The main reason behind my interview with Riccardo Brett was that I thought Tetragrammaton passed by untouched by Japanese music press. As the responses to the interview from Japanese Hirasawa fans came, it turned out that I was wrong. Hirasawa did talk about it, in a two-part audio interview/conversation for the Rock website FUZZ (thanks to @monikura for pointing this interview’s existence out). Unfortunately, FUZZ is set up so that it can only be accessed by those who live in Japan. Eriko Miyazaki, who translated my interview to Japanese, kindly transcribed and translated the segments about the album. Since this is a conversation, the original had parts where the involved didn’t talk cohesively, were hard to understand, rambled and overall talked in a stream-of-consciousness way; I took the liberty of adapting it for a hopefully less cumbersome reading experience (with some assistance by @wheezingly). This was intended as an addendum to my interview, and to present the other side’s view of the project, and only consisted of the first and last parts of the interview. However, since Eriko transcribed and translated it in full, and since it contains interesting information, I went through all of it. This is the first part, the second one can be found here.
The following was conducted on 23 May 2008, at Ootaka-no-Mori SS Deck Terrace by Yoshiyuki Ohno for FUZZ.
Yoshiyuki Ohno: So, hello! I say, It’s long time no see…
Susumu Hirasawa: Yes, isn’t it?
YO: It’s been more than 20 years since I interviewed you last time?
SH: Yes, it is. It’s been about 25 years?
YO: It’s been that long?
SH: Yeah. Because P-Model is about 30 years old.
YO: Oh, yes. P-Model will be 30 years old next year.
SH: Yeah.
YO: OK. Could you introduce yourself?
SH: Yes. Well, I am Susumu Hirasawa.
YO: Yes. Mister Susumu Hirasawa, I should say. You are now called “The Master of Techno-Pop”, right?
SH: No, no, no. [being humble]
YO: Though I just called you that, in fact we used to be buddies, fooling around together in the old days. But you haven’t changed a bit, it seems.
SH: I haven’t? No. I’ve changed naturally.
YO: But from my point of view, as a musician, you haven’t changed at all in the sense that you always continue doing new things nobody has ever heard of or what other people haven’t done before.
SH: In that sense, I haven’t changed. But, well, I don’t look the same.
YO: More wrinkles on your face now, right?
SH: More wrinkles on my face. [laughs]
YO: You can say the same to me. And let’s not talk about that or aging or something… Today, I want to talk about how I was surprised to know that you are releasing a CD recorded with a Death Metal vocalist from Italy. It has three songs?
SH: Yes. Three songs.
YO: It’s called Tetragrammaton. Is it what we used to call a mini-album?
SH: Yes, with three songs.
YO: So I listened to these three songs and found that not only Metal music fans would listen to these songs comfortably but also ordinary Rock fans would. I find it quite surprising. But first, how come you decided to collaborate with someone from Italy?
SH: Well, what shall I start with… it’s a long story. Since I quit major record companies…
YO: It’s been almost ten years.
SH: Yes. Since I quit being a so-called “Major” artist1 and started business mainly through the internet, people from overseas have started to get interested in my music. Well, it was only natural. We started to receive CD orders and inquiries from overseas, from all over the world actually. Well, it’s no wonder. While this was happening, there was a Japanese manga called Berserk and the video of the TV anime series of that was a huge hit in Italy.
YO: Wow!
SH: I did the soundtrack for that anime. That’s why a lot of people in and near Italy buy the soundtrack CD and know about me. Do you know Berserk, by the way?
YO: No. I’ve only heard the name.
SH: It’s a rugged and macho anime so to speak with violence and dark scenes. That’s probably the reason why it attracts attention of Death Metal fans there as well as fans of Japanese anime. And this human2 called Riccardo Brett bought the soundtrack CD. It’s more like horror movie kind of music. So he liked it a lot and he recorded his Death Metal voice in his own style over some tracks from the CD.
YO: Ah!
SH: And he sent it to me.
YO: So the songs didn’t have vocals?
