Amy Rebecca Klein

Nisennenmondai Comes to America

In 1999, guitarist Masako Takeda, bassist Yuri Zaikawa, and drummer Sayaka Himeno met at a meeting of their University’s music club, formed a band and named it Nisennenmondai, after the impending Year 2000 Crisis. The name stuck, and the band kept playing—even after Y2K itself turned out to be something of a dud. Looking back, it seems pretty quaint that we all expected every machine on the planet to fail simultaneously at midnight on that millennial New Year. Who has the energy to read about apocalyptic prophesies anymore? The global recession yields scarier headlines every day. 

We’re lucky that Nisennenmondai outlasted the rumor of the bug in the machine—largely because we weren’t ready for this band back in the year 2000. At the end of the Clinton Era, America’s future seemed pretty secure. We wanted classic rock or retro-revivalism—the Strokes or the White Stripes, or else, some spunky electroclash with a dance beat and a good sense of humor. Meanwhile, in Japan, the 90’s couldn’t have been more dissimilar: In 1991, the economic bubble of the late 80’s burst, and the country sank into a ten-year recession known as the “lost decade.” Sound familiar?

Finishing up an American tour opening for Battles and heading off to Europe for additional dates, including a stop at All Tomorrow’s Parties in London, Nisennenmondai seems poised to break into the indiespehere this side of the Pacific, and it’s about time we started listening to them, because the cultural moment is oddly appropriate.

Nisennenmondai makes music for confusing times. It is complicated, abstract, largely genre-less music. It’s also wholly original, oddly thrilling, and strangely evocative of the apocalypse. But to me, what is most interesting about Nisennenmondai is the way in which the band encourages the listener to think about creativity as a function of collectivity and connectivity. At a time like this, when many people are coming together and trying to create something new, Nisennenmondai seems to make a whole lot of sense.

Here’s how a typical song starts: Takeda coaxes a short burst of harmonics, taps, and squeaks out of her guitar. She plays a few notes extremely fast, loops them, plays some more fast notes on top of the original ones, and then loops those too. Her approach to the instrument is entirely her own, less melodic than it is percussive and textural. Her fingers seem to be pushing buttons on some sort of squealing, sighing, pulsating, perpetual motion machine. A robotic guitar goddess comes to mind—Marnie Stern built out of sheet metal.

Eventually, Zaikawa starts laying down a bassline that is short, fast, and seriously funky. The funk you were probably not expecting. The guitar-bass duo suddenly sounds like Sonic Youth just took the train up to the South Bronx to hang out with ESG and they all had an awesome party where someone raised the idea of a starting a band together. The bassline repeats over and over, adding tension, while you close your eyes and fantasize that Kim and Thurston are still in love, the Scroggins sisters finally get to quit their day-jobs, and everyone starts writing music for the new supergroup that will eventually go on tour with Wild Flag. Then your head explodes from the idea of too much awesome—except this explosion is actually the sound of the drums coming in.

Himeno, or Hime for short, is like no other drummer I’ve ever seen. She sounds something like a drum machine set as fast as it can go. She thrashes the open high hat, pounds the kick drum, and whacks the snare with a ferocity that almost makes you pity the equipment for having to take this much unmitigated abuse. There is never any sort of pause. Her arms flow from one piece of the set to the other in a whirl of unending speed.  There is more athleticism in a single one of her snare hits than I can lay claim to in the past year. Hime tackles techno, dance, and polyrhythmic beats with a hint of funk—and as she plays, she closes her eyes and shakes her ponytail around in some kind of supersonic orbit, so that her face becomes a blur contiguous with the motion of he arms. Watching her, I start to doubt that anyone else can play this fast and this precise, and soon, it appears that so does everyone else in the crowd, because a massive cheer ripples through the audience every time Hime plays a lightning-fast round on the toms and then segues right back into the beat. I’m not talking about people applauding for a drum solo. I’m talking about people spontaneously losing their shit every time the drummer does a fill—which happens about once every few seconds.

