Six Degrees of Tracks & Tales, No. 001: Tokyo to Leeds
Nine thousand kilometres in six reads — and the slow discovery that two cities with nothing in common have been making the same argument all along.
By Rafi Mercer
There is an hour that turns up on holiday and catches people unprepared. Mid-afternoon, usually. The plans are done or not yet started. The light has gone flat and thick. Someone is asleep in the next room. You have an hour and no obligation inside it, and the phone comes out because that is what hands do, and then twenty minutes are gone and nothing has happened at all.
That hour is the most valuable thing most of us are given all week, and we have almost no idea what to do with it.
So here is something to do with it.
Tracks & Tales now runs to six thousand cities and a few hundred records, and it is entirely searchable and almost entirely unwalkable. You can look something up. You cannot travel through it. A search returns what you already knew to ask for, which is a poor way to find anything worth finding. What follows is the other thing — a route. Six reads, in order, no skipping. It starts in Tokyo and ends in Leeds, and the point is not the two ends but the middle, where the ground gives way.
Start in Tokyo, because everyone does, and because the form was built there out of a shortage. Post-war, imported records were scarce and expensive. A single LP might be heard by hundreds of people who could never own one, in a room where someone else had already paid for it and set it up properly. That is the origin of the jazz kissa and it is worth sitting with, because it means the whole culture began as a solution to not having enough. The reverence came from the scarcity. The etiquette came from the reverence. Twenty seats, low light, walls of records, a sliding door that seals out the neon — none of that was a design choice at first. It was arithmetic.
Then go and stand inside one room of it. CITY COUNTRY CITY, Shimokitazawa, up a staircase in Tokyo's bohemian quarter, where the vinyl on the shelves is all for sale and someone flips a record without hurrying and conversation drops on its own. Notice the shelves specifically. Notice that the culture and the commerce are the same object here — the record you are listening to is the record you can carry out.
Which means the next thing is on those shelves.
Sunshower was made in three spring weeks of 1977 at Sound City and Crown Studio, and it sold almost nothing. Ryuichi Sakamoto arranged every song, years before Yellow Magic Orchestra. Haruomi Hosono played bass. Tatsuro Yamashita sang backing vocals. Taeko Ohnuki was in her early twenties and her label era ended with this record. On paper, a failure. In practice, a room containing most of what Japanese music was about to become, and none of them knew it.
But read past the personnel to the thing the record is actually doing. It takes an imported American form — crossover, smooth jazz, the whole borrowed vocabulary — and builds something out of it that is not American at all and is quietly suspicious of the city it came from. Listen to Tokai, the emotional centre. Bright surfaces. Melancholy underneath. A sunshower is two things at once.
Hold onto that move, because it happens again.
Strictly Turntablized arrives seventeen years later in the same city, and DJ Krush is doing the identical thing with a different import. Hip hop this time, taken apart and rebuilt without asking anyone's permission, slowed to something nocturnal, all the aggression drained out and replaced with space. In a listening bar it turns the room after-hours. Conversation slows. Awareness sharpens.
And here is the hinge of the whole route, so read it slowly: Krush's instrument is other people's records. Not a sample of an instrument. The record itself, the physical disc, the thing someone else made and pressed and sold and discarded. He is not playing music. He is playing an archive.
Now go five thousand miles west, to a man in Leeds doing exactly that, at exactly the same time, who has almost certainly never heard of him.
George Evelyn built Carboot Soul out of records dug from car boot sales and market backs across Yorkshire — the title says it plainly, the sound of hidden things found in second-hand corners. He grew up in soundsystem culture, breakbeat, soul and funk and reggae absorbed the way weather is absorbed. Les Nuits opens the album on a Quincy Jones sample stretched into a dreamscape, strings floating above the listener, bass humming like current.
Two men. Opposite ends of the earth. Neither with money or a studio worth the name. Both building rooms out of what other people threw away.
That is the middle of the chain and it is the part that should stop you, because nothing in Tokyo's careful reverence and nothing in a wet Yorkshire field on a Sunday morning suggests they belong in the same sentence. They belong in the same sentence anyway. Scarcity, again. The same arithmetic that built the kissa built the sample.
Which leaves the last stop, and it closes something.
Finest Hour is Leeds a generation on, in 2011, post-dubstep, the electronics finally handed back to people in a room with instruments. It is deliberately northern. Reflective, measured, aware of time as texture — set against London's rush the way a kissa is set against the street outside. A record about listening together, communal, asking for presence rather than attention.
Which is the argument Tokyo was making in 1955, made again in Yorkshire, in English, by people who arrived at it independently.
Six reads. Tokyo to Leeds. What you have at the end of it is not information — you could have got that from a search in ninety seconds. What you have is the shape of something: that the rooms and the records keep reaching the same conclusion from opposite directions, because the conclusion was never really about music. It was about what happens to attention when someone decides it is worth protecting.
The hour is gone now. It was a better use of it than the phone.
Do I have to read them in order?
Yes. The route is the point — each read changes how the next one lands, and the surprise sits between the fourth and fifth. Read them out of sequence and you get five good pages and no chain.
How long does it take?
About an hour, unhurried. It is built for the dead afternoon on a holiday, a long train, a Sunday with nothing in it.
Will there be more of these?
Yes. Six Degrees runs as an occasional series — a start point, an end point, and six reads to get from one to the other. Suggestions for future pairs are welcome, and the more improbable the two ends, the better the route tends to be.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe.
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