It was fantastic! It’s not the type of movie that must be experienced in a theater setting but music fans are doing themselves a great disservice if they ignore this film.
You don’t have to have any pre-existing interest in Japanese music to thoroughly enjoy Live From Tokyo.
There are a couple segments that seemed to drag and the selection of imagery juxtapositioned over a few of the live performances to me seemed clumsy. For example, 90% of Nisennenmondai’s awesome performance of “Mirrorball” was obscured by a monorail train (I think it’s the Yurikamome connecting Shimashi to Odaiba if I’m not mistaken) and clips of cooks placing items onto the conveyer belt at a kaiten sushi restaurant. I presume that kaiten sushi is supposed to be a metaphor for the mechanical, krautrock element in nisennenmondai’s music. That’s ‘clever’ but I wish the audience could have seem more actual footage of the intense performance by the 3 girls in nisennemnondai.
I almost cheered when uhnellys came on screen. hahaha. It’s too bad that you could barely see Midi’s face in the background and the focus was almost completely on Kim, his baritone gt and his fro.
There were a lot of great viewpoints on what makes Tokyo’s underground music scene so creative and interesting. They discussed the obvious influence occidental (Western) music has on Japanese music but how the Japanese love to tweak and improve on all things foreign to mutate it into something uniquely their own. They covered the ‘nomura system’ of bands having to pay $$$ to the livehouses just for the opportunity to perform such that losing money at each show is the norm for almost all bands.
Quote:
(He’s referring to the widely-disliked “noruma” system, which requires that each band meet a ticket sales quota or make up the difference in cash. It is not uncommon for a band to put their all into a performance only to find themselves afterwards scraping together upwards of 30,000 yen to pay for the privilege.)
The movie is very informative and the footage of some of the more extreme/avant garde acts (eg Optrum, Makoto Oshiro) was eye-popping for most of the audience. Everyone seemed to get a kick out of d.v.d. and Sexy Sythesizer.
Lewis Rapkin et al did a truly excellent job of picking the bands for this film. In reality, Tokyo’s underground scene overall is nowhere near as extreme but there are a ton of bands in Tokyo with ideas straight out of left field that will make you say WTF?!!! I hope people who see this film don’t have expectations that Next Music from Tokyo will include bands with the same level of bizarreness.
[...]
I HIGHLY recommend this film to anyone with an interest in music. It’s only 79 min long but it’s the closest you can get to immersing yourself in Tokyo’s great undergound music scene without hopping on a plane and travelling there yourself.
When Live from Tokyo gets released on DVD on July 26 by Good Charamel Records, please go and buy/order it. If you have a heart, you won’t just wait to download it for free somewhere. But no matter how you decide to obtain it, give yourself a reward by watching this great film.
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