A few weeks ago, Nisennenmondai played Death By Audio, where their live show provided a stunning example of the ability of a band to communicate through rhythm. All three band members found and kept their fingers on the precise pulse of the sound throughout shifting tempos, strange time signatures, and layers and layers of distorted, looped guitars; it was almost as if the three women shared a collective heartbeat. Thinking about the amount of practice that must have gone into each of the four 15-20 minute epics that the band played honestly made me feel a little sick. As a musician myself, I know how hard it can be to hear the other members of the band onstage, let alone listen to them—and this band was listening to each other so closely, they seemed to be psychic. I nearly laughed out loud when I read a negative review that claimed that the band sounded “under-rehearsed.” Telling Nisennenmondai that they need to rehearse is a bit like telling John Cage that he needs to make 4:33 a little quieter. I actually had a chat with Umi, the band’s driver, which ended up confirming what I already suspected. When I asked her whether the band was enjoying their time in the U.S., she admitted they hadn’t had many opportunities to go out yet. “After they finish the show, they’re up until four in the morning every night talking about how they can improve.”

As a band, it is difficult to walk the thin line between control and chaos; Nisennenmondai entrances us by dabbling in both extremes. Although it may begin slowly, each song builds to a climax that reminds you of sonic confetti drifting through the air, and you suddenly feel like you are at some kind of Japanese festival—the screech of traffic and the thump of people marching, pentatonic scales wafting from traditional instruments, laughter, someone at a temple thumping on a gong. The sensory overload is strangely soothing, and after a few minutes, you stop feeling the individual minutiae of the music and start feeling its cadences, its gentle, repetitive patterns, and you drift among the pulsating waves. You almost feel transported to another place, and looking around, you notice that nearly everyone else feels the same way. There’s only one guy in front freaking out, trying in vain to wiggle his whole body in time to every single beat. Everyone else in the audience seems to have entered a fugue state, has his or her eyes closed, and is gently rocking back and forth like a stoned hippie in front of the Grateful Dead.

But suddenly, Takeda unleashes a barrage of harsh noise. The guitar goes straight back into the amplifier, generating squalls of feedback, and Takeda throttles the guitar neck her hands. Hime attacks the drum set, keeping her whole body limp except her arms, so she looks half-dead, while she conjures some kind of avant-garde free noise solo evocative of Yoshida Tatsuya of Ruins or Brian Chippendale of Lightning Bolt. A minute later, the band finds the beat again precisely where they left off, and the imaginary Japanese street festival returns as it was, but with more energy. For all their precision and care, Nisennenmondai has no problem tearing down the towering sonic structures they build, and often, it is the collapse of the song is where the music becomes its most human.

It’s almost impossible to listen to Nisennenmondai and not think of technology—and not just because of their name. It’s because of the way they play with the sounds of industry and electronics, because of the uncanny, almost inhuman perfection of the drums, and the interconnected nature of the songs, and the way that the various parts of the band become one. However, watching Nisennenmondai, it’s almost impossible not to think of writing. When I watch the bassist pick out her simple melodies and observe the diligence with which she watches the drummer, searching for the perfect fraction of a second into which to insert each sound, I remember the surrealist poets who were interested in choosing words based on sound rather than on meaning. Like Nisennenmondai’s music, their work evokes the feeling of being lost in a dream. After all, Nisennenmondai weaves twenty-minute sonic tapestries with no verses, choruses, or lyrics to speak of; it appears that the band is most invested in the act of putting the right sounds in exactly the right order and a whole lot less interested in trying to tell us what it all might mean. That they leave up to us.

If you happened to be at Death By Audio, or if you were lucky enough to catch Nisennenmondai opening up for Battles at Webster Hall the night before, then you were lucky, like me. But chances are you weren’t there, because unfortunately, not that many people this side of the Pacific even know who Nisennenmondai are. I wish I could say that their lack of success stateside is simply a result of Nisennenmondai being super DIY and underground, but the band has actually opened for Hella, Lightning Bolt, Prefuse 73, Thurston Moore, Mika Miko, No Age, Battles, and members of the Ex, has received one very favorable and one very high album rating from Pitchfork, and has played for tens of thousands of people at European festivals such as Roskilde and Primavera, right alongside today’s hottest indie buzz-bands. It’s not like Nisennenmondai’s music is particularly inaccessible. In fact, fans of noise rock, techno, post-punk, electronica, psychedelia, and prog can all find something to savor here. 

So why aren’t more people talking about this band? Well first there’s the fact that they haven’t toured the U.S. since 2005, and while they have released albums here, I really think that the recordings only capture a small portion of the equation. The live-composition element—witnessing the way these overwhelming soundscapes grow out of a single guitar note—is really what sends you over the edge into fandom. I think that must be at least half of the reason people haven’t paid much attention to the band over the past few years. But sadly, the other half of that reason has to do with the way we tend to see women artists, and artists from other cultures as fantasies, spectacles, curiosities, or “others.”

