Unpacking Big Ears, Part II: The Japanese

Night One, after Avey Tare, we experienced two Japanese bands, neither of which we had ever heard before. Oh boy! New discoveries!  And sandwiched as they were between two bands we knew well: Avey Tare and Mercury Rev.  The Asian filling in our musical Oreo.

The first of the two bands was called Kukangendai, and we had literally no idea of what to expect from them.  Noise rock? Punk? J-pop? New age? All that we knew is that they were from Kyoto, but they could have been anything.  Nothing, though, could have prepared us for the mutant jazz/math-rock the trio played.

The genius of the music is that while the crazy off-rhythms are initially disorienting, after a while it starts to make sense, but once you get your mind around it, they pull the rug out from under you again by adding or dropping beats and then suddenly you're back in free-fall all over again. Yet somehow, they make it all sound pleasant and fun.

We've previously noted that the brain seems to have two systems for understanding music.  One is called the veridical system and responds to sounds and melodies that are familiar and can be identified.  That warm, fuzzy feeling you get when an old familiar song you haven't heard in a while starts playing is the brain's veridical system releasing some dopamine or serotonin or whatever to reward itself for recognizing the tune.

The other system, the one Kukangendai plays to, is called the sequential system.  The sequential system responds, and by "responds" we mean releases those neurotransmitters that signal pleasure or contentment, when the brain figures out or interprets a passage or a rhythm or a melody and can process something into "music." This is often experienced as the sudden, unexpected shudder of pleasure we get when some knotty orchestration or dense jazz passage finally snaps into comprehension.  It's probably also closely related to the satisfaction we experience when we solve a puzzle or ace a quiz.

The video below provides a pretty good schematic of Kukangendai's approach to music.  At first, it sounds "off," chaotic and random, but soon a pattern emerges and once we feel comfortable enough to predict when the next beat or note is going to occur and it does, we experience the rush of endorphins from the sequential system.  We often express it as a chuckle or giggle, but sometimes it's not far from the experience that we call "mind-blowing."  But Kukangendai, to keep that rush going, alter the rhythms and beats just as soon as they become predictable, leaving us to figure out the next pattern, on and on throughout their entire set.

We don't know how they do it, or how many hours of practice it must take to get to the point where they can do a whole show like that live on stage.  Of course, the Japanese seem to have a robust tradition of math rock.  Listen to the intro portion of this 2009 performance by Zazen Boys, also from Kyoto, where the rests between the bursts of music are far, far longer than the bursts themselves.  That laughter from the audience is more from the serotonin in their brains than any humor on the stage.

Anyway, we and the rest of the Big Ears audience loved Kukangendai's performance, and over the whole rest of the weekend we were asked and heard others ask, "Did you hear that Japanese band that played after Avey Tare?"

Another approach to the sequential is through psychedelic "outer-space" music, where the mind can translate the sci-fi sounds of bleeps and bloops and random washes of noise into the elements of music, and then, once that puzzle is solved, reward itself with a hit of dopamine.  This is the approach used by the Japanese-American band Yunohana Variations.

Yunohana Variations are an improv supergroup of sorts, consisting of drummer YoshimiO of OOIOO and the mighty Boredoms, the avant-garde percussionist Susie Ibarra, and artist Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, who performs as Lichens.   Parts of their set could have served as the soundtrack for a science fiction space opera, while others parts sounded like Sun Ra-meets-Elvin Jones, as evident from these two short clips we recorded of their set.

There was a lot of unity to this trio that held the band and the sound together like covalent bonds. YoshimiO and Ibarra were obvious compliments to each other on their twin drum sets. One of the audience's favorite moments in the set was when YoshimiO realized she didn't have a bean-bag shaker, and Ibarra tossed her a spare from one drum kit to the other, perfectly timed and aimed to land right in YoshimiO's hands at the exact moment it was needed.

But in addition to sharing percussion duties with Ibarra, YoshimiO also shared vocals duties with Lowe and each fed off each other beautifully.  Finally, Lowe and Iberra shared the electronic effects,  thus closing the loop and completing the triangle.  No one did anything solo and everything was a group collaboration. Each member was listening to the others and then playing something that augmented what the others were doing.

Here's a longer (and better) video from a year ago that should give you a pretty good idea of how this all comes together in performance.

This set was pretty much what we expected, knowing what we did about the performers, and while it wasn't as unexpected as Kukangendai (of whom we knew nothing) it was no less amazing.  

So, the first three sets for us at Big Ears 2019 consisted on a dreamy, laid-back set of songs by Avey Tare, followed by two innovative sets by Japanese and Japanese-American innovators that both blew our minds (in a sequential way, of course). And we still had Mercury Rev to look forward to.