Sending a giant thank you out to all who came to share an afternoon and early evening of music appreciation and record-loving at Top 5 Records – Volume 15 “On the Road Again”. After an 8-month hiatus we found an amazing new home at Bar Kurage adjacent Mustard Hotel in Reload Shimokitazawa. This new space, run by the supremely cool and contagiously fun Wataru san and the lovely and smiley Haruka, made for a wonderful event. It’s a beautifully designed bar, stocked with all kinds of premium flowing deliciousness, and has an outrageously nice DJ rig, replete with brand spanking […]
Tokyo Record Style
Amy
Hey Record-loving homies! I finally get to introduce you to lovely Amy with whom I shared a long and friendly conversation in the shelter of The Suzunari’s Yokocho where we hid out from the sudden downpour, chatting about her music, fashion, traveling, rock climbing, and an architecture internship that brought her to Tokyo for an extended stay from Singapore where she lives and studies. Sidenote: I tend to keep Tokyo Record Style completely free from work-related talk only so as to have a place to focus completely on play, freedom, and fun. Having said that, I have blessings to count […]
Tokyo Record Style
Chris
More slacker style on TRS. Love it! Here’s the thing about slacker style – the whole point of it is two-fold: First to convey a sense of indifference, disaffectedness, unconcerned nonchalance. Two: to actually HAVE indifference, disaffectedness, unconcerned nonchalance, cuz really, who CAN be bothered. But you see, it is a bit a paradox, cuz on one hand it requires much thoughtful consideration, such as how holey or stained can jeans be before they’re trying to hard, how tattered or ironic can a graphic t-shirt or trucker hat be before it’s makes fun of itself, at one time of day […]
Tokyo Record Style
Yoichi
You’ve seen the memes of Gen X’ers telling both Boomers and Millennials to get over themselves and get on with it, and about them being the generation who despite being raised by the TV are more resourceful, educated, balanced, and indifferent to the momentary wanes of society, which has perhaps developed within them a type of insolence and insubordination that only fellow members of their generation find distinctive, familiar, and well, charming. Unfocused intellectual slacker recognizes unfocused intellectual slacker. So during my last visit to Like a Fool Records, it was this familiarity apparent when I met Yoichi, pictured here, […]
Tokyo Record Style
Tomo – Like a Fool Records
Being blind-sided by a new artist, by a new band, by a new landscape of sound …what a truly great feeling. Like a baptism of sonic rhapsody, purifying your attention, distilling your conscience, the sensation can wash over you like a shamanic wave, transfixing all your senses, illuminating your perceptions, calming your spirit, and soothing your soul. Ah, you’ve arrived at a new place of musical appreciation! Congratulations! A new band just found its way to your heart, planting a seed of curiosity for more, an interest to go immediately deeper, a smile on your face, a surprised widening of […]
Tokyo Record Style
Freddy
Good grief, where do I start with this one. Freddy is my oldest record-loving homie, my blow-our-paycheck-at-the-record-store-ON-payday partner-in-crime, the guy to whom I left my entire collection to when I moved to Japan and who every-few-of-those-early-years-of-living-here, I would return to and expatriate some of my records little-by-little until I had rudely raided virtually all I could (Sorry Fred). Because he was from Chicago and tapped into the underground scene, and because he had about 10 years on me, he knew 5-10 psych, garage, punk, post-punk, new-wave, and no-wave artists for every Top 40 or Classic Rock artist I knew. Some […]
Tokyo Record Style
Mehran and Jasmine
Miyazaki’s Spirited Away is hands down one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s a powerful and beautiful story about coming of age, poetically and whimsically told, a journey simultaneously through adolescence and a mythical world, stunningly animated in vivid and imaginative Ghibli fashion, that somehow all makes perfect sense while making no sense at all. The protagonist Chihiro finds herself passing through a gate into the magical world of the “kami” (the gods) and loses both her parents and nearly her own identity in the process. She must overcome the challenges she faces while working in a bath […]
