still doing things that I gave up years ago"?

Actually, Akane's record is better than I'm making it sound. She's a good composer, and every time you're starting to feel overwhelmed with 90s references (Stereolab, Plone, Broadcast, Le Tone) she'll drop in some YMO or even some -- ahem! -- weird Wendy Carlos tunings which get you interested again. Here's an mp3 of one of my favourite tracks on the album:

Banshuu (mp3 file, stereo, 3.4MB)

If I recommend this album to you -- and I do! -- perhaps I can avoid the sense that I'm betraying Akane and Sonore by invoking 1998 so much. But I'd feel I was betraying myself if I didn't mark my doubts. And I find them interesting, these doubts. I think I can answer the question about why something that was so right in 1998 might be wrong by 2008 if I say that pop music -- and the cat's cradle matrix of influences it bounces about in -- is something ephemeral, not timeless. It really matters what year something was created in, not just because technology changes, but because fashion does too. Pop music is a product of fashion, technology, sex, sensibility, context, hot memes and, oh yes, musical skill too.

I think I've always practised "style betrayal". That is, I've abandoned certain styles not despite having embraced them in their prime, but because of it. I lived that Casio Baroque meme pretty intensely ten years ago (here's an old Scotsman interview, for a taste of it), which is why it'll always remind me of that particular year, with wonderful pinpoint accuracy. To be more precise, the period 1996 -- the year I first heard Ariel Wizman DJing Perrey and Kingsley at some party attended by Sparks -- to 1998. (Toog, who became my best friend during that period, has recently completed a documentary about Jean-Jacques Perrey. I look forward to seeing it.)

It's worth remembering that memes that seem anchored in the past for you -- precisely because you lived them so passionately, like a brief, intense love affair -- might still be relevant to people unaware of them. Talking to my cousin Justin in Glasgow a couple of months ago, I was reminded what different worlds we live in when he stopped me to ask what Loungecore was. ("Remember when the Mike Flowers pops covered Oasis?" I said. "That was loungecore. Ironic Easy Listening music in the 90s.") I'd sort of assumed that anyone in the music industry, and anyone who lived through the trends of the 90s, would know the term loungecore. But Justin didn't, and -- who knows? -- perhaps he'd be a lot less judgemental, as a result, of someone tangled up in a matrix of 1998 references today. "It's all good!"

Hell, yes! Well, no. Hisae and I talked about it over lunch. How does it happen that cultural workers -- like the legendary Japanese loyalists on Pacific islands, unaware that World War II has ended -- soldier on in styles that aren't new enough to be fresh, or old enough to be revived? Look at the reviews Stereolab have been getting for the last decade: basically, every single reviewer demands to know how come no-one's told Stereolab that the war they're fighting is over. They won! And then the world moved on. Yet if Stereolab persist long enough they might become like The Fall: the mountain that Mohammed comes to, rather than the Mohammed who runs after every style bandwaggon.

There's a hint of embarrassment in the Sonore press release: Hosaka's early musical influences "are there for all to see", but her real influence comes from the visual world of Archigram and Bruno Munari. So might it be that memes are cancelled -- or become embarrassing -- more quickly in the pop world than they do in the design world? Might that be a sort of "preservative bubble" for old styles? And what about the bubble of exile? Is exile a way of encountering new memes, or keeping old ones in aspic? Hisae thought that the internet kept us all in touch with our homeland these days. I wasn't quite sure if you could be socialised by the internet.

"What," I asked her, "if there are basically two types of artist, Van Gogh and Picasso? Van Gogh arrives at a style and stays with it. Picasso changes his style every five years to keep people interested. Of course, neither style is immune to fashion, or more authentic than the other. It's just that one artist can change, the other can't. It doesn't make one better than the other."

Perhaps my need to embrace styles intensely and then abandon them is inconstancy, superficiality, lack of backbone, gadfly-ism, butterfly-ism. Perhaps it's the corrosive influence of my gadfly mentor, David Bowie. Perhaps it's the ideology of conspicuous consumption -- use then discard. But perhaps also the need to abandon is a mark of the intensity of your encounter with something, of your awareness of living inside society and inside history, and of a certain detachment, an awareness of the healthy side of forgetting (which is that it clears the decks for new experiences, and makes new discoveries possible).

