Friday morning
The weather forecast for this year’s Fuji Rock Festival hasn’t been encouraging. Rain pretty much every day, but right now the sun is out and the temperature is quite bearable. It was cloudy last night for the pre-festival party but I only felt a touch of mist around 11 pm.
The crowd wasn’t as big as it’s been for the past two years, which seems to mean the post-Covid “revenge” is over, though I’ve heard that Saturday is sold out. The free party last night, which is thrown mainly to thank the locals for their hospitality, seemed relatively low-key, and you could actually get food and drink without waiting. Even the fireworks, which officially kick off the festival, seemed subdued. There were no big break beats in the Japanese fashion.
That said, the live entertainment was as rowdy as always. The Mexican band Son Rompe Pera, started things off with a loud raucous set that fortified the group’s cumbia skills with punky determination. I mean, the main instrument was a marimba, played by a shirtless guy who seems to have copped his stage moves from Angus Young. Since the energy level started high and never flagged, there were no heart-stopping moments, but the prefest crowd is always raring to go so the band might be surprised today when they do their regular set at the White Stage and not that many people show up (they come on around lunch).
The second band I never heard of: FCO, who aren’t part of the official lineup. Apparently, they’re a side gig of one of the members of Tempalay, who are playing the festival. I was pleasantly surprised by the music, which had a solid pulse and some wild, caustic guitar work. I didn’t really care what the acronym stood for but once I found out I had questions.
Saturday morning
Contrary to forecasts, yesterday’s weather was almost perfect: partly cloudy and cool, with only a little drizzle in the early afternoon.
It being a Friday, the festival was not full, and I only experienced one bottleneck, which, of course, happened near the White Stage. They’ve actually opened up another forest path, supposedly to get around this problem, from the Gypsy Avalon stage to the Green Stage, but it still has to go near the White Stage where it connects to another forest path, so in a sense it’s not really a solution during times when certain shows at the far end of the festival grounds end at about the same time.
Today is sold out, so the bottlenecks will probably be worse. According to the Japan Times, the reason for the sellout is Fujii Kaze, who plays the penultimate show on the Green Stage. This repeats the pattern last year, when that slot on Saturday was filled by city pop veteran Yamashita Tatsuro, who rarely gives concerts these days. By that token, it would seem to be a kind of strategy by the promoter, Smash. The real headliner, Khruangbin, like last year’s headliner, Vulfpeck, isn’t nearly that popular in Japan, but I assume Smash still feels it has to put a foreign act at the top of the bill. Besides, if people are coming just to see Fujii, they have to have time to make it back to where they’re from afterwards.
I saw most of the acts I wanted to see yesterday. Three of them are nominally “ethnic music” groups whose members do not necessarily belong to the ethnicities whose music they play. Les Khmers, which performed in the early afternoon at the newly revamped Orange Echo, plays Cambodian pop of the 60s and 70s, though almost every member is Japanese, including leader Samut Nobe, who apparently was an exchange student in Phnom Penh some years back. I’ve always thought that Japanese kayokyoku (popular song) sounds a lot like other Asian countries’ pop music or vice versa and Les Khmers kind of fortifies that theory. The crowd really jumped, especially when the tempos revved up and Nobe started doing his awkward dance moves. He was helped enormously by a female vocalist who might have been Cambodian (her name was not listed on the festival program) and seemed to have the native moves down.
Altin Gun definitely has at least one Turkish member, vocalist and baglama player Erdinc Ecevit, but the band is headquartered in the Netherlands and, according to their bio, boasts members from all over. Still the music they play is very much based on Turkish psychedelia from the 70s that’s punched up with a more club-friendly rhythm sense. They’re one of the funkiest bands in the world at the moment, and while they held their own during the mid-afternoon at the Field of Heaven, there was a feeling that they were holding back—just as the music was building toward something monumentally ecstatic, the song would end. It was pretty amazing, but also less than what it could have been.
