(This text was first published in the zine Call And Response is Half Dead)
Quit your band! So is called Ian Martin’s essay about Japanese underground music, published in 2016 by awai books. I won’t write about the content of this book, because I read it quite a long time ago and I have no time to dive back into it anymore: I’m reading Emoji Dick, a translation of Moby Dick into Japanese emoticons and it’s quite time consuming. As well, other folks reviewed the book, in a clever way; they covered the essence of it. No, I mean, I would rather like to go back on the title.
Quit your band! As a member of the electro-contemporary-dreamcore band Lo-shi (two albums released on Ian Martins’s label, buy them or steal them, it’s quite good shit) and of another band called Strasbourg (one self-released album, way worse than Lo-shi but drunk-punk-ambient fans could appreciate it), I often asked myself: why? Jesus, why not quit my bands and become, say, a respectable electro-fishmonger? Oh wait, I know: for the money. With Strasbourg, I’ve earned 557 yens and with Lo-shi, well, I’m still waiting for the royalties to come back in my pocket (Monsieur Martin, if you read me). Forget about money… Glory! In my case, it’s a synonym for polite silence; for a long time, I’ve been touching myself early, and I got the strange premonition it’s going to last. So why persevering in my insignificant sluggish being, why continuing doing musical artifacts vainly (Georges Bataille would gently talk about « unproductive consumption »), with my micro-penis?
Ian Martin’s book title, more than a castrating injunction, is an invitation to ask yourself this kind of questions, and to find some answers (the ghost of Doctor Freud just murmured: « to symbolically enlarge your penis »; fair enough).
For sure, we all do things in society to be loved, recognized, noticed: maybe it’s the core of all arts, music of course included. But let’s go further. While doing stupid music, I have fun. I look for things, scales, textures, samples, rythms; I’m like a child (Freud again: « polymorphously pervert »: I agree). I play, and the game is a serious one. I am focused, busy, absorbed by my pleasant, sometimes hilarious task. In this state of flow, I am exploring soundscapes like a cowboy doing zapoy or I am gardening like an armless stallholder. That’s it: the child state. Pure bliss. (To be honest, I did a mental age test on the internet and in fact I’m 14 years old, on the frustrated and neurasthenic side of the force, but you get the idea). That’s precisely the reason why us, failed artists, staying in that child state, succeed in life. Look at other people, I mean the rotten wannabees or the « true » successful ones! Look at their faces: that’s horrible. Those Burzums from seabeds take themselves too seriously, and their music smells like cornichons (French pickles).
Being in a band (or several), doing gigs, being on a label like CAR, moving inside different porous scenes: all of this allows the mental and retarded experimental artist (I’m mostly talking about myself), the coming off a red wine high post-dadaist fellow to avoid the redoubtable solitude, to get off the pot and shit in colours. The more the merrier: plus on est de fous, plus on rit. Drunk anartists, poetarians from all countries, join the asylum! And fuck capitalism.