Tokyo Record Style
Miya
Venturing into some potentially dangerous territory here: Women and Vinyl. This is not a topic that particularly interests me but I heard something in passing that had me scratching my head and won’t seem to leave my thoughts. It was the question of whether men buy records to impress women, and if a record collection ever got a guy laid. It was posed by a sassy young lass, clumsily but endearingly unaware of how to wield her newly discovered insouciance, addressing a bunch of middle aged men old enough to have been around the block a few times. She got […]
Tokyo Record Style
Saeka
If you’re not subscribed to my YouTube channel, please check out Tokyo Record Style! I’ve just been documenting random record musings, including the occasional visit to cool record shops in Tokyo (Link here). Before recording anything in a shop, I like to make sure it’s ok with owners and clerks and set up a situation where I can pitch what I want to do, give them a chance to review it, then come back at a later date to record so nobody feels they are being put on-the-spot. …So I pass Jet Set Records in Shimokitazawa nearly every day on […]
Tokyo Record Style
Yasu
Sesame Street… …ok bear with me. I grew up on Sesame Street, well not actually ON Sesame Street, but watching it as a kid. I have 4 younger siblings, spread in ages across 12 years. So Sesame Street was on our family TV for a decade. It didn’t change heaps over the years, but I definitely got “old school” Sesame Street (think: 70’s era View Master – “Day at the Zoo”) and my youngest siblings got new updated versions, but all still quite familiar. Even my own kids watched DVDs of Sesame Street, both the oldest and newest seasons and […]
Tokyo Record Style
Azim and Family
Do you remember the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when King Arthur and his Knights reach the mysterious and feared “Bridge of Death”? Some of the knights make safe passage by correctly answering the scary and mean bridgekeeper’s riddles of various difficulty (What is your favorite color?) while some don’t (What is the capital of Assyria?) and are magically thrown into “Gorge of Eternal Peril” When it’s King Athur’s turn to answer the riddle “What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?” King Arthur stumps the bridgekeeper himself by inquiring “Which kind of swallow: African or […]
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Mori (and Rio)
What an encounter, meeting Mori and his lovely lady, Rio! What an insanely cute couple! I swear, I keep traveling back in time to my 20s when I meet young people on the streets in love. What I see are the playful of hearts, innocent spirits with ornery sweetness, that child-like twinkle of wonder in their eyes that reflect back wide-open roads, roads that tend to glimmer less and less for those whose decades have passed and as midlife tries to beat us down, break our will, suck the creative marrow out of bones. But some of us fight to […]
Tokyo Record Style
Malin and Bastian
Vertigo! Jaws! Dolly Zoom! I just finally “got” the “sound” of “Group Sounds!” There was a short 3 or 4-month window of time in the spring of 2004, between the moment that Japan was whimsically put as an unexpected destination on my upcoming-that-summer sojourn to Asia… (after a travel agent who was booking my tickets to Nepal’s Himalaya asked me “How about a stop in Japan? You’ll be flying to Kathmandu via Tokyo and Bangkok?” “Japan?!” I replied, “Hmm… Why not? Sure!”) …and the moment of time when I called my parents from San Francisco Airport to say “Ok, I’m […]
Tokyo Record Style
Dylan
I’m asking myself, “How does one let go of the standard conventions of a song: Intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus?” But that begs the question, “Where did the conventions of a song come from in the first place?” And then that begs the question “What was there before conventions?” I’d guess if you went all the back to the beginning, you’d start with rhythm, the heartbeat, followed by the murmur of breath, or perhaps the howl of wind, rumble of water, crack of wood. But was there harmony before humans? It seems that the Greek philosopher Aristoxenus’s “Elements […]