Antibalas is one of the foremost Afro-funk groups on the planet, and has been for almost 30 years, though they contain no musicians from Africa. Heirs to the rebel tradition of Fela Kuti, they use funk as a means to incite change, and baritone sax player Jake Pinto mentioned the current dire situation in the US. during their early evening set at Heaven. Unlike Altin Gun, they never held back and the field was jumping high during their vocal-less set, which consisted mostly of brand new material. The veteran ensemble, who haven’t played in Japan for nine years, seemed genuinely humbled by the reception.
As usual when there is too much good stuff on offer I tended to do a lot of running around from one end of the festival to the other and back again. At the far end of the grounds, where I saw the above mentioned acts, I also saw Arlo Parks, whose gently insistent dance music was heavily laden with a therapeutical component that I’m sure most of the audience, regardless of their spiritual wholeness, didn’t get, but they definitely got the groove. The Japanese electronic group Black Boboi, three women dressed completely in black, threw a hypnotic spell over the early evening crowd who had settled in the Orange Court for dinner. They held their own extremely well given the competition on other stages.
At the money end of the festival, Snail Mail delivered her strummy, personal rock songs to an audience that simply got off on the guitars—she’s quite capable on the instrument, even if she has a lead guitarist to do most of the heavy lifting. I’ve always been slightly dismissive of her songwriting, which sounds like what Taylor Swift in her post-pop phase is striving for, but the tunes stand up to scrutiny when played live. I was completely taken by a guy who was standing in front of me, dressed incongruously in a Mexican pro wrestler mask and flowered lounge pants. I didn’t have the nerve to ask him to turn around so I could get a photo of his masked face with Snail Mail in the background (depth of field challenge?). That would have been Pulitzer-worthy.
Like Antibalas, The xx were making their first return to Japan in almost a decade and seemed really stoked to be playing Fuji Rock. As the Green Stage headliner for the day, they had a lot to live up to and delivered more than enough to send the crowd out into the late night maelstrom of obscure bands and DJs in high spirits. By presenting their chillest songs during the first half of their set, they could dedicate the latter half to their dance music, and while Romy got the lion’s share of camera shots on the big screen, it was bassist Oliver Sim who clearly commanded the stage. The guy is truly a sexy beast. Jamie xx’s occasional solo break beats were few and far between, but this is supposed to be a group comeback, right?
Maya Ongaku, a Japanese psychedelic trio, was the first act for the late shift at the Red Marquee, and while I was beyond faded at that point, they held my attention with long-form repetitive melody dumps that never quite fell into jamming, though, as with Altin Gun, they seemed to stop right when they were reaching liftoff.
But the show of the day was definitely Turnstile. I saw them when they played Fuji two years ago and liked it a lot, but then they were the penultimate act on the White Stage on Sunday, and it took a while for the crowd to warm to their emo-hardcore shtick. What difference two years make! The audience in front of the Green Stage for their late afternoon show was already quite rowdy 15 minutes before they took the stage, and remained raucous yet indefatigably sentimental during the whole of the punishing hourlong set. These people know all the words to the songs as well as their meaning, and the cameras that fed into the giant stage screens were more often trained on the audience than on the group, whose diversity makes them almost faceless. I counted three distinct mosh pits forming spontaneously early on and the band members catered to the feeling, which only grew as the hour stretched on and each emotionally impacted song built on the last one. There was even one guy who must have been a plant, but the moment was too perfect to tell for sure. During “Dull,” when lead singer Brendan Yates talks about “waiting for the call,” a guy at the front of the barricades held up an actual red landline telephone. I mean, who prepares for such things except stoned obsessives? But that’s what the Turnstile show was, one of the best hard rock performances I’ve ever seen at Fuji, because the band and the audience worked as one. Exhilarating doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Sunday morning
It rained quite heavily Saturday morning, but when the time the festival opened at 11 am, the precipitation had turned to drizzle and by noon the sun was out. It didn’t get hot, since there was a stiff, cool breeze coming down the mountains. The rest of the day was near perfect, weather-wise.