SH: No. The tracks were instrumental. So he recorded his vocals over my tracks and sent to me. No wonder. It’s originally a soundtrack for a TV anime so you could say it’s like movie themes. You could record any voice over it and it would match well, but when he put his Death Metal voice over it, that added a finishing touch like something out of an occult horror film. People were familiar with this kind of sound. Though there had never been a music genre like this before, but people were already familiar with this kind of sound from some movies. I thought they matched well and I also thought it was an interesting attempt. I suggested we re-record those tracks to make some changes and make new versions to create a new CD, because those songs were already on a released CD.
YO: So you liked Riccardo’s vocals.
SH: I did.
YO: Was it like a thing you had never thought about?
SH: Well, he said, “I’m a Death Metal vocalist and producer. I have a musical background in that kind of genre”. At first he asked me tentatively. He was afraid I wouldn’t like it because he was from a totally different genre than mine. When I read his message, I thought, “that should definitely match with my tracks”, and it turned out to be just like I thought.
YO: You know, that reminds me of Marilyn Manson doing the soundtracks for Resident Evil [the movie], it’s as extremely wild as that. I see. So have you met him?
SH: No, I haven’t.
YO: Oh, you haven’t. So did you communicate with each other on the internet?
SH: Yes, we did.
YO: So the recording itself was done by uploading the music files somewhere and downloading them to listen to them?
SH: Yes, exactly.
YO: You did it that way. But you used the same method a long time ago, right?
SH: Yes. Eh, when was that? [asking Mika Hirano, Chaos Union staff, sitting next to him]
Mika Hirano: Which one are you talking about?
SH: The thing with Hans.
MH: The project with Hans was around 1998 or so.
SH: 1998. That was when MP3 finally started to become well-known. I became acquainted with Hans-Joachim Roedelius of Cluster by chance through internet. Hans and I made an album sending music files back and forth through internet. That was the principle of the project. The album [Drive, by Global Trotters] was released in Europe and Japan.
YO: At that time, didn’t you have any problems with the speed of communication lines?
SH: In those days, we had…
YO: We didn’t have ADSL yet, right?
SH: No, we didn’t have ADSL. How do you call it?
YO: The phone line? ISDN?
SH: ISDN.
YO: Yeah, it was slow. So this time the CD with Riccardo was made on fiber-optic communication? Is the sound quality different from the CD you made in 1998?
SH: The quality of the sound is basically the same. In the 90s, the communication speed was slow, but the music files were digital at that time like now, so there is no difference in sound quality.
YO: So you have been doing things like that. It’s been 10 years since you became independent and moved your bases to the internet3. After 10 years, when I listen to this CD now, I see the original extremity of Hirasawa coming back.
SH: Well, it’s just a genre in my huge repertoire. You know, the interesting thing is, as it has been since the early days, my music is liked by extreme punk fans, and on the other hand, is also liked by people who hate punk music.
YO: Those extremes.
SH: Yes, extremes. A song of mine has many aspects, so everyone focuses on and listens to the parts that they like the best. I have beautiful songs, too. But those deceitful boys and girls, they never become fans of my music. My fans like my music if I make some extremely terrifying songs. They like it if I make a beautiful song, too. My fans understand me because I have been doing this for a long time.
YO: So, when you do that, when you make a certain kind of song, I guess you think like “I want to show this side of me this time”, right? So haven’t you used up all your ideas because you have been a musician for 30 years?
SH: No. I never feel that way. I’m always interested in a lot of things and I can relate my interests to my music and my other works. It continues every day. I’m sure you know that New Wave musicians like me don’t have music as their motivation in the first place.
YO: It’s only the means of expression.
SH: They became musicians not because they love a certain kind of music, but because they have something to express before playing music. That’s the type of person they are. The New Wave musicians will characteristically change the styles of their music to some extent, adjusting to the times, but they don’t just follow the fashion of music on the market. I have been playing music that way. And also, in pop music history, we have heard all the possible different waves of music for the first and second times now. We cannot find something new anymore. This is what it is like right now. So my chest of drawers is already full of my repertoire after listening to and playing everything for the second time.
YO: So you accumulate it.
SH: So you could make music combining elements from the accumulated repertoire. Meanwhile, you can be inspired by a lot of things other than music and convert them into music. If you keep having curiosity, you don’t run out of ideas.
YO: You can become interested in anything if you have curiosity.
SH: Yes. That’s right.
SH: Yeah. I wonder why. It means I have a warped mind. It’s true that you feel secure when you use something everybody uses. But I can scarcely find something that stimulates my curiosity in those secure things.
