Symphony of the Earth--One Fewer, and We Might Have the Question -- The Elephant Kashimashi

There are a dozen, or at least a half-dozen, ways to start writing about this. And it's really just two songs. Well. Two songs, two instrumental versions of those songs, and seven live recordings.

The opener that has always entertained me is that this band fell into my lap by chance. I was studying Japanese (which has turned out poorly) in college and was handed a random "Best Of" for Christmas about eight or nine years ago. It was a band no one, including me and the one who gave it to me, my father, had ever heard of in our area. No friends, searching for them online tended to turn up sites in Japanese, if anything. The cover wasn't an awful lot of help, and of course all notes were in Japanese. I was going out to visit friends, though, so I put it on in my car stereo as I drove out, having sampled it briefly at home. They were noisy, boisterous, and rougher than the sounds typically associated with Japanese music in the modern age, especially that theoretical entire genre of "j-pop," which tends to be bouncy and slick more than anything else.

Of course, that compilation started with an album track from 24 years ago, the rather noisy "Fighting Man," simply transliterated into katakana instead of actually translated. Of course, Japanese music of any popular variety is notorious in English-speaking countries for its broken-up nature and habit of using English awkwardly at best, and totally uncomfortably at worst, jammed into the middle of otherwise entirely Japanese lyrics, often seemingly for no good reason. While it does compose the chorus of that song, it makes no other appearances, beyond that refrain of "Baby, fightingu man!"

[I'm Not Foolish Enough to Post My Amateurish Translations] -- Japanese Bands, Especially That Super Funky One: Bazra

DISCLAIMER: I apologize to anyone who does not have MS Mincho (or equivalent) installed or enabled for display in their browser or operating system. I dislike romanizing without giving the original, so, while I will quickly gravitate toward it, most names will be established in their original language first.

With a taste for music like mine, the title of this post is pretty well guaranteed to reflect one of the handful of Japanese bands I like. Dealing with エレファントカシマシ (The Elephant Kashimashi, sometimes "Elekashi") is still a bit too daunting for where I am, and a bit too important to me to reduce too far. I like other bands with non-English-speaking origins, but plenty are instrumental, and others are languages either Romantic or readily translated into English, even if with sparing accuracy.

Translated Asian languages seem to suffer some of the most problems, for various linguistic reasons that I have only the mildest of familiarity with. Obviously this means I don't share my family's relative necessity for linguistic touches in vocals, though I can appreciate them. But I don't understand the lyrics of 宮本 浩次 (Miyamoto Hiroji) at all. In my college days, I took a fair bit of Japanese, but my lackadaisical approach to all things in structured education hindered my understanding severely, and even translating one song ("Call and Response"¹) was an arduous effort, which involved listening, transcribing and then comparing and refining where the phonemes could not be properly separated into words or tweaked into the right words. Then, beyond that, actual translation was an enormous headache, as my brain cannot decide whether to go with poetic license or extreme faithfulness. The end result looks like someone attempting to write something pretentious, but failing because they are writing in English and it's their third or fourth language and they've yet to master it.

Bazra is no different, in terms of my lyrical understanding. Bazra as a band, however, is very different. It's going to be difficult to impress the divergence from a more "classic" sound like Elekashi, rather than just attempting to establish the sound in the first place. It would be great if I could begin at the point that explains both my awareness of and my affection for Bazra, that being "星の降るような夜に," ("Hoshi No Furu You Na Yoru Ni") an Elekashi song from their 1994 album 東京の空 (Tokyo No Sora, which I can comfortably explain is "The Skies of Tokyo," though still rough as a translation), their 1994 album that marked the end of an era. But we'll talk about that some other time. To give a rough estimate, here is Elekashi in 2008 performing "Hoshi No Furu You Na Yoru Ni":

When It Comes to Making Dreams, It's All Mixed Up

Sometimes I don't know where to start. There are decades of music, and plenty of it I've never heard, and plenty of it you've never heard, dear readers. Do I come in an emphasize a long-time love of my own? Do I try to bring one out that I feel people will not know? Do I try to pull a band out from the sturdy position of independent fame and influence, showing it to people who never heard of it? Address resources for music? Point to only the things I'm looking at in the immediate?

Any of these is an intriguing idea, and, unfocused though it may leave me, I want to address all of them, and leave this a discussion of music from an unusual viewpoint--not restrict that viewpoint to only certain elements or factors of the entirety of music.

I'd like to write about a band I love dearly and have spent horrifying amounts of money on, to say nothing of what a few family members have spent on them as gifts, but to cover エレファントカシマシ¹ known in English by the half-translation, half-transliteration "The Elephant Kashimashi," but that's a massive undertaking. They released a new single in November (yes, they still do that in Japan!), and another is coming in April. The album they are likely to appear on has not been announced yet, though. This seems like a solid place to bring them up, but it's effectively guaranteed that I'd have to address something like the totality of that band--which has existed, unchanged, for the last 24 years, with an album release almost every single year in that time, to say nothing of non-album singles, non-album b-sides, and EPs like Dead or Alive (no relation to the British band, video game or movies). This isn't the time for that, as that will probably take a few entries, perhaps to discuss them by "era."

Similarly, while I've recently acquired the reissues of The Fall's Cerebral Caustic and Shift-Work, that's another band that would need a lot of time devoted to try to make an accessible discussion work. That's 29 studio albums, a number more lives ones, endless compilations, EPs, non-album singles and more music in general than one can shake a stick at, no matter how vigorously.