When it comes to artistic contribution and innovation, Shugo Tokumaru remains the most important member of Japan’s indie music scene.
Yet Tokumaru also deserves credit for keeping himself in the business of making music within these incredibly turbulent times. Besides moving a good number of albums, he provides tunes for NHK and Mujirushi Ryohin, tours Europe, and sells-out his shows across Japan. We have seen such collapse of the “music industry” (is there still a “poetry industry”?) that no one could possibly muster up epithets of “sell-out” towards the transaction of cash for musical creation. The general feeling now is, oh, how quaint.
The best of Tokumaru’s contemporaries — Petset, Plus-Tech Squeeze Box, MacDonald Duck Eclair, the Usagi-Chang crew — have essentially stopped releasing records, as it takes superhuman obsession and maniacal obduracy to keep churning out new material that is just going to be jettisoned into the hyper-competitive black hole of the modern music marketplace. Even if you don’t need to earn your supper from album sales, you do nominally want listeners and feedback — and even those are not so forthcoming in our era.
Luckily for us, Shugo Tokumaru having a career in music means he has the work responsibility of producing albums on a frequent basis. And in this world of $.99 singles, Tokumaru’s oeuvre is still meant to be enjoyed in its long form. In June, ST released his fourth album Port Entropy. (This is Tokumaru’s first journey into nonsensical but lyrically harmonic English album titles. And I feel like he was playing with the idea of a palindrome but gave up halfway.)
Continue reading this article at Néojaponisme.