Quite early on -- when I read Roland Barthes' Inaugural Lecture to the College de France -- I discovered there were intellectual justifications for abjuring, repudiating and betraying too. As a man who'd shifted from semi-scientific textual analyses to meditations on pleasure, Barthes claimed, in this lecture (one of his last, delivered in 1977) the right "to abjure what you have written (but not necessarily what you have thought) when gregarious power uses and subjugates it". It's a valuable reminder that the meanings of things are constantly shifting because context shifts, and that ideas, like styles, are subject to exhaustion, to mutation, and even -- yes, and for that very reason! -- to revitalisation.

Comments

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Bowie just did that out of fear, you know. Oh poor bb, trying to outrun rejection.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Jings, that Glass Spider tour looked like the epitome of crapness for twenty years, but now it looks BRILLIANT!

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

I know, I actually always rather loved it. It's garish and crass and insane. Aside from the monologue at the beginning, that is still shite.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

PS: Jings????!!!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Jings is Scottish for Jeez. I picked it up from a writer from Inverness.

[robinsonner.livejournal.com]

Jings Crivvens, help ma boab!

[kementari2.livejournal.com]

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

So, you were sent a record, you weren't sure whether to like it because y'know "this shit is so 1998... but hang on, I used to like this stuff ten years ago!" What does this mean?

You sit down with your girlfriend:

"Is my personal brand authentic, Hisae? Do I even have a USP? (unique selling point)"

I ask this question a lot. Not to my Japanese girlfriend but to myself on an almost daily basis.

Should I even be listening to Kemialliset Ystävät when Psych folk is reaching the end of its cool-life? Do I really buy tshirts from American Apparel because it's the only place I can get them in raspberry, or simply because it's American Apparel? I'm having salmon bake for lunch; is salmon bake too mainstream?



Jewelry on my dog; yes or no? So many difficult decisions plague my life.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I suppose what interests me about this subject is the question: "If it was so good then, why isn't it so good now?" The obvious answer is that then was then and now is now, but behind it lies something much more contentious and controversial, something not at all obvious and not at all generally accepted: that culture isn't timeless. That how things taste, culturally, isn't something inherent and objective, but something that can shift with the winds of fashion and sensibility. Which obviously plays merry havoc with the idea of a timeless, eternal canon of masterpieces.

But then (I've said this before and I'll say it again now) "I've said this before and I'll say it again now" is a formula for politicians, not artists.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I have to add something more awkward to this thought: what happens when styles and personal relationships are all tied up with each other? Does abjuring a style, in that case, mean avoiding people from certain periods of your life?

I think I do actually do this, and it disturbs me. For instance, I'm aware of avoiding Stereo Total -- the "best band in the world", for me, circa 2000 -- despite the fact that they live near me in Berlin, and have invited me round to their place. And despite the fact that they're really lovely people. Yet somehow I can't imagine hanging out with them without the feeling that we'd both be dragged back to the 1990s, and that that would make us both uncomfortable. It's a milder version, perhaps, of the discomfort of hanging out with old lovers, no matter how much you still like them. (Nevertheless, I'm not the kind of person who wants to break off all contact with ex-lovers either. Something in between.)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

And lurking behind this is the troubling semantic link between "inconstancy" and infidelity and marriage vows. In other words, the idea "If it's good to act this way about styles, why is it bad to act this way in relationships"?

Or could "style infidelity" be a sort of safe, cultural substitute for "marital infidelity"?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

(There's also, of course, the guilt associated with being less-than-ravingly-positive about any record you get free in the mail from either the band or their label. Witness the Vampire Weekend affair (http://imomus.livejournal.com/350070.html). It's a real quandry, because you owe it to yourself and to the artists concerned to be a bit more than a soundbite-producing cog in their hype machine.)

