My first memory of listening to Ray Harakami’s music. What I felt when I saw his performance.

Mark “Frosty” McNeill, who is the co-founder of the Los Angeles-based internet radio station dublab, which has a global listenership, discovered Rei Harakami’s music as it was being released while Harakami was alive and has also shared the stage with him as a DJ. Frosty is also known as a curator on the Pacific Breeze: Japanese City Pop, AOR And Boogie 1976-1986, Pacific Breeze 2: Japanese City Pop, AOR And Boogie 1972-1986, and Somewhere Between: Mutant Pop, Electronic Minimalism & Shadow Sounds Of Japan 1980-1988 compilations. As someone who has his finger on the pulse for international music and an ardent fan of Japanese music, we asked him about his thoughts on Rei Harakami and why Harakami’s music has attracted listeners from around the world.

――When was the first time you heard Rei Harakami’s music, and what were the circumstances? How did it make you feel when you first heard his music?

Frosty: I actually can’t put my finger on the first time I heard Rei’s music, rather it seemed like something that slowly faded into existence. His music entered my sphere like the humming of the atmosphere before solidifying into recognition. This revelation is actually much more satisfying as it was an evolution of awareness, and for me, this fits the character of Rei Harakami’s sounds. Once they slid into my consciousness, I realized that my library was already well stocked with his music and that I had even played it on the radio prior, possibly in a state of Harakami-hypnosis. I’m sure I stood in front of a listening station at Spiral Records decades ago with headphones on, wrapped in the wonder of his work as the buzzing Tokyo life swirled around me as if in another universe. Once the light truly came on, the details of Rei’s individual compositions and body of work started to focus further—yet, still to this day, they retain an ephemeral quality as if hovering in a dreamstate just on the edge of possibility—almost too luminous to be real.

――You have been DJing at various events and have been active as a radio DJ with dublab for many years. Have you ever played Rei Harakami’s music as a DJ? Do you remember anything from playing his music out?

Frosty: Yes, I have definitely played Rei’s music a lot over the years: on the radio, at gigs, on curated playlists, at art happenings, but most of all in my home. His work has a really unique vibe—when I hear it, I know it’s Rei Harakami but it’s also like a sonic shapeshifter. His music has a fluid sort of sound that seems to harmonize to the call of manifold moments.

——When Carlos Niño performed in Japan (in 2010 at Tokyo Unit), Rei Harakami also performed there, and you opened up as a DJ. What do you remember from seeing his performance?

Frosty: I was completely awestruck by this experience. First off, I remember speaking with Rei Harakami backstage and was so impressed with his warm spirit. When he played, the venue’s already incredible sound system seemed to morph into some sort of spatial super system. It was as if we were immersed in a planetarium of sound—Harakami’s tones, the constellations beckoning us into new worlds. His performance was so gracefully elemental, as if his every sound emerged more so to give structure to silence and space, guideposts generously guiding us through the listening experience. It was like my brain and body had been recalibrated to experience the wonders of the world anew. When I showered him with well-deserved compliments after his set, it seemed like his humility only expanded—a peaceful attitude suggesting the music he played had always been there and he was simply gesturing at its essence.

The reason why I was attracted to Japanese music. The uniqueness of Rei Harakami

――When you started dublab (I think around 1999) you came to Japan. I met you for the first time back then, and I was surprised about how much you knew about Japanese indie music. How did you get interested in Japanese music?

Frosty: Wow, we have known each other for such a long time and I count myself a lucky person for that! Since I got involved in radio in 1994 at the University of Southern California my insatiable curiosity about the music of our wondrous world has accelerated, and when I founded dublab in 1999, it only went into overdrive. But my love for Japanese music dates back much further. My mother had an album of Japanese shakuhachi music on the Nonsesuch Explorer Series called A Bell Ringing in the Empty Sky. As a child, I would sit and listen to this for hours on end while staring at the intricate line drawings on the cover. It was as if a fantasy had manifested itself in the disc and years later when I first saw Akira Kurosawa’s film Dreams it felt like I had found an emotional equivalent to this. My thirst to experience more of this inspired creativity expanded and I started searching for Japanese music in earnest. Around 1999, when I found a copy of Cappablack’s The Opposition EP on Soup-Disk in the record bins of the mythical Aron’s Records, my flare was brightly lit and the quest for even more Japanese sounds was on.

