Second item received 20 July 2022 from the micro-label Presses Précaires in Montreal.
Perhaps untypically for this label, this is music from a rock band based in Beijing. I say this because the label usually eschews mainstream entertainment forms and instead tends to seek out low-key sound art, minimal improv, field recordings, and such like, although as curator and artist Anne-F Jacques is no stranger to that part of the world and has collaborated with Chinese sound artists, both here and on her Crustaces Tapes label. Indeed Zhao Cong, the bass guitarist and vocalist, made Fog and Fragments for the label in 2020. The trio here – Cong, Zhu Wenbo and Liu Lu – call themselves Kaoru Abe No Future, referring perhaps to the famed free jazz saxophonist from Japan who made many amazing recordings in the 1970s, and the cassette is called Another Wrong Way, Again. When I say “rock band”, that’s just to ease in the reader with some helpful navigational points, since the eccentric music barely qualifies as “rock” despite the presence of two electric guitars, and furthermore their approach to the song form is wayward and bizarre. It’s superb. They’ve managed to arrive at this point through working in local experimental scenes and activities, including their connection with the marginal tape label Zoomin’ Night, which has been documenting and releasing improv and strange music in Beijing since 2015.
Kaoru Abe No Future are somehow forcing the precepts of “rock music” through the filters of free improvisation and experimental sound art, and I think the most successful outcome has been the evolution of a strange, fragmented, and very low key approach to group performance. They deliberately keep the volume down, avoiding the usual rock excess of over-amplified noise, and strive to keep every song very simple, short, and direct. This means that songs can appear to collapse at the very end, as if the point has now been made and they simply ran out of things to say, but to my mind it’s a very good way of avoiding the traps of traditional rock-song construction – no repeated verses or choruses, which are arguably indicators of pre-conceived ideas and loaded assumptions about musical form anyway. That said, they use repetition in a deliciously inane and spastic manner, for instance on opening cut ‘Music Is Plastic Bag’, which states and restates its absurdist proposition in a throwaway manner, reminding us of a sort of 21st-century update on post-punk music. (Wouldn’t Poly Styrene have made a great job of this song?) On the other hand ‘Accordion Song’ edges a bit closer to the dark, grunged-out form of wasted garage rock which Les Rallizes Denudes have made all their own, and is one of the few times on the tape when our zaned-up trio make an attempt to honour some of the precepts set by The Velvet Underground. Other forebears we could mention include Maher Shalal Hash Baz, the very eccentric and offbeat Japanese big band, except in their case what appears to be clumsoid wrong-footing is probably carefully scored and rehearsed; and perhaps the second Ray Krayola LP also (I mean the brevity of the songs, and the way the songs keep ending when you wish they’d carry on a little longer).
Would you believe Kaoru Abe No Future recorded all these songs in a single day? Matter of fact they recorded nearly 30 songs in total, of which we’re hearing a selection. I totally love this – high recommendation for these endearingly quirkoid DIY and very individualistic musical expressions.