YO: Those completed things won’t do.
SH: There must have been less than 2000 Amiga users in Japan even when it was at its most popular. With that kind of rare OS, you face a lot of risks when you use it. You enter a danger zone filled with risk. Because of that, however, I’m attracted to such things. If I decide to choose something like that, I’ll discover something and say “see, I told you! I’ve found something interesting!”. [laughs]
YO: Now it’s said that the world is catching up with the internet age at last. Since the beginning of the internet age, I’ve seen the danger of internet itself and some harmful effects of it. I guess you have already experienced all that too, right?
SH: I don’t know if I’ve experienced all that yet. But there was an interesting incident. Musicians and people in the music scene are the ones who should keep being more curious and imaginative than other people. However, as you can see with how I’ve transformed my presence itself as an advertising medium after quitting my old ways of advertising, those in the music industry are the most conservative kind of people. I thought that way strongly when I was about to leave major record labels and go independent. At that time, I had a press conference. I announced “I’m starting to deliver music in MP3 online”. I sent faxes to the press, various music magazines, and so on. And on the day of the press conference, the only reporters that came were from computer magazines.
YO: [laughs] What a shock!
SH: Only computer and business magazines came. Nobody from music magazines. The people from music magazines would say “what’s MP3?”
YO: I can imagine. They didn’t know about it at that time. And some people said “the quality of sound in MP3 is bad” in those days. I see how it was.
SH: Music is not industrial goods. Music is culture in a sense. That’s why the people in the music industry should be the most interested in what kind of great things they could do if they connected music to the internet. Moreover, the music industry was in the midst of its dramatic decline at that time, but they were still relying on old means of advertisement, and still using the press kits they got from the record labels without changing anything or thinking of new ideas on their own.
If they went on doing business like that, the music scene wouldn’t grow. Do you know what that means? That was the time when their own market and future were at risk. I thought they were destroying themselves because they were not paying attention to the internet at all. And as I predicted, it turned out that they’ve really been digging their own graves. [laughs]
YO: From their point of view, currently, there are more people in the music industry who say “the internet is our enemy” than those who don’t. They think “now people are exchanging music for free with file sharing software. If we don’t stop it, we’ll be digging our own graves”.
SH: The fact that they commit to such kind of thinking proves that they are not thinking by themselves. They act based on the thought that they want to continue sucking the musicians dry using the vested-interest structure of the music market. The internet is their enemy? No way. You know, back then we were laughing so hard when we heard that one of the major record labels was trying to make musicians sign contracts that said “we will never have our own website as long as we live”.
YO: Oh no! Really?
SH: Yes, they were actually forcing the musicians to sign that. I thought someone who would sign such a contract had to be a complete fool, and we all laughed about it so hard.
YO: That was only 10 years ago, right?
SH: Yeah, only 10 years ago. It was a transitional time when people were divided into two groups: those who felt the internet was a threat to them, and those who felt it was a form of new media.
As you know, record labels are a bunch of idiots who can’t think of any way other than making a profit by using other people’s abilities. So the internet, which is something that cultivates your unique creativity, is nothing but a threat to them. They think the expansion of the internet threatens their profit earning system, so they say “digital recordings are criminal because they can be copied”. That kind of thinking is totally removed from reality. Yet that’s all they know how to do.
Back then we quit signing up with major record labels, started our own company [Chaos Union, Ltd.] like this, and we recruited a few staff members from Nippon Columbia. I was sure “only time will tell”. Yes, time is on my side as I expected. Nevertheless, they still refuse to change their attitude. So I’m sure they will go to ruin.
YO: I can’t help but think “do they enjoy strangling themselves?” when I look at the music industry, magazines and critic publishers.
SH: I think music writers will stand at a similar crossroad in the near future, too. They will be divided into two groups, those who continue writing as in-house (提灯) writers for magazines and printed media [who would praise the musicians that the record labels pitch for], and those who come back to their senses and become independent, I think.
YO: I had a feeling, about five years ago, that we were in the era that music writers were not necessary any more. You can read comments about someone’s music on the internet and you’ll see ones like “I think this way”, “I think that way” and so on. Those comments can help you decide whether or not to buy it. Word of mouth, so to speak. The word of mouth on the internet has been handy for these several years, but now it’s too much. It’s reached its limit. For example, if you see someone’s blog introducing gourmet food, you can’t tell if the writer has a lot of experience in tasting good food.
