There is no harder thing for a music reviewer to do than categorize music that’s, quite simply, uncategorizable. Especially so when it’s trying to pigeonhole or describe Chito Kawachi’s jaw-droppingly, unclassifiable 1993 debut, チトチック/クラクラ (CHITOTIHC/KULA-kura).
Chito, much like other fascinating Japanese composers like BaNaNa (aka Yuji Kawashima) and AQ Ishii, is one of those names you notice who appear credited as performer, writer, or producer, that signal you’re in for a special listen. A percussionist at heart, it’s Chito’s dexterity with all sorts of global instruments that allows him to add his unique flavor to albums spanning the realms of pop to classical, from experimental to overtly overground.
One could attribute Chito’s creative influence on the place of his birth: Fukuoka, Kyushu. It was on that far western Japanese locale that one can palpably feel and see a stronger pull of myriad cosmopolitan Asian cultures (Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, and more) sharing their plane on the East China Sea. When he first ventured into the realm of making music, as a rocker with brother Kuni Kawachi, it felt like Chito always wanted to create music that wasn’t a copy of something else but one tinged by his own cultural underpinnings.
As a psychedelic rocker turned jazz-funk pioneer, and a member of seminal Tokyo-based rock bands like The Happenings Four, Love Live Life, and Tranzam, you always felt like Chito was trying to be part of whatever forefront of music was present in Japan’s outer musical edges. It was in the 70’s, withTranzam, that Chito began to shift his creative world elsewhere. With Tranzam, his exploration of global groove and jazz, introduced Chito to the idea of a more mercurial form of instrumental music and allowed him to develop within that kind of musical vocabulary.
By the late ‘70s, as a composer, Chito exited the rockstar lifestyle and ventured toward more assured income, receiving commissions by huge TV networks like NHK or brands like Coca-Cola to craft music for stage and screen, commercials and radio. As a songwriter, Chito would work with anyone like fellow Fukuokan pop singer, Mio Takaki, or contribute glowing arrangements to the music of others like Masahiko Kondo. In that weirder world of ever-evolving Japanese pop music, somehow, Chito found second-wind as a sort of in demand hit-maker.
Yet, Chito — the musical provocateur, if you look closely, never completely left the building. You hear it in his musical side trips with others like Takami Hasegawa, Bi Kyo Ran, Shoukichi Kina/Champloose, Asiabeat, and East Pulse (his special one-off duo with Toshi Yokota). In 1984, Chito would create a loose, avantgarde percussion unit he’d dub “CHITOTHIC” and for the time being, lend its sound to experimental environmental music videos created for Bandai and NHK. Eventually, five years later, Kenji Sawada would enlist this crew to perform as backup on his “tropical swinging” Co-Colo 1.
At the start of a new decade, in the late ‘80s, Chito would begin his attempt to push the envelope again. Seeing the expansion of music, led by the realm of global electronic dance music, together with Makoto Matsushita and Malaysian percussionist, Lewis Pragasam, they created Asiabeat as a means to reorient this new electronic groove with new “Oriental” ideas they felt weren’t being explored fully. Weirdly enough, it was Chito’s work here that would present him with the opportunity to rework the Andean folk of Bolivian music giant, Los Kjarkas, for the dancefloor with their 1991 release, Tecno Andino.
So in the year of our lord, 1993, at this point in time, Chito was so locked into the global groove that I think other musicians took notice and influenced what he had accomplished. You’d hear it in the work of one Haruomi Hosono, whose Medicine Compilation From The Quiet Lodge wouldn’t sound far off from their shared contributions just a bit later that year on チトチック/クラクラ (CHITOTIHC/KULA-kura). Whatever was moving Harry then, arguably, was a product of that new Asian beat explored by Chito first.
What makes チトチック/クラクラ (CHITOTIHC/KULA-kura) so fascinating is that, in some weird way, it’s a meeting of minds and musical language of disparate artists at the forefront of a new kind of groove. There might be no “L” in the Japanese language but that doesn’t stop it from trying to find a working substitute. Similarly, Chito enlisted members from his Asiabeat and East Pulse, others from Mu-Project, K2, and Adi, and brought in Haruomi Hosono to play mercurial bass. In the great expanse of experimental Japanese-made pop music all of them might have gone in “out-there” in separate directions but on this record it was Chito who pointed their focus all on the same track.
“Bayou (バイヨー)” presents this floating idea of dance music with beats and rhythms that hover among the ethereal. Other like “Scribble Dance (らくがき)” use Harry’s acid bass lines to dig cavernous grooves that only come up for air via adrenaline-fueled jumps by Haruo Kubota’s quite Adrian Belew-esque guitar lines. Perhaps, Discipline-era King Crimson is an apt comparison to what Chito and his crew pull off here.
Where Discipline signaled a way to reconcile the most out-there polymeter music of prog with the more satisfying parts of post-punk and the new electronic wave, so to do I think チトチック/クラクラ (CHITOTIHC/KULA-kura) has that bit of heart/spirit in mind. This is the out-there of Japanese experimental music satisfying the best parts of the, then, new electronic wave. It takes a certain degree of proficiency and sheer chutzpah to go from “11” to the wonderfully impressionistic, ambient minimalism of a track like “Sanghyang (サンヤン)”.
It’s the joy of not knowing what each new track will hold and just letting yourself follow the hard-working hands of such learned musicians that brings the most out of Chito’s vision. It’s this very liquid music that keeps you on your toes on tracks like “Astral Lamp (無影灯)”. Tracks like “Jagg-chagg (ジャグチャグ)” and “Filament (フィラメント)” present a fourth world music bifurcated in exponential parts by the glitch of newer, modern, electronic modalities, intersected by expressions by differing voices. Every track you switch to presents a new way to get lost in the many phases and places Chito wants you to travel to.
In the end, as always, it’s not the destination but the journey through it that plants this album in your memory.
One response
Listening to it now, brilliant album, thank you so much!