Maruike House, Tokyo, 10/28/06

This was the final day of shows for us. Actually I was leaving earlier than the boys; they were flying out on Sunday from Tokyo and I was flying out today. We traveled from Osaka (spending the night in Bunsho's tiny apartment) to Tokyo by Shinkansen and got there in just less than 3 hours. Travelling on those trains is great. It's fairly roomy, travel is amazingly quick (you don't realize just how fast until you see one when you're a bystander on the road it's passing - blink and you miss it). Plus smoking cars! Thanks Blake and Brian for letting me give some of the extra cancer you'd been missing in the states. Incidentally, a few days prior, as we made plans to travel to Kyoto for a day, some man jumped in front of a Shinkansen in a rather successful suicide attempt and the train was "badly damaged." Kind of like a little bird hitting a 747? Bad news, but no one hurt on the train itself.

Once we rolled into Tokyo Station, I pretty much had to haul ass to the special express Narita train. So we said our goodbyes, cried, hugged and promised to write as soon as we got home. I think I managed to make the train with about 2 minutes to spare, very typical for me. Otherwise I'd be waiting at least another 30 minutes. The ride itself was an hour during which I had the pleasure of meeting a gentleman (named Jeff? sorry) wearing a Death In June t-shirt with tattoos decorating both arm, up and down. I guess he had dj'd quite a bit in his younger days (in San Fran) and would still occasionally roll out. He told me he had a a punk band, "tongue-in-cheek, very tongue-in-cheek," called Dead Vampires. Great name. Oh yeah, now he is a full time horticulturist...

Long boring story short, got to the airport with plenty of time and amazingly (from the time of stepping foot in Narita) i was at the gate in 30 minutes. Even had time to unload some yen at the duty-free's. $20 for 2 cartons of Marlboro's? Cancer, baby, cancer.

Ok: here's the much more interesting part of the story. This one is a gues entry from Blake since he was actually there and performing:

The final show was at Maruike House, and it was unequivocally the
smallest venue we played on the tour. It was in a joint art/apartment
complex—artists studios on the first floor and apartments on the
second.

The space was a room at the end of the hall that was approximately 8
feet wide by 12 feet long with perhaps a 7 foot roof. “What are we
getting into?” crossed both my and Brian’s mind.

After a short set-up period (the table we used cut the audience space
by about a third) we wandered around the neighborhood, venturing to the
always-present Lawsons convenience store for pre-show snacks and trying to guess what sort of turnout this night would yield.

At around 7:30 things started rolling, and to our pleasant surprise the
room was packed—one might say an easy task given the size, but with 12
to 14 audience members crammed into what had been reduced to an 8 x 6
foot space, well, it gave new meaning to the phrase “an intimate night
with…”

Yosuke Yamagishi opened the night, delivering a subtle array of icy
tones and washes decorated with some clicky-scratchy glitch material
(but never really bordering on the rhythmic). An overall solid
performance, but it went on a little too long for my taste. Brian
played next, opening with some crackled sputter and crinkling balanced
out by short bursts of distorted choke (similar to some of the elements
he had been using previously during the tour). He also brought in a few
longer drones to augment his stable of audio. At one point he had an
ending which I thought he should have taken (he mentioned in hindsight
that he was uncertain of how to work the transition), but instead
switched back to more of the scrabbled field recordings that he’d
opened with. I think he recovered, though, with some field recordings
of waves on a beach and high tones augmented by acoustic bell chimes
which worked out rather nicely.

I started my set with a bass drone that, for perhaps the first time of
the tour, I really felt warbled and shifted from channel to channel in
a successful way and created a pretty decent spatial weirdness off and
on. I then brought in some higher tone gristly hiss that eventually
drowned out the more soothing bass drones and let that boil for a few
minutes before delivering a burbling belch of processed
contact-mics-in-the-mouth stew to bring the night to a close (the last
bit seemed to resonate with folks the most).

One of the highlights for me was that Kotomi, who runs the distribution
channel Molehill, came up for the show, which was easily a 2 hour train
ride for her. It was great to put the face to the name after working
with her for the past several years. After the show, a handful (nine)
of us went out to dinner at a delicious restaurant (which made this
show a great note to end this tour on).