And you may find another blog about music and the writer may say “I think this song is blah blah”, but you never know. He might be a twelve year-old who is just listening to music for the first time. Therefore, these days we can’t believe what’s said on the internet because we don’t know what kind of taste the writer has. There is no measure to compare. That’s why it’s important for a music writer like me to write and convey my opinion, just like you, a professional musician, is using the internet as a means of communication.
SH: Ten years ago, I thought the music magazines would disappear but there would still be jobs for the writers to do. No matter how much the number of general listeners’ reports increases, they don’t usually have the quality of professional music writers.
The reason why I think so is that it’s actually hard for each listener to maintain his or her concept of values in choosing music independently. They definitely need a writer or reviewer who can give an outline and make a summary of what’s going on. Otherwise, the music industry would conduct the same charades in the internet too, after all.
Evidently, it’s happening already. When I started business through the internet, I suggested other musicians to use the internet to promote and deliver their music, too. I don’t know why, but nobody did what I suggested. They thought using the internet was hard for them or something and they didn’t try. After a while, the big music download service businesses were created and they started to sell a large number of music contents online, gathered from many musicians. This means those musicians allowed the intermediate exploitation structure to be organized again. They could have sold their music on their own.
Consequently, most of the listeners follow the trends those downloading services advertise. In this situation, we absolutely need a music writer who firmly holds the opinion that “we should rigidly establish and protect our values”.
We need music writers like that. There were very few of them ten years ago, but I think they are appearing little by little now. However, it’s hard for us to tell who is the in-house writer sponsored by big companies and who is the independent writer. So we need a reviewer who would say harsh comments and someone who would be called “a charismatic writer”.
YO: We need that. Actually, I used to be called a harsh writer by everyone and I’m still called so by young green Visual-Kei musicians. But I gradually started to think all of them are good. I feel something like “that’s a lot of fun!” In my way of seeing things, I don’t actually think like “this isn’t good” or “their performance sucks”. No matter how poorly the musicians play or undeveloped their techniques are, I look at them as something “good”. If anything, that’s where my values should be called into question now. “I enjoy my life everyday”, that’s what I want everyone to feel when they look at this kind of site. In this website of mine, all sorts of musicians are covered, but I love all of them. I only send out messages to say “I love it!”.
SH: But then, you’ve always been weird in one way or another, right?
YO: [laughs]
SH: Naturally, you look so out of place when you come into New Wave bands’ gigs in your outfit. [laughs]
YO: With my long hair.
SH: And in [heavy-metal style] London boots. [laughs] You haven’t changed your style, but you appreciate New Wave to a great degree. That’s interesting.
YO: Strangely, Hirasawa-kun, you and I have almost the same birthday.
SH: Do we? Your birthday is on the first of April?
YO: Yes. My birthday is on the first. So there’s only an exact one year difference between our birthdays. That’s why, you know, I understand what you think, what you want to do. It’s interesting, I’ve understood you since the old days. I understand what you say. But, unfortunately, your messages are not easily understood by the people. [laughs]
Well, you did something interesting like this [Tetragrammaton] this time. After all, I always think, regardless of whether you are a musician or not, it’s important to be curious about many things. If you are so full of curiosity, you enjoy everything you do, right? You enjoy every day. That’s what you have been doing all your life, I think. This time, your manager [Mika Hirano] happened to send this new CD of yours to my home, well, to my surprise. How come you sent it to my home address, by the way?
[everybody laughs]
SH: This kind of genre… nowadays we don’t do much paper media, and we even decline offers sometimes.
YO: Oh, really?
SH: This kind of genre is not in my areas of expertise. So we discussed what to do to promote it. And she asked around and said, “I’ve heard about this music writer called Mr. Ohno”. And I asked her, “would that be Yoshiyuki Ohno, by any chance?” and she said “yes”. So I said, “he is a person we can rely on to do things properly, so definitely send it to him”.
YO: Oh, I see. Oh, Thank you.
MH: So I visited your office and asked for your mailing address.