(Okay, I'm going to stop talking to myself now.)

(And in brackets.)

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

My general opinion on this is 'walk the middle path'.

Ultimately, being the bland relativist that I am, I'd say "Each to their own; if you're happy, more power to you" but if someone was to ask for my advice on how to expand their world view/creative horizons/etc, I would tell them to avoid extremes because that's generally been the approach that's worked best for me, and it's generally the approach of the people I respect the most.

If all you're doing is watching Eastenders and pop idol and listening to whatever music gets marketed the heaviest... this is a very passive existence. You're depriving yourself of so much. You're settling for the lowest common denominator that's being served to you because it makes the most money and it's easiest to swallow.

If all youre doing is chasing after authenticity as deemed so by those within a particular subculture, you end up in a very similar position to the one above, except instead of the mainstream boxing you in, you're restricted to whatever music The Wire happens to feature, or you're restricted art that's associated with particular people or movements.

Even if everything you embrace is utterly novel, completely new in every way, it's very likely only like that because you're shunning everything else around you. Again, you're boxing yourself in and depriving yourself.

If you're active in a way that allows you to seek out new culture, but without the restrictive conditions of being a cool-seeker or a reactionary, you'll find that you're curious enough to seek more than just that which is in arms reach, secure enough to reject superficial notions of authenticity and open minded enough to embrace not only the new but what actually makes you happy. At least this is what I've found.

[crowjake.livejournal.com]

I always think walking-the-middle path, is something I do... always changing like momus(potentially), bowie or picasso after all is a selling point too, just like occupying a little niche.

I dno, i feel like Picasso and Van Gough would be less popular if they walked the middle path. Would it have made them better or worse?

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

I'm not against change. I guess I'm against only settling for the mainstream, and also against denying your own personality in pursuit of the "authentic" and the novel.

[robinsonner.livejournal.com]

Some things just have to be liked. One cannot help but be in thrall to them. Stereolab were a case in point and yet initially I played catch up while I digested Serge Gainsbourg and Morricone type bossa nova in some weird preparation. Dots and Loops for me was where they lost their charm.

My brother is 11 years older than me. He was like Rod Stewart incarnate but had that modish sense of a working class adolescent of the sixties. Recently he asked me if I had any Massive Attack because the young receptionist in his hotel plays them all the time and he loves it.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm just trying to imagine the Massive Attack version of Maggie May -- it would have to have a little Tricky rap in the middle about how "Maggie this, Maggie that, Maggie means inflation".

[robinsonner.livejournal.com]

Didn't you have the hots for Caetano Veloso a while back. I am aware that case may only have been one particular transcendent album in his career which leapt at you from the past. Its odd though how unavailability can make something like that radically present when released decades later.

[(Anonymous)]

jewelry on dogs: yes. Easy.

Now let's have sex

A / dgk

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

I have clear photos
I live in the general London area
I am a man

If you can tick all three of these boxes we can work something out. There's some flexibility with number 2.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

Possibly some flexibility with number 3 too.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ha, anyone more hetero than A / dgk (who's in the TKO area, BTW) it's hard to imagine! The playa-less-gay-ah (as MES would probably put it)...

[slime-slime-sly.livejournal.com]

You totally stole the words right out of my mouth, except my main point was going to be about how lightly you can go about crushing some keut AZNs ego who hasnt had a single review for the work that has probably her whole hear packed in (otherwise why would she bother making something so old-fashioned)

[(Anonymous)]

I like the dinosaurs. Planning your memories in advance has got to be self-defeating - you just can't compartmentalise your life like that. (Though as ideas go it's still a million times better than the people who would rather record a concert on their grainy videophone for posterity than actually experience it themselves.)

Back to the OP, I don't think there's anything wrong with throwing yourself fully into the 'moment' and embracing scenes, trends as they happen. TBH that's the best part. But we all have to keep our inner hipster in check, lest we start berrating our best friend for being 'SO 2005'. After all, pop will eat itself.