――You must have listened to a lot of music from Japan that was of the same era as Rei Harakami. What made his music unique?

Frosty: Yes, I sure did. In college and into the early years of dublab, DJ Krush, Nobukazu Takemura, Susumu Yokota, and more were big for me and I still love this music while continuing to expand my breadth of Japanese music enjoyment. Rei’s music stood out in that it was like water sitting so crystalline in a glass on a windowsill with light pouring through the vessel projecting something altogether new on the other side. Upon lifting it to quench my thirst, I don’t long for the light that once was, but rather savor the simple glass’ many ways of giving nourishment. Listening now to Rei Harakami’s music as I write this, I feel a sense of natsukashii—I’m at once missing the past, like Rei’s 2010 concert at Tokyo Unit, while reveling in the joy his music brings me in the present moment.

――Rei was active between 1998 and 2011. He was part of the electronic music scene during this time, but what did his music achieve in the worldwide electronic scene?

Frosty: This is a hard question and I’m just grasping at my own perception. I feel like Rei Harakami’s music is still so under-appreciated, which is not necessarily a bad thing because the people who are fortunate enough to encounter it will value it even more. Many artists are not recognized in their time because our minds and souls need to move into a state where we can truly understand the value of their work. With Harakami, I feel like his music is timeless in nature and in our world of constant chaos it is a sanctuary, that once-discovered, brings great solace.

――Rei Harakami was influenced by music other than electronic music, but what type of influences do you feel from his music?

Frosty: More so than the influence of other music, when I listen to Harakami’s work, I get the sense that he was captivated by the magic of our world, the fleeting wonders that are only recognized by the eyes of the perceiver and thereby cherished as intangible elements that when summed make us human.

――It seems that a lot of overseas music fans are taking an interest in Harakami’s music, but what is it that draws them to his music?

Frosty: Music is so subjective and we are ever-changing from moment to moment so it’s hard to guess what others are feeling but I can only imagine that his music serves as a balm to the chaos.

――Harakami’s “Hiroi Sekai To Semai Sekai” is a collection of his music before his official debut, but what were your thoughts on this album?

Frosty: I am so thrilled by this release. It’s still so new to me and I anticipate spending much time with this music in the years to come. Hearing Rei Harakami’s early works is like finding more to love. I can hear the great joy, enthusiasm, and humor that went into making these works. Rei’s later works are also enriched by this early view—reflections of his personality are colored through this wider lens.

The impact of the introduction of Japanese city pop on the U.S. music scene. Notable artists after Rei Harakami.

――You worked on the Pacific Breeze compilation that brought city pop to overseas listeners, which is an era of music before Harakami’s time, but do you see any similarities or differences?

Frosty: I think that we live in a world of wide possibilities yet our collective potential is dampened by the narrow streams we are fed through mainstream media and marketing. Most of the world listens to a miniscule body of work while conversely the majority of music made, only ever reaches a minority of people. My life’s mission is to reverse this trend and share underrepresented, creative music with the world. Our human minds have great potential to expand and music is one great way to stretch them. So much amazing music has come from Japan and it’s a shame when it ends at the country’s shores, so I’ve been thrilled to see more folks enjoying Japanese music and have been thankful to do my small part to share it.

――How has city pop influenced the US music scene? Has there been more interest in music from Japan?

Frosty: I went into a record store the other day for the first time in a long while and the Japanese bin was really well stocked but each album was easily three to four times the cost of the other records in the store. While this shows the high interest, it also illustrates that demand can decrease access. I hope that the price bubble pops a bit in the vintage record selling market and that music is once again made more accessible. Sure, we have streaming services but there is so much great music out there that’s not on these platforms, but physical media shouldn’t come at a cost that forces consumers to choose from eating or listening. That’s one of the reasons I have been excited to work with Light in the Attic Records to produce compilations of Japanese music like the Pacific Breeze series and the Somewhere Between compilation. We’re sifting through mountains of music in order to provide thoughtfully crafted collections of jewels for the public to hear at a reasonable rate.