YO: [to Mika] To tell you the truth, when I got married a long time ago, Hirasawa-kun helped me out moving.
[everybody laughs]
He helped me moving with the P-Model van at that time.
SH: Was that Ayase area?
YO: Ayase, Ayase.
SH: I’ve totally forgot about that.
YO: …Like I said, these days, certainly I don’t find many people that really make me think “that’s interesting”, even after all these years. I’ve said this before, but speaking from my experience, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails made a mini album with Rob Halford of Judas Priest4, saying “let’s do something interesting together!” and it was really edgy, in a sense. However, some diehard Heavy Metal fans would say “why is he making computer music?”, and some Electronics and Electro-Pop fans would say “seriously? What’s Judas Priest doing here?”. I find many listeners are more stubborn than I thought. These sorts of new experiments might be subject to that unexpected barrier.
SH: In that sense, the style of this CD won’t face such barriers, I think, because it would be accepted like a scene from a film. Before they would say “this is Metal” or “this is Electronic”, they would think of it like a soundtrack of a movie, so the listeners wouldn’t hate the clash of genres so much, I think.
YO: Eh, is he singing in Italian?
SH: No, in English.
YO: Though he’s singing things like “aaaagh” in a low voice.
SH: I’m a little worried about it because an Italian guy is singing in English.
YO: He might say the same thing to you, too. You are Japanese, after all. So, I assume this is going to be delivered online and can people in Italy buy it?
SH: No, it’s not sold online. It’s a CD.
YO: Oh, it’s a CD.
SH: It’s sold as CD, and it will be available in Italy too, with a totally different cover design5.
YO: Oh, really?
SH: The contents are the same.
YO: I see. How do you buy it in Japan?
SH: You can buy one at a record shop or from our website.
YO: Have you decided on what record shops you’ll distribute this CD from?
MH: Daiki Sound, a big distributor specialized in independent labels, is going to do it.
YO: So you can buy one at a major record shop?
MH: Yes. And even a small record shop will put a backorder for you if you ask them. It’s actually going to be hard to find a record shop where you can’t order it.
YO: That’s good.
MH: The distribution of CDs is secure. And Amazon retails it, too. It’s also available through our website.
YO: Do I get a free gift or something if I order through your website?
SH: I would give free gifts with other CDs sometimes, but I don’t usually do something additional except for my mainstream CDs. Well, a record shop called Mecano, which was opened by a retailer who used to manage a Disk Union franchise, he deals with really “maniac” CDs, and he’s selling it [Tetragrammaton] for us. He would probably go an extra mile like that6.
YO: By the way, I thought having only three songs is kind of too short, you know?
SH: It started because I thought it was interesting, not because we set out saying “let’s do something together”, so I didn’t have a lot of time to do it. Three songs were the best I could do. The project started suddenly. I was doing other work at the same time, so I could only record three songs. And I also thought a full album with the same concept might not keep the listener’s interest.
YO: I can understand. I might not want to listen to 18 songs like that in a row. You know, you need a film to go with it. What if you made a soundtrack and made a film for it later? So you are not planning to do live shows in this unit?
SH: No. Currently, I have no such plans.
YO: Oh. You aren’t going to Italy, then?
SH: At the moment, I have no such plans.
YO: Really? I hear Japanese culture, music and anime are very popular in Europe now, right?
SH: Eh, where was that? Was that in Italy, too?
MH: Which one is “that”?
SH: Er, that strange one, sung in Italian.
YO: Did you sing in Italian, Hirasawa-kun?
SH: No. Someone sang my song in Italian.
MH: Paprika?
SH: Paprika. It’s a bootleg. There is a video on YouTube where someone sang it in Italian at an event somewhere.
MH: You see there. There is a CD with a gray cover. It has that song [The Girl in Byakkoya – White Tiger Field], the theme song for the anime film [Paprika].
YO: Oh, Music for Movies: The World of Susumu Hirasawa Soundtracks.
MH: This anime film was directed by a very well-known director [Satoshi Kon], and it was broadcasted on TV all over Europe and America. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival and was screened at other film festivals, too. So the theme song has become very famous along with the film.
SH: When it was released, the theme song for that anime entered the competition of the original songs category in the US Academy, although it wasn’t nominated.
MH: The Academy Awards [Oscars].