Kuma: I share your existential angst. I went from philosophy student to Ad Man and 'brand me' is understandably in constant redevelopment!! I won't be investing in dog bling any time soon but know you're not alone in that.

peace, CrazyDave

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's funny, all politicians use this word "change" as if changing was the best thing since -- well, since constancy, which they also say is the best thing since -- well, change!

berating our best friend for being 'SO 2005'

But what are friends for if not to reset each other's watches, or tell each other when it's time to move on? As Chirac said to Bush in 2003!

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe Picasso, as opposed to Van Gogh, changed styles frequently because he actually broke through to recognition--his success in a certain style was acknowledged by the public, and then he moved on to the next one.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Are you saying constancy is an attribute of failure? I could see that being applied -- in a super-Nietzschean-Darwinian way -- to relationships: "Oh, you're only married because you couldn't get your end away with a different girl every night! And then you have the gall to proclaim your weakness a virtue!"

[bokmala.livejournal.com]

Constancy results from a failure of the imagination (Or libido. To Picasso the concepts were interchangeable).

A strong imagination, set free, moves between ideas and styles without sentimentality.

It is something else; a yearning for meaning, that makes us stay with an idea, so that we can squeeze every significant drop out of it. The yen for meaning runs counter to imagination, and explains the conflicted nausea felt when processing ideas too long. (the nausea is increased tenfold when we, beyond wanting to understand, also want to create, based on our new understanding)

Gah. Wish I could write in a way that was less hectoring/lecturing when I'm really just thinking through ideas... Thank you, though, Momus, for setting up great springboards for ideas!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

No, that was beautifully expressed! I don't know who you are, but you should lecture us here more often!

I suppose what you're setting up here is Kierkegaard's ethical / aesthetic binary. Or perhaps what I touched on the other day, when I said that "crashing the plane and walking away" was more what money men do than what artists do, because art needs to be intelligent rather than merely cunning. It has an ethical dimension, an overview. I can see this aesthetic / ethical binary fitting (loosely, anyway) to your imagination / meaning binary.

[(Anonymous)]

Just saying, in a Nietzschean or Schopenhauerian way, that once you've overcome a goal, such as having your art become successful, the insatiable Will then needs a new goal to aim at. So you move on to a new style.

But also, Van Gogh predated modernism. The 20C artist adopted the idea that art was no longer done for decoration (classicism?) and spiritual purposes (romanticism?), but only justified as a game--originality and publicity for their own sake.

[(Anonymous)]

I think many ideologies are constant and embed themselves in the fundementals of style, and so it is merely the expressions of them, and the ultimate realisations of them which change.

Like how a wine producer may have to change the fermentation procedure to compensate for the varying effects of climate on the taste of grapes

[imomus.livejournal.com]

many ideologies are constant and embed themselves in the fundementals of style

I think you get yourself tied in knots there -- if the fundamentals of style contain "constant" ideologies, yet style changes, why don't the ideologies change too?

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

biology?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The fundamentals of style contain both ideology and biology? We're getting a little New Age here!

[dogsolitude-v2.livejournal.com]

I once went through a period of reading a lot of Jung. His ideas on synchronicity may be applicable to the question of why something can seem worthwhile in 1998 but not 2008.

Clearly the music captures something of the time and universe in which it was created, and maybe that 'something' makes it feel oddly out of place in the modern day.

A year ago I went home to visit my parents, and went upstairs into the loft. There I found old dogeared copies of 2000AD, some Transformers, some old soft toys... That felt uncomfortable, not because of associations with my youth, but because on some level I intuitively felt that there was something rather unhealthy about needing to relive the past on an ongoing basis.

Maybe it's bit like keeping your head under the duvet on a saturday morning to try and keep the light out; there's a deep seated need to come up for fresh air at some point...

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

I was thinking re yesterday's post that both Hirst and Koons are really nostalgia merchants. Hirst is popular with the rich Brits because he connects with their sense of lost empire -- the strange animals -- zebras, sharks and unicorns brought back from distant lands --the bejeweled skulls from mysterious India.

