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.

Would you buy the soundtracks for Japanese films as well?
Of course - monster movies and stuff like that. [laughter] When I was kid they didn't release the Godzilla soundtracks. That came later, when the films became cult viewing. Most of the soundtracks in the shops were for Western films.

Did you learn any instruments when you were a kid?
I went to piano lessons. Any time there was an event at school I had to do a piano piece, because I was the only one in the class who could play. I remember hating being forced into that kind of thing.


Was there any specific musician or record that was a turning point for you and made you want to become a musician?
Not really. I was a strange kid with no ambitions. How I became I musician was sort of the opposite to everyone else. I didn't bother writing it down on my profile, but I had a band in high school called the Kangan Zenji Band. It was an acoustic band, like the Holy Modal Rounders, or The Fugs, The Godz.


Were the ESP records widely available in Japan?
I'd managed to get hold of secondhand copies of The Fugs albums. Virgin Fugs was the first one I found, I think. I just happened across it somewhere. At the same time I was listening to all the normal stuff too. Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Yes, Genesis. Basically I listened to everything I could find, but the stuff I liked best was the weird stuff. Stuff that wasn't straight. It was probably the influence of listening to all those soundtracks. I'd always preferred the odd stuff played by jazz musicians to the sweeping string arrangements. The kind of thing you'd hear in Le Samurai or The French Connection. The jazz stuff sounded cooler than strings to me as a kid. And the spaghetti Western soundtracks[12] too, with the electric guitars - they were cool. And that's probably why I've loved listening to psych guitar and jazz all these years. I think that all those soundtracks I listened to as a kid have had a really powerful impact on me. Even though I may have not understood them at the time.


How easy was it to get hold of weird records in Japan at that time? Now Tokyo is like an Interzone where all the rare and weird records of the world eventually appear. I don't know about the States, but it's so much easier to get hold of stuff here then it is in the UK. What was it like back then, when you were in high school?
The stuff was available, but the main problem was the strength of the dollar. Imported records were really expensive. When I was a kid, one dollar was 360 yen [note: it's now 110 yen, which accounts for the vast expense of Japanese CDs], so imported stuff was very expensive. Even compared to the inflated prices of Japan-pressed records. So if I was buying a new record, it had to be a Japanese pressing. That was what I was buying right through high school. But then I heard some punk stuff on the radio, and I started buying imported records. If I wanted to buy imported records, British and American stuff I had to get on the train and travel for about an hour - if I wanted Japanese records it was only ten minutes. So that was what I did. I'd work part-time jobs and spend all the money on records.


Presumably there were no 7-Elevens back then. Where did you work?
Factories making threads. Restaurants. All kinds of stuff.

When did you come up to Tokyo?
Around `78 or `79. Red Alert was my first band in Tokyo. I'd already decided to become a musician. It was just around this time that No New York was happening. And that was like a second shock for me. Punk had been a shock, but it was basically just three-chord rock. But then hearing The Contortions, Teenage Jesus, Mars, DNA. The first time I heard DNA I knew that I had to make music. On my profile I've described Red Alert as psychedelic punk but it's probably closer to Teenage Jesus.


Have you heard those Von Lmo CDs?
No, but they're from around the same time, aren't they? The whole New York scene around `78, the second wave, sounded really fresh to me. The shock of No New York wore off after about a year though. And just around then I began meeting the people from Friction and Fushitsusha[13]- that really decided my future for me. I was still young when I met Haino and Lapis and so on. And that was it, they showed me that punk wasn't where it was at. I suppose I was lucky. If I hadn't met them I would have kept on doing the same thing and I probably would have given up eventually. All the bands I was in, from Conformist up till Sweet Inspirations[14], were all with the musicians who hung around with Haino - Tori Kudoh [15], Kadotani [16], Kaneko [17], Harumi Yamazaki, Tamio Shiraishi [18]. When you play with people like that technique no longer matters. They were jumbling up jazz and contemporary music and psych and punk any way they wanted. Hanging out with those people had a big influence on me.


Were you doing any improvised stuff then?
The earliest bands weren't. We were totally punk - not much technique but a lot of attitude and rhythm. I played guitar back then - actually I couldn't play it. I'd keep making mistakes and that gave the whole thing a No New York flavour.


Did all those early bands exist simultaneously?
Some of them did, but others only lasted for a few months. For example, I was only in Kosokuya for three months.


What did you do in Kosokuya?
I played bass. Narita [19] played drums with them then, though of course he was already playing the guitar. He had been playing in bands since `79. Recently we found a tape of a band called Tokyo that he was in around `79 - I'm going to put it out. After that he was in a band called Kyoaku no Intentions[20]. After that the next band he was in was Psychedelic Speed Freaks, with me. That band became High Rise. I formed Psychedelic Speed Freaks because even playing with Kosokuya and Tori Kudoh, I felt that their ideas and direction weren't quite right for me. There were points that we had in common, but other points where we were totally different. So I decided to do something "hard" with the people I got on best with. Kosokuya have hardly changed at all - they were weird back then, too.


Who else was in Kosokuya then?
There was me on bass, Narita on drums, Kaneko on guitar, and Mik on vocals. I think there's one tape left over from the time we were in the band. Kosokuya have been playing for a long time. They debuted in `75. They were called Kokugaiso back then. Kaneko and Mik were involved with Shuji Terayama's theatre group - they met there in about `75. At the start they would both dance naked. Then they called themselves Ray, and finally they changed the name to Kosokuya around `78. The name may have changed but it was always the two of them - if you look at it that way then Kosokuya has been going on for over twenty years. Everyone else has left the band now - Kaneko is the only one left.


