One of the world’s most populous cities and certainly among the most interesting, Tokyo is a place where there is never a lack of worthwhile things to do, and that includes musical options in the countless “live houses,” or concert bars, peppered across the municipal map. Japanese musicians and fans have long demonstrated a thirst for sounds from abroad, and an informed respect as well, so quality rock, reggae, jazz, and much more can be found easily enough. For the foreign visitor, the distinctively domestic creations and interpretations are the most interesting. While tickets aren’t cheap, the online reservation system is practical (and honourably devoid of treacherous supplementary fees), sound quality is taken seriously, early start times much appreciated, and the sheer energy of the local audiences astounding. Below are a quartet of musical events from early spring that PAN M 360 is pleased to report back on. Stories by Rupert Bottenberg and Alain Brunet who were in Japan last spring.
Neko Hacker @ O-East, Shibuya, March 23, 2024
One of several venues under the O banner in the eternally busy Shibuya district, all owned by sleazy streaming giant Spotify, O-East nonetheless can’t be faulted for cleanliness, excellent sound and sight lines, and a spaciousness that’s at a premium in such a dizzyingly dense megalopolis. The room’s 1,300-person capacity was nonetheless entirely accounted for by the enthusiastic (bordering on frenzied) audience, few of whom were much past the national minimum drinking age of 20. Granted, it was a free show (with a request for donations upon the concert’s conclusion), but there was no denying the ferocious reverence the audience held for Neko Hacker, a duo plus friends who are hardly known outside of Japan.
That should change, because the core pair, guitarist/producer Sera and lyricist/songwriter Kassan, have since 2018 assumed a mandate to “spread Japanese music to the world.” What they’re doing it with is an almost perfect amalgam of the country’s contemporary pop-culture sounds. They’ve christened it “kawaii future rock,” formulated as “kawaii X EDM X rock.” The first part, Japanese for “cute,” is represented by ubiquitous shoujo anime fan art (the duo’s avatars, appearing on their record covers and in the image above, are a pair of techno-coquettes, one with peach-coloured hair, the other turquoise à la Hatsune Miku), and by young women serving as guest singers, rolling on stage just when Kassan’s prefabricated vocaloid tracks won’t quite cut it anymore. The second two ingredients manifest as video-game jams undergirded by trance grooves and complemented by barnstorming guitar riffs.
That rock element was augmented in the final stretch of the concert by the sudden appearance of a full heavy-metal trio (bass, drums, and a second guitar)—entirely unnecessary, thoroughly funny and enjoyable. The whole was supplemented by a video barrage on the backdrop screen, a chaotic soup of 8-bit graphics and chibi cyberpunk cartoon girly-girls.
What’s undeniable in the accelerated, gleefully overstated music of Neko Hacker, reflecting a tendency that’s ubiquitous in Japanese indie rock, is the pronounced spirit of ganbatte, a Japanese cheer that could be explained as something like “do your best, we believe in you.” Beset by demographic decline, economic downturn, and environmental anxiety, the Japanese are at pains to summon up optimism these days, but despite, or perhaps because of that, the kids are snatching it of thin air and making delicious noise out of it.
