Four o'clock in the morning in a Tokyo underground station: the camera slides past tired faces to the rhythm of the somewhat dreamy, inchoately »chilly« music. The anonymous young people, some already dozing, some still hyper - an indication of the rave that has gone before - resist the camera's gaze as it serially works its way forwards. No one pays particular attention, no one poses in this small, very personal »station drama.« For, every time a new face appears in the viewfinder, a window pops up in which inner worlds become visible, turned to the outside: dreams of seashores, of beloved or hated people, or simply of the fish market that will soon open its doors. Or are these merely inwardly projected outer worlds that a touristic gaze has captured among the rich detail of Tokyo's streets and everyday life?

The video that Mathias Gmachl, a member of the electronica groups Farmers Manual and GCHHCATT, has made for the Japanese musician Noriko Tujiko works mainly with outer-inner encapsulations like these. The constant series of new microworlds, which are individually tailored to the bleary-eyed faces or mechanically emerge from them, gradually makes visible the cosmos of the world surrounding them. A thoroughly non-oriental gaze, which prefers to lose itself in mundane trivia (and in the nocturnal underground tunnel) than present any appetising exoticisms. And even if, at the end, a Japanese food market spreads out and blankets all else, the visual approach is still far from every form of consumerist appropriation.

The Viennese label Mego, which has already brought out Noriko Tujiko's second CD, also treats Japan's sound universes in a non-speculative, completely »untouristic« manner. Tujiko's first CD, »Shojo Toshi« (2001), still displayed a surprising »poppiness« that was completely untypical for Mego, but did not fall prey to the clichéd notion »Japan = garish computer kitsch.« On the current release, »Hard Ni Sasete (Make Me Hard)« (2002), piano loops, gently dabbed-in beats, all sorts of distortion and vocal escapisms are blended into an even more individual melodic mixture. The images accompanying it, contrived by Tujiko's own design team, SlideLab, in themselves speak a programmatic language: whereas »Shojo Toshi« featured a soldier enthroned on top of a high-rise, facing the Wonderland topos of magic mushrooms, the image repertoire on »Make Me Hard« congeals into a coherent collage landscape consisting of cameraman, beach, car, pouting lips and a portrait of the artist. Completely unexotic stereotypes, but the dispassionate way they are combined almost makes them turn into the opposite. That which sets them apart derives from a colourful celebration of everyday life, not some sort of »far-outedness.«

Another recent Mego release shows how easily this laid-back approach can still be misunderstood as a predilection for the exotic. Masamo Akita - also known as that veteran master of noise, Merzbow - provided the basic material for the cover design of his CD »A Taste of...Merzbow« (2002): hand-drawn illustrations of fish dishes taken from old Japanese picture books, which designer Tina Frank converted into small, digitally wrought bills of fare. The tracks and their individual parts, all of them named after fish dishes, are thus given a visual hachure that counterpoints the music - uncoloured, needless to say; the optically subdued culinary programme of Japanese cuisine acts as a camouflage for the electronic barrage of radical abstraction à la Merzbow. Five years ago, a small elite from the noise scene associated with Masamo Akita already gave a brief foretaste of their brachial culinary desires. The title of that barbarous musical effort was »I Cut My Finger« (1997).

The Japan transfer launched by the Viennese label Cheap Records has taken a musically more »seductive« course. Take Rodriguez - one of the most active artists in his field - was deliberately picked out from Japan's heterogeneous and often quirkily abstract electronica scene as a musician who shows great skill in dealing with images of exoticism. Even the very title of this Cheap production, recorded by Rodriguez with his »Exotic Arkestra,« demonstrates this: »Prince of Mambo Breaks« (2000). As a hypertrophic DJ enterprise, he sets off on a computerised world tour through all sorts of virtual world-music territories, which end up in a thorough muddle: these exuberantly morphed counter-geographies have names like »Mecca Salsa,« »Revcarib,« »Hali Hali.« And the mambo rhythms and hyped-up dub fantasies that Rodriquez put through their paces with obvious enjoyment on his many other productions (such as Sonic Plate) are in frequent attendance. As well as the connections to Sonic Plate, Cheap has recently been enhancing its links with the Tokyo label Sound of Speed. Recently there was a parallel presentation in Austria of the current CD »Live Ring« by kossio (Kuniyuki Takahashi) - a not unattractive dark electro/ambient work of the Tokyo school - which took place in the rooms of quartier 21 in Vienna's museum district, where Cheap runs a small shop.

But it is not only the transfer of Japan to Austria (whether on the level of design or of releases) that has become more intensive over the past few years; things have often taken the opposite path as well. For instance, graphic designers like lia or dextro were occasionally featured in the Japanese CD-ROM series »Gas Book.« And there are often invitations to festivals and exhibitions, particularly for people working in the field of mego or experimental electronica. The label Gasweb, for example, recently invited Tina Frank to put together a sampler of her own video and graphic works for its DVD series. »Fuzzy Motion: Pictures without Legs 1995 - 2002« contains a non-stop selection of Frank's music-video works - such as those for General Magic, Pita or Fennesz (including the now classic »Aus« made for the latter) - as well as cover designs and short sketches slipped in here and there: fed in directly from the desktop workshop into the video interface. »end of skot« (2000) is one of the most outstanding items: the photograph of a dead girl, taken from above, is subjected to attempts at »animation« by means of digital signal colour layers - while the music (by skot vs. hecker) simultaneously surges from one spasm to another - until finally the picture literally begins to disintegrate and ends up shattering into its geometrical particles. Here, once again, is a reduced, unsensational imagic approach that - even apart from larger intercultural transfers - achieves the greatest possible density within the smallest possible framework.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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