Why did you call yourselves Psychedelic Speed Freaks?
Because that was the way we played. At that time, Kosokuya and all the other bands were really dark, exclusionary and closed off. I didn't like that and wanted to do something that would be the antithesis - that was why I formed the band.


Who were the original members?
There was me on guitar, Mitani from Maher on bass, and Narita on guitar. Then there was Takahashi[21]from Maher and Che Shizu[22]on drums - he also plays on Tamio Shiraishi's CD. The bass-player quit soon after, so I started playing bass. We played for quite a bit as Psychedelic Speed Freaks before we changed the name to High Rise.


When did you change the name?
When we were about to put out the first album on PSF. We talked with PSF and they thought that the band name was too direct and asked us if we would change it. So we changed it to High Rise, and they took the initials of Psychedelic Speed Freaks for the name of the label.


Why did you choose High Rise?
From the Ballard book.

What was the initial aim of the band?
A lot of people we knew were dying from drug ODs and so on. There were a lot of great musicians in the sixties and seventies who died from drugs, or went insane before they could become famous. We wanted to make an anti-drugs statement, so we chose American and British drugs slang for all the titles. The concept was to save the junkies.


Were you all involved in the drugs scene too?
Not at all. I had happened to meet and play with Haino when I was very young, before I could get into that scene. Haino is totally anti-drug and anti-alcohol. Narita was the same. None of the members of High Rise drink or use drugs. We were one of the few clean bands in the scene. That was why we dared to come up with the concept.


Is the High Rise energy an imitation of a drug high then?
That was just our concept for the first album. The energy arises from deconstruction and reconstruction. We gradually moved towards that.


What kind of music were you all listening to?
Psychedelic and improvised music. Narita had been going to see people like Kaoru Abe[23] while he was still in high school. We were all listening to free jazz and psychedelic.


How would you describe your position in the Japanese music scene at that time?
We didn't have a position. And the way PSF promoted us at the start was to a very limited audience. Everything was word of mouth, limited pressings, and they turned down all offers of foreign licensing. That was their idea, not ours. Though they're totally different now from how they were in the eighties.


How were you accepted by the fans?
I think everyone was totally shocked by what we were doing, and no one really got it. But we got a reaction, and we counted that as a success. We wanted to shock everyone with a wall of sound. I believe that when you hear an electric guitar you need to get that sense of shock from it. That's why we came up with that sound. PSF and the pressing plant put a lot of work into getting that sound - at first we were told that we couldn't press something that sounded like that, that the sound would drop out. So we just pushed all the levels as far as they would go. When the first album appeared we got a lot of offers from all over the place.


Did you get any coverage in the music press?
None. None. Everything was done by word of mouth. The word spread to Alchemy in Osaka too. So the year after it came out, we got the offers to do the Alchemy compilation[24] and Dead Tech. We didn't do any promotion at all, but the word spread and we got a lot of offers to play live and to record.
Now there seems to be a bit of enmity between the Tokyo and Osaka scenes. What was it like then?
There wasn't really any enmity. Information flowed both ways. There was a bit of rivalry between Alchemy and PSF though. Alchemy had been going a little longer, but in spite of the rivalry they were shocked when they heard High Rise, and they asked us to be on the compilation. There were a lot more offers, but PSF turned down all the labels it had a grudge against. Trans Records and so on. They turned down all the punk and new wave labels - they must have thought that Alchemy had some promise though. [laughs]


Were you playing a lot of gigs?
For some reason we played with Hijokaidan. Musicians seemed to like us but the audiences didn't. We were only playing live three or four times a year. We were very stoic and never tried to attract more people. We would only play when someone invited us. I suppose that if we had pushed more we could have played every month. Back when I was in Kosokuya and Rotting Telepathys and Red, I was doing a lot more gigs, maybe fifty times a year. I played out a hell of a lot.


You played with Michio Kadotani in Rotting Telepathys, didn't you?
Rotting Telepathys was me and Kadotani - everyone else was a guest. We'd invite someone different every time we played. I played guitar - it was the two of us on guitars. We'd do these wall-of-noise performances at the Kido Airaku Hall[25] and so on. We'd both be playing chords and he would be screaming out these agit-prop type vocals. It was pretty cool. When we'd play proper gigs we'd invite people to do bass and drums. There were a few times when we played at Goodman that we invited Tori Kudoh and Kaneko - it would be the four of us on guitar. [Laughs] Today that lineup would be a supergroup. There's one of those tracks on the PSF CD. I'd played out a lot back then and was tired of it all, so when I formed High Rise I decided not to book stuff myself. And there are a lot of idiots involved in the live house scene.


The rest of the interview you can find follwing the link on the first post.

[Glice]

Many thanks.

[Savage Clone]

Thanks so much for this!

(I've read this one before, but not for a long time and I certainly didn't know where to find it anymore)

[Shifty Prophet]

Thank you.

[hat and bread]

There's an equally (or more perhaps!) interesting interview with Munehiro Narita in issue #4.

http://www.squealermusic.com/reviews...interview.html

[hat and bread]

Speaking of Narita, his new group Green Flames sounds almost exactly like High Rise. Do be checking that out if you have the chance.

[blunderbuss]

^
Are there any releases available?

[hat and bread]

I don't think so, but hopefully that will change soon.
I think for the time being the only way to hear them is to come to Tokyo.

[hat and bread]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-VduvqbiLU

[MellySingsDoom]

Narita's new band sounds as expected, but good with it - nice meaty fuzz gtr from the man himself.