Koons on the other hand speaks to Americans because of the sense of their lost "entertainment" empire--dimly remembered tv shows and toys from our recent, and less troubled past. Train sets, teddy bears and pool floats. Pre-pederast Michael Jackson. The lost "empire" of our imagination.

Maybe that is why I find Koons wealth less galling. Hirst's wealth comes from dealing in the symbols of brutality and theft and destruction.

In Van Gogh's defense...

[(Anonymous)]

"What," I asked her, "if there are basically two types of artist, Van Gogh and Picasso? Van Gogh arrives at a style and stays with it. Picasso changes his style every five years to keep people interested. Of course, neither style is immune to fashion, or more authentic than the other. It's just that one artist can change, the other can't. It doesn't make one better than the other."

Sorry, I don't mean to be nitpicky, but I don't think that's a fair comparison. Van Gogh's career as an artist spans only a decade (1880-90). His works up until 1885/6 are vastly different in style to the ones he did in the latter half of the decade, after he came in contact with art scene in France. One could speculate that had he lived longer and had a larger oeuvre, those late works might possibly have been seen as a transitional/experimental phase rather than simply a product of arriving at a style and staying with it. Picasso's career spans from around 1900 to 1973, so obviously he had more time change his style, not to mention respond to the really significant socio-political changes and events that occurred in the 20th century. Monet and Picasso would be a better comparison, perhaps.

well

[(Anonymous)]

even rock stars get fat and wrinkly. You want art to represent some place and time [or layer after layer of place and times!] - maybe this is Akane Hosaka's 2008.

Although it may not be mine...I live in the US...so my retro right now is looking a lot like the 30s and the 80s. I haven't heard people say "Like 70 years ago" as many times in the past few years as I have in the past few days. -Robyn

semi-consciously selective memory re:1998

[(Anonymous)]

I started (slightly) cringing when I played the Akane Hosaka clip (and doubly when I saw the record sleeve...)
"There's a word for this," I started to say to myself...



So, re:
>"If this stuff was good in 1998, why can't it be good in 2008 too?"

in my experience, my first music-linked memory that it brought to mind was the image of 'Cloudy Cloud Calculator' on vinyl, gathering dust in my studio apt c.2002 and reminding me of 1998 in ways that I didn't really like. (as far as what particularly I feel like avoiding about that aspect of the 1998 me, I'd be hard pressed to say, though...)

'Dots and Loops' is hardly less 1998-ish (1997 to be exact...), but it still sounds "fresh" enough when I listen to it. (though i'm certainly very well aware that not everyone is going to share in that experience..!)
it must have something to do with reminding me of some aspect of 1998 life (as I imagine it or mythologize it now) that feels still-compatible somehow.
listening to "Brakhage" right now, though, i can also say with certainty that i would still like it if it came out today rather than back then, whereas i have not been impressed with what little i have heard of 'Chemical Chords' so far. what would i thought of 'Chem.Chords' at the time if it had come out in 1998 instead of 2008?

taking a quick look at the Momus catalogue of the time (1998, give or take a year, or what I was listening to most at the time),
"Tragedy & Farce" (+ Born to be Adored) still brings back deeply unhappy summer memories, but now in vivid colors (red, bordering on red-orange; and deep blue, respectively);
"MC Escher" was another of my favorites at the time, but I have to admit I can't remember the last time I decided to actually play it. I would still like it, I'm sure, but it would probably remind me of the time period a little too much, so I would slightly prefer to leave it in the past.

But what is it that makes that difference? I'm not sure how much of this is a reflection on the worth of the work itself and how much relates to the selective memory, changing tastes, etc. of the listener.

i'm curious, how did all of this figure into the selections you outlined in your An Evening with Momus (imomus.livejournal.com/387272.html) post? (i'm sure it's somewhat different when considering your own work.)

-jw

[(Anonymous)]

'chemical chords' is probably much better than i thought at first - never trust a record store listening station with one working ear on the headphones..!

