I’ve been checking out Japanese CD stores to find music for my electroacoustic class as well as get a sense of music in this country. Also, searching for CDs (or certain books) helps satisfy the hunter in me. Sadly, this is all that is left of my carnivorous ancestors ability to prowl the Sarengeti spearing wildebeasts, lions, bison, or whatever else one finds in that place and time. (Being a professor only compounds the sens of loss and insecurity since I even sometimes find produce sections overwhelming.) Anyway, the music I am hunting is Japanese “noise” and “noise” rock. I have a playlist from a book entitled Noise/Music which has two chapters on Japanese music. The first record store was HMV which was organized much like it is in the West. The genres are standard (classical, rock, jazz) except there are huge sections of Japanese Pop–a style of music which sounds like you’d think, sweet, happy, upbeat. I brought my playlist to one of the help staff and she told me that everything I wanted was out-of-print.Alex did find a Radiohead CD, however, the Japanese version of Pablo Honey with bonus tracks and he was quite happy, particularly at the price.
I then found, right in our neighborhood, a series of small used CD/DVD shops and I enjoyed “prowling” for my prey. One thing which threw me a bit was a store which I spent considerable time in and identified a CD that mightbe something I’d use. When I went to the back of the store to find the cash register, I was suddenly surrounded by porn DVDs and tapes! The porn industry is actually quite present. It’s not obvious on the streets; however, often CD/DVD stores–as I found out–are what is sold in the front and something else in the back. Anyway, I decided to pass on the CD and left.
We DID finally find the perfect store–sort of a Bull Moose of Tokyo which had three floors of music. With Lily’s help I was able to find a CD by Kenji Haino and another called Tokyo Flashback which had a collection of artists. My thoughts at this point is that I might arrange the class around the concepts of Noise, Music, Silence, Sound (or Sound Art). These discourses are increasingly meshed together and the Japanese have some amazing work in the field of Noise.
