Sunday, July 6, 2008

The significant lady presence in my life has, for the past month or so, been staying in Japan.  Needless to say, I’m extremely jealous.  Not to be culturally outdone, I’ve been leaning more about all things Japanese lately, including a band called Nagisa Ni Te.  Now, the savvier music snobs out there have probably heard of Nagisa Ni Te already, and to save some face, I have heard the name before (I think it was Jens Lekman who covered one of their songs on an EP some time ago), but this past week was my first true exposure to Nagisa Ni Te.

Doing research on a band who have a history of more than a couple albums can be difficult, but doing research on a band from Japan who have more albums than have even been properly released in the United States has proved to be something of a challenge.  When researching any band, it’s difficult to truly grasp how the band’s history has played out over time when you have it all right in front of you.  That can be even more difficult when half the website you find are in Japanese, and the US discography is out of order, due to reissues and compilations being released at various points in the bands career.

Jagjaguwar will be releasing Nagisa Ni Te’s new album, Yosuga, this September in the United States.  A couple of weeks ago, I heard this track from the upcoming album:

:Nagisa Ni Te - Premonition:

That’s the song has set me out on a trek to dig up what I can of the band’s back catalog.  The song is so simple; it has barely enough instruments between the toy-ish organs and folk guitars to support the male/female vocals. Something about that stark simplicity is compellingly refreshing, though, and I was determined to find more...

First, a little "background" research.  Nagisa Ni Te, it would seem, is comprised of Shinji Shibayama and his girlfriend Masako Takeda.  Shinji Shibayama is formerly of the bands Idiot O'Clock and Hallelujahs (the research for which we’ll save for another day), and also the founder of the Japanese label Org Records.  My Japanese is about as far from fluent as you can get, but I can tell you that the band's name means "On The Beach," apparently a reference to the 1975 Neil Young album of the same name.

Nagisa Ni Te’s first album, On The Love Beach, appeared in 1995.  From what I’ve read, most of the songs were the solo work of Shinji Shibayama, with Masako Takeda showing up in the credits somewhere.  The same simplicity is at work here, and again it’s the folk guitar that keeps the song alive, with the help of some light drumming.  See if you can pick out the lyrics "toozakaru nagisa no watashi/watashi no nagisa" in the chorus, they (roughly) mean "fading away me on the beach my beach."  Have a listen to Nagisa No Watashi (aka Me, On The Beach).

:Nagisa Ni Te - Nagisa No Watashi:

1997’s The True Sun has more contributions from Masako Takeda, and is a live acoustic recording of the band.  A double LP, The True World was released in 1999, again on Org Records. From what I can tell, neither of these albums have ever seen an official release in the United States, and for the life of me, I can’t find any tracks from the albums, without getting a little illegal, as they say.  If you’re interested in hearing stuff from the The True Sun, you can buy it online from Japan for about 4,500 Yen, or roughly 45 bucks (plus shipping, of course). Luckily, that’s pocket change on my big-money music blogger salary.  Needless to say, no, I haven’t bought it yet.

The band’s next album, Feel, which has no legally downloadable tracks either, was more acoustic based than previous attempts and some songs clocked in at lengths up to 10 minutes.  The music again feels the influences of American and British folk rock, but with their own focus on nature, from a lyrical perspective, and elements of psych-rock, from a musical perspective. This was the first album to be simultaneously released in Japan and the United States (again by Jagjaguwar).

The Same as A Flower followed Feel in 2004, and I’ll quit talking and let you listen to some of it.

:Nagisa Ni Te - A Light:

:Nagisa Ni Te - Bramble:

Both songs as you see are long, for the most part very simple, and "folky," but increasingly tend to incorporate more creative instrumentation.  A Light relies on a clean electric guitar and a bell part throughout, with Masako Takeda taking the vocal reigns for the whole song.  Bramble hands the vocals back over to Shinji Shibayama, at least for a time, and has both acoustic and electric pianos and guitars throughout the various forms the song rolls through in its lengthy 11 and a half minutes.

Dream Sounds came a year later.  The album isn’t technically a real album of new material, but instead a reworking/rerecording of older songs, four very long tracks that Jagjaguwar tells me are "the perfect introduction to the dreamy and nature-obsessed universe of Nagisa Ni te."  This track, Anxiety, is the shortest on the album, but one of my favorites, and a little bit more rockin’ than our previous samples.

:Nagisa Ni Te - Anxiety:

2008’s Yosuga then brings us up to present.  In all my research, I was excited to find that somewhere on the other side of the world a whole wealth of that simplistic, wholesome music that first caught my ear exists for my future listening pleasure, if only in very expensive back-catalog form, and slightly-less-cool American reissue form.  Needless to say, I’m now considerably excited about the release of Yosuga this September, but not as excited as I am about fully immersing myself in a band who have been loyally releasing music entirely unbeknownst to me for the past 13 years.  So while figuring out where to start can be daunting, discovering a well developed band you never knew about is like your new favorite artist releasing 8 albums at once. Unfortunately, you can only listen to them one at a time.

- John Michael Cassetta -



Unless otherwise expressly stated, all text in this blog and any related pages, including the blog's archives, is licensed by John Laird under a Creative Commons License.