YO: That’s awesome!
SH: There could be a “best home recording award”.
YO: Best home recording award?
MH: He wishes there was one.
SH: In the music category.
MH: He said “I wish there was a best home recording award in the music category”. [laughs]
YO: That would be interesting. Hmm.
MH: So someone in Europe heard that song [The Girl in Byakkoya], sang it in Italian and posted it on YouTube. Interesting, isn’t it?
YO: There is a band called DGM, a Technical Progressive Metal band. In the album they released only a few months ago [Different Shapes], they included the song You wa Shock! (Ai wo Torimodose, Bring Love Back), the theme song from the anime Hokuto no Ken (Fist of the North Star), sung in Japanese as the bonus track. Its promotion video is really interesting. They are really anime otaku as well as a professional progressive metal band, so they play the song really really well. You know, it’s interesting to see that music is loved beyond national borders in the anime world. Having seen this, you could perform in Italy or France and will totally get accepted, I thought.
SH: You know what’s interesting? Nowadays you can buy my CDs online directly through our website. We get orders from America and Europe the most, of course, but we also get some huge orders from Chile, United Arab Emirates, Russia, Qatar, and so on.
YO: Don’t tell me they order like 100 CDs at a time?
SH: They order all the CDs at once.
YO: That’s awesome!
SH: And you know, I have a page on the Arabic Wikipedia.
YO: I can’t even read it! [laughs] I can’t read it, but that’s awesome!
SH: We shouldn’t underestimate it. The number of orders from overseas are not so big compared to domestic ones, but I wouldn’t have got them at all if I had stayed with a major label. We get them so often. Interestingly, when… the conflict was still going on in Iraq, we received an order from a US army domain in Qatar. A soldier stationed there probably ordered a CD to listen to in his spare time. It’s been interesting.
YO: If you were with a major label, you could sell your music only when the label manages to make an agreement with another label overseas, in Italy or somewhere. To put it briefly, the relationship between a musician and listeners doesn’t need such troublesome contracts.
SH: That’s right. As I recall, when we [P-Model] were with Japan Record [1982-84], Virgin France wanted to sell our records. But they lost the contract.
YO: How come?
SH: I don’t know why.
YO: Virgin Records was with a different group of labels in Japan, right? [Victor Music Industries]
SH: I don’t know the reason, but they shelved it anyway. Furthermore, before we even knew about the offer, a weekly magazine called “Shuukan Playboy” [no relation to the American publication] had the information about it and printed the story7. We were like “really? We never even heard about it”. We looked into it a lot, and found out that Japan Record received a fax from Virgin France, but they left it lying about. Ultimately, they lost the contract.
YO: You know, I say all Japanese people tend to have this problem. One of the reasons that computers and internet have not become as widespread as we expected is our unfamiliarity with the keyboard. We’ve all learned the alphabet, but many of us think it’s difficult to type on the keyboard. Also many Japanese people have a life-long fear of English language. So if they receive a fax in English, they think “I don’t understand it”. People in their forties and fifties now have a strong tendency like that. I suppose that’s why the internet doesn’t reach everybody. So that could have been the mistake they made. One day you receive a fax in English, and you think to yourself “maybe I don’t have to read it because I don’t understand it”.
SH: Well, it’s a major company run by adults. It must have been a good business chance for them because they could have become the provider of the original masters. And interestingly, we heard that the band name P-Model had a bad connotation or something in French and that we would have been called “Heller”8.
YO: What does it mean?
SH: I don’t know. I know nothing about it. If I remember correctly, Led Zeppelin was called “Nobs” in Germany. I don’t know the reason why, though9.
YO: Heller, huh? Sounds elegant.
SH: We never knew about it. That we were going to be released by Virgin France.
YO: The name sounds really elegant and nice to me. Maybe they had a problem with the “P” sound?
SH: I don’t know what it was.
YO: I suppose the pronunciation “pee” in English is, you know… Anyway, that’s interesting.
1 A tendency in Japanese music discourse is to categorize artists as “Major” (メジャー) or “Indies” (インディーズ), based on whether they are signed with a large industry player or not. Hirasawa spent 16 years of his career as a “Major” artist and struggled for creative control. He went independent for good in 1999, and since 2011 has self-identified as a “Stealth Major” (ステルス・メジャー) － an artist on a minor label who attracts as much attention as one on a major label.