When I take a look at the information that’s available on the internet, it’s pretty clear that most of what has been spoken or written about the band boils down to a weird distillation of sexist and racist stereotypes. Nearly every source I could find online began his or her description of Nisennenmondai by emphasizing that the women in the band are small and so you would not expect them to be good or interesting because they are small, and female. I quote Prefuse 73: “They started to play and the drummer was as big as my hand….Next thing you know, these three, tiny diminutive women were making us look like idiots because they were so incredible.” Reading stuff like this, you get the feeling that this Nisennenmondai must be like that group of kids who impersonate Kiss.

Luckily, it sounds like Prefuse 73 changed his mind after seeing the show. But some critics remain nonplussed: Spectrum Culture tweeted that Nisennenmondai were “literally dwarfed by the stage,” and linked to the following review: “Japanese schoolgirls… Nisennenmondai were almost swallowed by the stage. Wide and cavernously deep, the Emo’s East stage would be a luxury to any group with an epic roster…but the threesome felt lost in it.” Here, the Japanese schoolgirl trope seems borderline offensive, and pretty inappropriate, given that the women in the band all graduated from college ten years ago. 

Other reviewers recycle the tired cliché about Japanese women being cute all the time. Dazed Digital writes: “The noisiest and at the same time the cutest thing to emerge from Tokyo’s vibrant noise community is Nisennenmondai, an all-female noise trio with as much of a penchant for matching dresses as for Kraut-inspired noise rock.” Having seen this band play twice now, I can safely say that the vibe they are going for is not cute—it’s more like I am dead serious so don’t fuck with me. I mean, the members of Nisennenmondai are all perfectly good-looking people, but there is nothing cute about their sound, and honestly, they seem to have as much interest in playing to the crowd as Jeff Mangum has had for the past decade. For most of the show at Death By Audio, Zaikawa faced the back of the stage, Takeda had her hair in front of her face, and Himeno’s body language alternated between fits of religious ecstasy and homicidal rage. 

I’m not saying that posts on music blogs can make or break a band. But I do believe that music blogs often reflect cultural undertones and sociopolitical dynamics that exist in the larger world, and these forces inevitably play a part in shaping a band’s popularity. If you look at what the non-writers have to say about Nisennenmondai on twitter, you’ll find a wide range of opinions about the band, their music, gender, and race. One guy seems utterly enthralled by the live show, and writes, “Nisennenmondai at death by audio is brilliant inhuman live techno psych miasma noise bliss, fyi.” A second guy theorizes that there’s no point to having a drummer who sounds “like a drum machine,” but “it’s okay tho because she’s hot.” Others occupy the bizarre middle ground between stereotyping and full-fledged awe: One girl tweets, “I’m not usually big on girl bands but they blew my mind.”

Just as the way we talk about art can determine its lasting cultural impact, the way we talk about gender and race determines what these categories will continue to mean. Cultural boundaries are fluid and shifting, and it’s just not enough for us just to think of these shifting conditions as existing outside us. We have to engage with these definitions of gender and race, and we have to struggle with them, and recognize that the way we write is often our way of writing these definitions. Language is a two-way street, and the way we talk about the world is what makes the world the way it is.  

Whenever I write about music, I try to abide by Janet Weiss’ advice about the importance of the imagination in letting go of the stereotypes you might have about a particular artist. In a recent interview with Slate, when she was asked how she hopes people will listen to Wild Flag, she answered: “Don’t limit us. Just let us play music for you, and we’ll surprise you. Have some things maybe you don’t understand, things that are revealed to you through the music, things that you feel…. Imagination is such a key component to listening to music. Putting your headphones on and letting your mind wander. Letting it mean something to you that the band maybe didn’t even intend.”

To judge the art itself rather than the artist who created it is usually more difficult than it seems. This dilemma is something that my feminist friends and I struggle with whenever we realize that we love music by someone like Lil Wayne or Bob Dylan—someone who is a genius but still sings a lot of misogynist lyrics. I wonder: How do I separate myself from the women in the songs, and how do I separate my preconceptions about the artist from the things I love about him, the songs themselves. In the end, I often find that there is really no way to accomplish this sort of intellectual separation. Yet, the strange thing is, that when I use my imagination and when I fill in the blanks, and read myself into songs, and see connections that the artist never even intended, then the distance between “you” or “I,” between “man” and “woman,” “artist” and “audience” gets smaller and smaller until it almost fades away.