Tokyo Record Style
TOP 5 RECORDS – SummerTime
Welcome to Season 2 of “Top 5 Records” where music-loving pals and DJs Michael Warren, “bemsha” (Tatsuo Fukutomi), and “Zebrio” Brian Scott Peterson (yours truly), invite their friends to an afternoon and evening of playing records and counting down their Top 5 Records on various themes! The Season 2 – Episode 3 theme is “Summertime” – songs and albums that are made for summer! It will be up to our DJs to share how they interpret Summertime, whether that be “Hits of the Summer”, “Surf-Rockers/Beach-life classics” “Scorching Hot Solo-ridden jams”, “Albums for Convertibles”, and so on. This will be our […]
Tokyo Record Style
Gokky
“Never judge a record by its cover.” An adage updated for the modern age. As I came around the corner past the famous Suzunari Gekijo Theatre, made famous for being about as far off Broadway as you can get, and over the old tracks of the now-underground Odakuyu line, where we Shimokitazawans used to wait for sometimes 15 minutes at a time for all the local, semi-express, commuter, and double-decker Romance Car train to pass, and then through the once-iconic-but-now-a-bit-sterilized gate of “Ichi-Ban-Gai”, the “#1 Street”, right in front of Jet Set Records, I spotted a pair of full-sleeve tattoos […]
Tokyo Record Style
Asa and Hitomi
“Who are these two interesting and colorful characters browsing around in Shimokita’s Disk Union? Are they together? They must be. Oh, look! Dare I say he’s going to buy that record, wait, another! Maybe if I just look a little longer in the 45s, keep an eye on them, and then time the purchase of these outer sleeves right as they’re walking to the register, then I can conveniently walk out at the same time as them. Oh, good, Auld Lang Syne has been queued for the shop’s closing. Just wait a little longer, Brian. Wait a sec… could this […]
Tokyo Record Style
Jeff Sato
Goodness, gracious. Jeff Sato is one of the coolest, most friendly, and interesting characters you can meet in the Tokyo Record shop scene. He’s a veteran rock&roller, with his own records, CD’s, and books, dozens of producer credits, pals and A&R guy for Jeff Beck, David Lindley, Ry Cooder, Jackson Brown, X Japan, and a bunch of others. He has heaps of stories, like the time he interviewed Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, or seeing Clapton 100 times, or the very first time he heard the Stones or Dylan on FEN, Far East Network AM Radio, the American armed forces […]
Tokyo Record Style
Aurelien
For those who might not know, I have a volunteer photography project called “Photohoku” where I gift photographs to people in need. It would take a while to share all about it, but I just encourage you to check it out. But one of technical the aspects of it, not completely unlike Tokyo Record Style, is approaching (read: accosting) strangers, trying to diffuse their immediate apprehension with some welcoming, unthreatening charm and an honest smile (which, in a world filled with nefariously-intended people requires a certain finesse), and in a very, very short amount of time, seconds really, sell them […]
Tokyo Record Style
Naoki
Jet Set Records in Shimokitazawa is known for stocking a pretty eclectic, alternative selection in music (They’re also known for this easily recognizable borrowed Pan-Am logo on their bags that somehow always spots my eye, and which I just found out was called “The Blue Meatball” back in the day.) Apparently Jet Set has a bigger shop in Kyoto, maybe the original, I’m not sure. I spotted the Jet Set logo the other night on a smaller-sized bag being carried by the fella pictured here. Initially, I couldn’t tell if it was a CD that he had purchased or a […]
Tokyo Record Style
Natsumi
I met with Natsumi near the iconic Suzunari Theater in Shimokitaza, carrying a Disk Union bag. I stopped her for a chat and she very kindly agreed to be photographed for Tokyo Record Style. She had just scored the debut CD “Cavemen’s Law” by her friend’s new psychedelic pop band band, “Paddy Isle”. It’s not listed on Discogs yet, but I already listened to a few tracks from it on YouTube and it RIPS (Check the links in the comments.) Natsumi was super friendly and kind and shared with me that she is a ballerina and a ballet teacher. I […]