Encouraged by the strength of my selections on Friday, I decided against my usual regime of checking out acts I knew nothing about when there was nothing I especially wanted to see, so the first set of the day for me was the Beths at 2 pm at the Red Marquee. The New Zealand band’s brand of jangly guitar pop is the kind of indie thing that goes over very well in Japan, and the shed was suitably stuffed with people who knew their repertoire. Elizabeth Stokes’ self-deprecating manner and matter-of-fact vocal style make her effortlessly likable, even to people who may not understand English, and she communicated real personality during the group’s hourlong set, which gave them ample opportunity to cover a good deal of their recorded output. Almost everything galloped forward at a rapid clip, and each song was met with an even louder ovation than the previous one. It was a pretty satisfying way to start the day.
I decided to trek out to the other end of the festival to check out the Korean power trio Cadejo and, along the way, score some coffee, because there are more stalls to buy coffee out there than there are in the Oasis food court. Of course, great minds think alike and every place I passed that sold coffee had real long lines. I opted for some cold green tea, which supposedly has as much if not more caffeine than a similar serving of coffee, but the line was much shorter. The stall was in the forest next to Gypsy Avalon, which has become a kind of woodland mall—juice bars, art galleries, Japanese confectioneries.
Cadejo was something of a bust. From the one video I saw of them I had gotten the impression that they were a kind of avant-jam band, and they are in the sense that they constantly improvise on very loose established patterns, going from strict reggae to punishing noise rock in the bat of an eye, but this lack of a consistent tone made their music more frustrating than involving. The guitarist is surely some kind of genius, but the rhythm section was often out of sync with what he was trying to do. Still, the crowd seemed to appreciate what they were attempting and cheered them on. Their Japanese and English were good enough that they could actually maintain communication throughout the set I saw. I left about halfway through.
Needing a rest, I found a grassy spot on the hill in back of the sound booth at the Green Stage to relax, but was shooed away by staff with bullhorns who were telling people who had set up tarps and little campgrounds to move higher up because the area was going to get crowded. I assumed they were talking about the act I was waiting for, Basement Jaxx, but they were probably talking about the act after BJ, Fujii Kaze, who was the reason Saturday was sold out.
But when Basement Jaxx started their late afternoon show, I realized that the tarp clearing was being done for the folks who wanted to dance, because everyone all the way up to the tree line was boogieing for the whole hour. I’ve seen BJ several times, and I’ve seen the Chemical Brothers just as often, and while it may be a chump’s game to compare the two, they emerged at the same time with a similar m.o.: electronic dance music delivered as unified shows. The difference is that BJ really does put on a show, with extra vocalists and dancers, elaborate sets, and numerous costume changes. More significantly BJ’s musical preferences shade definitely toward African-American R&B, while the Chemicals is more into purely electronic rave type bangers. BJ had three excellent singers who were able to bend the enormous crowd to their will with their gospel-inflected encouragements. They avoided break beats in favor of dramatic flourishes that always hit harder. And the camp elements only added to the entertainment value.
As it happened, the Chemicals were represented at this year’s Fuji in the form of half the brotherhood, Tom Rowland, who was the mastermind behind the day’s headliner on the White Stage, Tomora, his side collaboration with Norwegian pop singer Aurora. Having grown bored with Green Stage headliner Khruangbin’s noodling I decided to check out Tomora’s show instead, and at first didn’t know what to make of it. Rowland’s influence is palpable in the loud, almost industrial edge of his beats, but I couldn’t make heads nor tails of the visuals. The crowd made it difficult to get very close (I have a paranoia about being caught in a stampede at the White Stage, so I usually hover around the edges) and all I could see were pre-produced videos on the jumbotron screens. Aurora was obviously on stage, and I assumed she was singing, but it felt beside the point when you had these storyline videos telling you how to feel and what to think.