2 Hirasawa is prone to applying unusual word choices in his writings. One of them is occasionally replacing the standard Japanese term “Person” (人) with the rather uncommon “Human” (人間), and on rarer occasions “Hominid” (人科), to indirectly imply that he may not be one, an idea occasionally toyed around in his musical concepts.
3 Although the points of internet interaction & collaboration are brought up in specific contexts by Ohno, he slightly mischaracterizes them. The interaction with and application of the internet on music work was the main focus of the Revised version of P-Model (1994－2000), which only spent 1 year as an active independent band. Elaborating on the “chain letter song” method devised with Kenji Konishi (the Revised incarnation’s other driving force) for what eventually became How about FUKO?, Hirasawa set the production of all the band’s releases to incorporate long distance techniques, with the mailing of storage devices back & forth serving as a supplement to file sharing, whose use increased as internet connections evolved. Drive, made at the tail end of this era, was completely conceived & recorded through online means. However, when it came to mixing/mastering both the Japanese and European releases, the mailing of DATs and the reunion of people in studios in both Tokyo and Dublin was necessary in those steps of the process (not to mention Roedelius’ trip to Tokyo to promote it). Shortly after this phase ended, Hirasawa stopped all active collaborations, with some of the advantages of the internet vaunted by him at the time going unused until Tetrgrammaton’s creation some 10 years later (thanks to Sumire Hoshino for clarifying some details for this footnote).
4 Voyeurs, the release Ohno refers to, is a full-length album by Rob Halford’s project 2wo. It was originally created as a guitar-heavy release with future Marilyn Manson/Rob Zombie guitarist John “5” Lowery and Lowery’s producer Bob Marlette. After a chance encounter on Mardi Gras, Trent Reznor offered Halford a deal with his label Nothing and to rework the album as an electronic one with Dave “the Rave” Ogilvie of Skinny Puppy (Reznor’s “executive producer” credit and ambiguous wording on the interviews I read through don’t make the extent of his contributions clear). It wasn’t a completely egalitarian affair: Lowery was shocked and disappointed with the final product (much of his work was excised to make way for the electronics), although he’s still proud of the strong songwriting that came out of the project.
5 From Hirasawa’s microblog post on the Italian cover: “There are some elements in common, yet also a distinct touch, reminiscent of ’70s prog”.
6 Yasuhiro Nakano, founder-owner of Shop Mecano, lover of all things krautrock/new wave and go-to writer on Hirasawa for mainstream press, has had a hand in making many extras for Hirasawa productions. Interviews conducted by him about the first 6 albums to come out of the Syun label and about Mandrake were pre-order bonuses for Air on the Wiring, Landscapes and the Unreleased Materials albums; and he formulated a large Q&A for 1996’s Electronic Ship Visit Angya tour program. After opening Mecano he made 2 bonus items for releases purchased from there: the complete version of the Mandrake interview for the ’06 reissue of Unreleased Naterials and a show report leaflet for the DVD release of BITMAP. He’s done small newsletters attainable at the location for free covering current stock, but nothing as extensive as those bonuses.
7 Hirasawa misremembers at this point. The news were published on an issue of the monthly men’s fashion magazine Popeye, which went for a “subculture lifestyle” direction at the time (street date 25 July 1982). The only image I found of the article is unfortunately unreadable); comments about it on this blog indicate that the report listed interest by 3 labels and that Perspective (the only album made under Japan Record at that point) was planned for release on Fall of that year.
8 The name P-Model was supposed to go by in France, according to a subheading of the article, was “Enol” (エノール). During the translation process Eriko noted that the word used by Hirasawa, “Erēru” (エレール), had more than one transliteration in French, such as “Errer” and “Airelles”. When editing I decided to use “Heller”, as it is the name of a French plastic vehicle model company, which fits with Hirasawa’s style.
9 Eva von Zeppelin, granddaughter of airship designer Ferdinand von Zeppelin, took offense to Led Zeppelin’s choice of name and debut album cover (a photograph of the Hindenburg disaster) and threatened legal action. As a result, they toured Central/Northern Europe in 1970 as The Nobs (a pun on the name of their promoter Claude Nobs).
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