――Has there been any music after Harakami from Japan that you are interested in? If there are any artists you have your eye on please let us know.

Frosty: I’m loving what Foodman is up to, H. Takahashi always amazes me, Chee Shimizu is the key to so much, Kuniyuki Takahashi is a sublime sureshot, Meitei is excavating and illuminating, Ytamo and Oorutaichi are my lights, Kenji Kihara keeps me grounded, and Midori Takada is like an eclipse that stays perfectly in balance.

――If Harakami were still alive, how do you think he might have influenced the current scene?

Frosty: Rei Harakami would have continued to make music true to his heart. This pure act would likely have influenced many others to follow their passions.

――What are your top 10 Rei Harakami tunes?

Rei Harakami – after joy
Rei Harakami – sequence_01
Rei Harakami with Ikuko Harada – sequence_03
Rei Harakami – unexpected situations
Rei Harakami – remain
Rei Harakami – double flat
Rei Harakami – on
Rei Harakami – a certain theme
Rei Harakami – owari no kisetsu
Rei Harakami – くそがらす (plus more favorites to come from Hiroi Sekai To Semai Sekai!)

Mark “Frosty” McNeill is a DJ, radio producer, curator, university professor, and Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker based in Los Angeles. He’s the founder of dublab.com, a pioneering web radio station that has been exploring wide-spectrum music since 1999. McNeill hosts weekly radio shows for dublab. As Adventure Time, he and Daedelus have created new worlds of sound and alongside dublab colleagues he activates the Golden Hits dream machine. Frosty has performed high concept DJ sets around the globe with the mission of sharing transcendent sonic experiences.
Web: frosty.la
Radio: dublab.com/djs/frosty
Twitter: @dublabfrosty
Instagram: @dubfrosty

Translation Hashim Kotaro Bharoocha

Edit Takahiro Fujikawa

The post “Revisiting Rei Harakami’s music” Pt. 2: Mark “Frosty” McNeill on the encounter with the music like a fluid and its peculiarities appeared first on TOKION - Cutting edge culture and fashion information.

In honor of this release, we’re releasing a short series of three articles that reexamines Harakami’s career path from the beginning. In our first article, we interview filmmaker Yasuto Yura, one of Rei Harakami’s university peers who would later become one of his long-standing friends. How did Rei Harakami feel about making music at the beginning of his career? And how did Rei Harakami go from filmmaker to musician? Yura, who lives in Kyoto, spoke to us over Zoom.

* For this interview, I referred to the June 2021 issue of Eureka, “Special Feature: Rei Harakami” (Seidosha).

Rei Harakami had a preference for analog—then he encountered the computer.

――You first met Harakami when you were studying film at the Kyoto College of Art. What was your first impression of him?

Yasuto Yura: Harakami and I first met when we were helping an older student out with their film. Harakami was a second-year student at the time. I was making sound effects, and I think he was helping as a regular staff member. My impression of him was that he was a really cheeky guy. He spoke what was on his mind, so he was quick to express any complaints. But it wasn’t like he just didn’t want to work. He just wasn’t afraid to speak up when something was wrong, or the work could be made more efficient. I think that never changed, even in his later years. But back then, he was about 20 years old, so I thought he was cheeky. (laughs)

――Did you have any idea that you’d become such good friends when you first met?

Yura: No, not at all. (laughs) There were times when we both went out drinking with a group or were at the same wrap party. But before I knew it, he started showing up at my room unexpectedly or waiting outside my apartment for me to come home from my part-time job. (laughs)

――After that, you became such good friends that you’d go out drinking together three times a week. What led to you two finally hitting it off?

