http://www.squealermusic.com/reviews...interview.html
The following interview with Asahito Nanjo originally appeared in issue #3 of the New Zealand magazine
Opprobrium. It is reprinted here with their kind permission.
Interview and translation by
Alan Cummings.
To most of you Asahito Nanjo may just be one more of those difficult to remember names from the currently hep Japanese underground. To those of you with a couple more brain cells (and deeper wallets), his role as bassist in Japan's loudest mind-and-speaker-blowing units,
High Rise, Musica Transonic and
Mainliner (recent release on Charnel House) may spring to mind. Musica Transonic have been described in these very pages as "total over-the-top distortion insanity;some kind of peak in the post-psych idiot rock underground." But these comparatively well-known manifestations of Nanjo's work aesthetic are but just the surface. He has been (very) active in the Tokyo underground scene since the late seventies, clocking up appearances in around thirty different gigging bands - including Rotten Telepathys with the late Michio Kadotani (see the documentary CD on PSF), long-running space psychedelic masters
Kosokuya, the original version of Keiji Haino's Nijiumu, Sweet Inspirations with underground legend Tori Kudo (of Maher Shalal Hash Baz "fame"), the ubiquitous High Rise,
Toho Sara, Okami no Jikan; the list is probably endless, and I haven't even started getting on to the various studio-only projects and one-off jams. He is active at the moment as a composer, lyricist, guitarist, bassist, keyboardist, performer, vocalist and concept-originator in around fifteen different units, all pursuing different aspects of his unique musical vision.
Nanjo has recently revived his label, La Musica, to get more of his work out into the world. Around 130 (!) cassettes and the first two CDs in the release schedule are currently available. He was due to take Musica Transonic, Mainliner, Okami no Jikan, and Toho Sara on their first European tour in late September/October [of 1996].
(The interview was conducted in my living room, Tokyo, on an immensely hot afternoon in mid-August 1996. Ice coffee and `psychedelic' ham sandwiches were the refreshments of choice.)
How did you get your nickname, "Red"?
That comes from the name of my first band, Red Alert
[1]. There was a time when I was pretty close to the edge, in the things I thought about. That was why I chose the name Red Alert.
When was that?
At the height of punk in Japan. Red Alert was a pure punk band.
How old were you then?
Around nineteen or twenty, I think. I took the name from films. It's a very punk-type name though.
Did you have a nom de punk?
No, but the nickname sort of stuck.
Were you born in Tokyo?
No, in Aichi prefecture
[2]. Just around that time the whole Tokyo Rockers
[3] scene was happening. Red Alert started up at the same time. I knew a lot of people from the Tokyo Rockers scene - the guys from Friction
[4] and so on. Friction's guitarist
[5] was in another band with the guy who played guitar with me in Red Alert. So I knew people like RECK
[6] and Lapis. I actually had a band for a while with Lapis, we called it Lapis and Red. Punk was really big in Japan round this time, with lots of bands - it was a pretty vital scene.
Did the Japanese scene start after the London punk explosion, or was it something that grew up by itself?
There were punk-like bands going back to about `75 - stuff like Sanbunnosan
[7], Frankenstein, Bronx. I was still in Aichi then, but I'd read about these bands. They've all become legends now. The original Japanese punk scene lasted about five years, from `75 to `80. These early bands gave birth to a more fully-formed punk scene - that was the Tokyo Rockers scene with Friction, Lizard and S-Ken etc. Totally separate to this there was another stream - Hadaka no Rallizes
[8] and Lost Aaraaff
[9]. The stuff they were doing was different. It wasn't rock `n' roll - Rallizes were kinda folk, Lost Aaraaff were kinda jazz.
Were you able to get information about weird stuff like Lost Aaraaff, living out in the boonies?
There were good magazines - the original Rock Magazine and DOLL. They'd do profiles of weird stuff, so I read about a lot of bands there first.
What kind of music were you listening to back then?
I was listening to stuff like The Fugs around `75. When the punk thing happened I was buying a lot of punk records. And of course psychedelic stuff as well. Just around this time the English Radar label was reissuing stuff like Red Crayola and 13th Floor Elevators. That was around `78, I think. So all that stuff got mixed up in my head with the punk movement. I was listening to the Red Crayola and Elevators reissues - the originals were too expensive. Then there was the Psycho label in England, and Eva in France. All that was happening around the same time.
So you were absorbing punk and weird psych at the same time.
Yeah, but the impact of punk was so great that I felt more drawn in that direction at the time.
What are your earliest musical memories?
Film soundtracks. When I was a kid, I loved films and would buy the soundtrack to every film I saw
[10]. I got to hear a lot of different music that way that I mightn't otherwise have encountered. When I saw Elevator To The Scaffold, I had to go out and buy the Miles Davis record. I'd even buy the soundtracks for action films. This was back when I was in primary school. I was a collector - I had to have the soundtrack to every film I saw. Of course, when I was a kid, action films were my favorites. At that time, they showed all kinds of films on TV. Stuff that you wouldn't believe would be on at nine o'clock - stuff that they put on at about three in the morning now
[11]. From the end of the sixties and through the seventies Japanese TV would show lots of really weird films. I'd decided that even if the film was boring, I had to have the soundtrack. When I first started buying records, all I was bought were soundtracks.