But after a half hour, the action moved resolutely to the stage and the music made much more sense. And there was a story there of a sort too, because Aurora was doubled by another woman who was dressed and made up to look just like her. Whether she was also a singer or just a stage accessory, I couldn’t tell, but it upped the dramatic component and the music was more exciting as a result. I really wanted to stay to the very end, but, you know, paranoia.
There were rumors that Rowland was going to do a DJ set at the tiny Naeba Shokudo stage in the Oasis after midnight, and a huge crowd materialized there around 12, but I didn’t stick around to find out if he really showed.
After BJ I caught Thurston Moore at the Red Marquee. Though he didn’t play any Sonic Youth songs, he might as well have given the makeup of his band: SY’s Steve Shelley on drums, a female bassist whose singing voice sounded a lot like Kim Gordon’s, and a lead guitarist who complemented Moore’s buzz saw strumming with pure skronk. He also stuck mainly to standard rock song structures except during those predictable codas when everything just sounded like shredded metal. Moore, a septuagenarian, seemed quite fit, though he had to read his lyrics from sheets on a music stand, which he’d toss on the floor whenever he finished with them. Exuding a clear peace-and-love vibe appropriate to his generation (even if his iconoclastic rep as a young musician didn’t align with that of an unreconstructed hippie), he communicated fitfully with the audience, which wasn’t as large as I anticipated considering how many times SY toured Japan in the past. Before playing the song “Cantaloup,” he told a story from that morning about eating cantaloup in the artist’s quarters at the hotel. He seemed to think it had some kind of mystical meaning.
Though I’ve seen Fujii Kaze’s videos and one appearance on NHK, I don’t really know much about his music, and assumed it could be categorized as Japanese R&B. But after seeing him perform in front of a sea of adoring fans representing a wide swath of ages (a photographer friend said there were middle aged female Fujii fans at the barricades for BJ, obviously staking their territory), he sounds more like what Americans would call yacht rock. Of course, yacht rock as translated into Japanese would be so-called city pop, whose main architect, Yamashita Tatsuro, was last year’s big draw, so there is some consistency here, the difference being that Fujii is about 40 years younger. He’s also incredibly beautiful, in a very feminine way, with high cheekbones, a delicate nose, and flowing brown hair. For his Green Stage set he wore a white suit whose enormous size would put David Byrne to shame.
But my biggest impression is that the guy is definitely talented and not just another manufactured pop star. Apparently, he was a child piano prodigy, and his playing was impeccable. More significantly, his songs had melodic depth and breadth, even when they sometimes sounded romantically corny, whether he was singing in English or Japanese. His English, by the way, is fluent, and I assume the reason he spoke half his stage patter in English is because he wanted to connect to the foreign element in the audience, especially the Asians. Or he could have been showing off. He seems to like to show off.
Though BJ was my highlight for the day, I did see several DJ sets that made me quite happy. Almost all the DJs playing the Blue Galaxy are old men, Japanese or English. They play only 45s, no music files, and almost nothing that was released after 1975, concentrating mainly on vintage ska/reggae, Japanese kayokyoku, and American R&B. The tent is always hopping, with most of the dancers being young people who may or may not know this music but definitely can feel it at a primal level.
But there was another DJ that made an impression at Gan-Ban Square over at the other side of the Oasis. Tempalay’s AAAMYYY (or “Amy” to people with dyslexia) did a short, action-packed DJ set with the help of a bassist/guitarist and a rapper/dancer that was startling in its originality and refusal to resort to quirk (outside of an opening cut that she sped up to produce helium-quality vocals). Her electronica instincts are peerless in setting up where her melodies have to go to reach catharsis, and she isn’t a bad singer, either. Actually, calling it a DJ set may be shortchanging her. It was a pure high-wire solo act.
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