Yura: At the time, he and I were the only students who designed our own sound for our films, at least to my knowledge. I used a computer, and he made more analog music using cassettes. Harakami said that he didn’t like computers. If anything, he was more into improvisation, so he wasn’t really interested in playing and performing using a computer, which is more fixed. He used to barge into my room with a bottle of sake all the time, and when he saw my Roland MC-500 sequencer and other gear I was using at the time, he asked half-jokingly, “What do you do with this?” So I showed him how to use it. He started fooling around on it, making random stuff. He was completely absorbed in it for a while and asked me, “What do you do when this happens?” Looking back on it now, I feel like even back then, what he was doing was rather complicated. But after working for a while, he’d be like, “I got it!” And after that, we’d get wasted. (laughs) I wasn’t necessarily the reason he got into it, but I think maybe he was able to experience something he hated and feel an affinity for it. Or he realized that it was interesting depending on how you used it. I think this was after Hiroi Sekai came out, so maybe that was around when we started talking more.

――I see. So it all started with the computer.

Yura: Back then, his year was having a film exhibition, and he was selling Hiroi Sekai tapes there. I stopped by that exhibition, and I remember he asked me to buy his tape, so I did. Recently, I visited that same gallery where the exhibition was held because I had some errands there. We started talking about Harakami, and the gallery owner also had the tape. (laughs) I don’t think there are many of those tapes out there. He probably only made about 20 of them. He worked really hard to make them, dubbing everything manually.

He also did illustrations, so he used to make flyers for exhibitions and such using the convenience store copy machines, which were finally able to make color prints. But he didn’t use it in the traditional way. Instead, he’d use the copy machine as an effect. He’d go through the trouble of making the illustration small and enlarging it on the copy machine to make the quality rough on purpose. He seemed to like things like that: figuring out how to use existing technology to alter something. He did that with sound and film too.

――What kind of films was Harakami making at the time?

Yura: In the early days, he mainly made animations. The song “Isudetabi,” which was on the same label as the latest release, originally came from a film of his friend moving around while sitting on a chair. He used the song for that film. Later, he made experimental works that reimagined the structure of stories and films.

――In terms of filmmaking, Voyant, which Harakami made in 1995, was his last work before he became a musician. As his senior in the same industry, how did you feel about Harakami as a filmmaker?

Yura: I thought he was the most interesting, at least of the people I knew. I always kept him in mind, and he probably kept me in my mind, too. We never said it directly to one another, but I wanted to leave him speechless with my work, and he wanted to compete with me, too. So when my work was bad, he would make sure I knew. (laughs) I wouldn’t say we were doing it consciously, but once one of us finished a piece, we’d talk about it over some drinks. Looking back on my days as a student, having him there was very important.

An important document of how Rei Harakami went from filmmaker to musician

――At the end of last year, the remastered editions of Hiroi Sekai (1991) and Semai Sekai rei harakami selected works 1991~1993 (1993) were released. These tapes date back to before Harakami became known as a musician. What was Harakami’s attitude in regard to making music?

Yura: Back then, he was making music for people’s films. Most of the songs on Semai Sekai are from that—basically, it was music he had composed for people’s film soundtracks. He was skilled at making music, so classmates started asking him to make music for them. First, there was the image of the work, and then the film, and Harakami would figure out what kind of music to add to that. In a sense, it was the beginning of his client work.

――I see.

Yura: Back then, I worked as a tech staff member at the university. I was helping to select the gear and software that would be installed in the new video and audio production facility. So I introduced Mac, the sequencer software EZ Vision, and the Roland SC-55 sound module (Editor’s note: The SC-88 PRO, a later model of this equipment, would be one of Rei Harakami’s favorites into his final years of life). From there, Harakami learned how to use these in class. I think that’s when he started using the computer to create music. “Kujirayarou no Tema” from Semai Sekai makes great use of the SC-55.

――This work documents the process of how Harakami, a guitar and bass musician, set down the path of becoming an electronic artist. In a way, it was like the start of Rei Harakami as the world knows him.

Yura: That’s true. Semai Sekai might be the tape that started it all. Hiroi Sekai was his world before that, and his world after that was Semai Sekai.

――How did you feel about the process of Harakami changing?

