HAIR STYLISTICS - RUSTLING UP A RACKET AND A RHAPSODY
Published: The Age, EG, July 23, 2010.
Sometime-novelist Masaya Nakahara is glad to be back doing what he does best - creating earth-shattering noise, writes Dan Rule.
Masaya Nakahara has a mean self-deprecating streak. He describes his noise-lashed live performances in terms of “self-destruction”; he labels his award winning writing “half-arsed”; he chuckles regularly and heartily at himself.
“I do exactly what anyone else could do onstage,” he offers, pauses, giggles. “It’s just about how shamelessly and unscrupulously I do it.”
The Tokyo noise musician, better known by his past and present stage monikers Violent Onsen Geisha and Hair Stylistics, is a rarity in the often dark, dour world of noise music.
In a two-decade creative career that has seen him share stages with Sonic Youth, Beck and John Spencer Blues Explosion, collaborate with Jim O’Rourke and win Japan’s prestigious Yukio Mishima Prize for his 2001 “anti-novel” Bouquets of Flowers Everywhere, the 39-year-old has built a reputation on merging tectonic swarms of volume and texture with an all but comedic palette of samples, sound bites and stage antics.
The artist, however, frames his output – which has included acclaimed 2004 album Custom Cock Confused Death and recent 12-month, 12-release recording project Monthly Hair Stylistics – in a somewhat more humble light.
“Loud noises are just fun,” offers Nakahara, speaking from Tokyo with the help of a translator on the eve of his debut Australian performance as Hair Stylistics at The Toff in Town on Sunday night. “I kind of just feel like I’m directing traffic in a way.”
“My equipment and devices make noise and I just direct it and try and mould it into something crazy and interesting.”
Using samplers, delays and various electronic bits and bobs, the joy of Nakahara’s approach is the ambiguous connection between gesture and sound.
“That’s one of the things I really love about noise and electronic music,” he says. “There can be all this crazy action but it might not actually be directly linked to the sound. The audience doesn’t even know what’s happening.”
“It’s kind of like when you strum a guitar and when you do a windmill – it’s the same sound, but a windmill is far more interesting to watch.”
The son of a Tokyo illustrator, Nakahara spent his childhood “making stuff”. “Because of my father’s job, there were always materials around,” he recalls. He latched onto the work of Jean Luc Godard as a teenager and soon began devouring film soundtracks and avant-garde music.
Nevertheless, Nakahara didn’t attempt to make music of his own until he stumbled across the chaotic beats and sample collages of late 1980s hip-hop crews like Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions. “When you think back to bands like Public Enemy, their music had the potential to encompass a lot of different things,” he says. “It was so open-ended and there really wasn’t a particular style as such, which was very attractive to me.”
He saved up to buy his own sampler and multi-track tape recorder in 1988, only to realise he needed more equipment to make hip-hop. “After buying those two things I realised that all I could make was noise,” he laughs.
His foray into literature is just as unlikely. Nakahara is completely untrained and while critics have anointed his collection of short stories Mari and Fifi’s Massacre Songbook (1998), aforementioned novel Bouquets of Flowers Everywhere and book of film criticism Masaya Nakahara: 2004–2007 Work Journal (2008) as signposts of Japanese literature’s avant-garde, he casts his writing as little more than frivolous.
“I don’t really like literature,” he says. “It really is just work for me, a way of making money. I don’t give it much thought.”
Indeed, Nakahara’s heart lies in his unhinged musical explorations. “I like it when the audience recognise those moments when I’m playing and I become confused and lose control of the sound,” he laughs.
“Please try and find those moments. Try and find the moments where I don’t know what is going on, because there will be a few of them.”
Masaya Nakahara, aka Hair Stylistics, plays The Toff in Town on Sunday, July 25 with Menstruation Sisters and Marco Fusinato.