[(Anonymous)]

All I know is, I saw some Japanese names in a retro Continental context, so I'll check it out.

-M.

[(Anonymous)]

great post, M. But the killer thought (one I carried to bed w me last night, a bit uncomfortably up against You-Know-Who)= 'what happens when styles and personal relationships are all tied up with each other?' Goes right back to adolescence, where the personal style was generated by suturing sexy bands to odd clothes to dirty thoughts. Often thought that one's 'commitment problem' is part and parcel of channel-changing, shape-shifting, clicking-through...

[(Anonymous)]

Why thank you. I don't think my comment qualifies as 'great', but I really tried to be concise and ambiguous yet meaningful and honest.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

i can't play the cassettes i recorded on in 1998 because all of my tape decks broke.

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

For some odd - seemingly counter-intuitive - reason stereo manufacturers have started putting tape decks back in new systems.
Invest now and you too can aural-timetravel with new old formats!

Recording Foxes and Hedgehogs

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

You seem to be - if not quite questioning - certainly toying with your earlier avant-at-all-costs philosophy in regard to music.
I think your desire to push the boundaries has kept Momus fresh but then I also like quite a number of recording artists who seem to somehow remain interesting without radically changing direction over their career - Kristin Hersh for example.
By the way your decision to minimalise Click Opera services just isn't working out! ;)

Option Of The Moment

[georgesdelatour.livejournal.com]

A few thoughts.

1. I have a very good friend. For years I was telling him about your music. Suddenly he's "got it". He's buying up your back catalogue, and especially enjoying - of course - "The Little Red Songbook", from 1998.

It's funny for me to listen to it together with him. I've kept it in my memory, but haven't played it aloud for a couple of years. I realize my (unreliable) memory has been slyly remixing it, making the drum programming more "now", less "then". But it still sounds so personal in its musical choices, that it really isn't time-stamped as fiercely as, say, 'N-Sync's debut album from 1998 is.

Anyway, my friend's just arrived at the party, even if you've left the building ages ago. In 1998 he was at school in Birmingham. Back then he couldn't possibly have been aware of the music that was influencing your direction on "The Little Red Songbook".

2. You find Akane's music lags too far behind your current taste. But don't some people get to a style too soon, before any audience is ready to revisit its formative flavours? The mid-90s Romo scene, and Stuart Price's "Jacques Lu Cont" alter ego, both happened maybe three years too early to make any sense in Britpop-obsessed Britain.

3. We're talking here about finding the right retro references to revive if you want to be in sync with the now. But what about music which claims to be all about the future (or even "the phuture")? Eventually futurism dates too, I guess. Drum'n'bass was, by a long way, the most adventurous, forward-sounding music to emerge from 90s Britain. It mutated, spawned 2-Step, Bassline, Grime and Dubstep. Futuristic styles, like Techstep, have become Old Skool Jungle. We've all heard so much ad-agency drum'n'bass, that the music just doesn't surprise us any more...

[(Anonymous)]

My view on Akane Hosaka's work, which by the way is her 3rd CD-R re-issued as a CD, is that she's doing Casio Childisc. I hear the Ramond Scott, soothing sounds for babies thing - which sort of ties back to Takemura's label from some years post 1998, sort of the 'it' sound after Shibuya-kei though it started circa 1994 I guess.

My impression is I think I want to like the music a bit more than I actually do. I'm just not hearing enough melodies or inventive arrangements that really get me going (having heard quite a few tracks). I don't think it's a matter of adding more influences you were/are into.

I can't say I'm hearing much of Perrey and Kingsley at all, though clearly their never saw royalties from Disneyland Electrical Parade theme (a.k.a. Baroque Hoedown) is an in-grained melody if one lives in Japan (Just heard a house cover of it as the finale in some hyped J-House compilation. this summer at some CD megastore, which I guess pretty much exist mostly in Japan now) So that to me is just a hook into what you were into when you had an impact on a Japanese scene.

-http://technopop.info

[a1icey.livejournal.com]

neat! i love the 90s retro connundrum. like the wackness - did you see that film?