Yura: Before making this cassette, Harakami hated computer and techno music. But he suddenly became absorbed in it, so I did think, “That’s different.” Since he could record the tape in one shot, he didn’t need to dub it as many times, so the sound quality became clearer, and the sound was much better. But Harakami didn’t like it to sound too high-quality, so he would sometimes try to “dirty” the sound quality on purpose.

――Why do you think Harakami became so absorbed in computer music?

Yura: For one thing, he probably realized that he could express all kinds of small nuances with the computer. Also, he got into polyrhythm around that time, so I feel like he must have realized that when he incorporated that into his own songs, the computer was more convenient than playing instruments.

――The songs in both albums leave an impression with their diverse sound: They feature a raw physicality, piano playing that sounds improvised, elements of blues-rock and folk, and a collage-like quality that aren’t present in Rei Harakami’s later works. How did you feel when you first heard these albums? 

Yura: I thoughtit was unusual for him to make this kind of music. It doesn’t sound like music from a band or a computer, and it isn’t music that’s easy to understand. There’s a unique, floaty feel to it, which I thought was interesting when I listened to it. Although I didn’t think it would sell. (laughs) Regarding the diversity of the sound, I think Harakami mixed all kinds of music within himself, and that was his output. But Harakami would never say what music had influenced him. (laughs)

Rei Harakami’s world—his “sekai”— will never fade away

――Many listeners will listen to these two re-releases for the first time after listening to Rei Harakami’s other music. How do you feel when you revisit Rei Harakami’s earlier music from a modern perspective?

Yura: In many ways, I think that it was because of these works that the later Rei Harakami came to be. That kind of work doesn’t just come out of nowhere. There was a Harakami even before this tape, and everything is connected. After Semai Sekai came out, Harakami started receiving work requests from all kinds of people. From there, music started to become his job. But back then, he still felt strongly about wanting to be a filmmaker, so he was really torn. At one point, I’d said to him, “You get this many compliments and work requests from your music—why don’t you turn that into your main job?” About two weeks later, Harakami told me that he was going to debut through Sublime [Records]. I was happy for him. I think Harakami wanted closure with filmmaking, so he created Voyant (1995) to bring a conclusion to his filmmaking career.

――Harakami’s music transcends borders and time, and is still listened to today. Why do you think that is, and what do you think is the appeal of his music?

Yura: I think about that sometimes. I believe it’s because he made things that hadn’t ever existed in this world, and that’s been true since he was making films. I think he hated going along with the scene or being put in a category, so he used his own methods to make whatever he wanted. I mean, isn’t every Harakami song immediately recognizable as one of his? There won’t be any new songs, but he made music that was so original that you instantly know it’s Harakami when you listen to it. I don’t think that will ever fade away. I still listen to his music from time to time, and it never feels old. His music had its own unique universe. And I think that was born from Hiroi Sekai and Semai Sekai. Some people use various techniques to make songs that go with the current trends, but Harakami made music separate from that. That won’t change whether ten years pass or 100 years pass. They aren’t songs or sounds that feel like they belong to a specific era. They don’t get old, and even today, people can still listen to his music normally.

Yasuto Yura
Yasuto Yura began independently creating films in 1991. He’s shown his work in Japanese cities such as Kyoto and Tokyo, as well as Europe and other Asian countries. In addition to filmmaking, he also produces various other works, including installations, collaborations, books on computer technology/introductory design, and CGI animations. He currently teaches film production at Osaka Electro-Communication University and is a part-time lecturer at Ryukoku University. Other roles he holds include Organizer of VIDEO PARTY (a group that holds film screenings), Program Director of Lumen Gallery, and planning committee member of the Kyoto International Student Film & Video Festival.
www.yurayas.net

レイ・ハラカミ『広い世界 と せまい世界』（rings、2021/12/29）

Construction Syunsuke Sasatani

Translation Aya Apton

The post “Revisiting Rei Harakami’s music” Pt. 1: Filmmaker Yasuto Yura on the birth of Rei Harakami’s eternal universe appeared first on TOKION - Cutting edge culture and fashion information.