te_ri is a characteristic dislocation instrumental rock band formed by a pair of person whose live in Iwate and Okayama. We will explain the achievement point at the present time in these 10 years is the official interview of the album “kasugai low gravity” which divided into three parts, the first, the second and third parts.
In the first part, we will explain how te_ri was formed, the artists who were affected, the original composition method using bugs in the composition software, and the practice method at long distances. Please enjoy the YouTube videos as well. (Sentence / Structure: Jun Okubo)
How te_ri was formed
-I’d like to start from what kind of band te_ri is, so I would like to ask you to introduce the members first. First of all, can you introduce each other to each other? Mr. Murakami.
Murakami (M): Yes, and Takashi Katayama is a drummer from Osaka at the age of 39. That’s all (laughs).
– It’s simple (laughs). Now, from Mr. Katayama, please tell us about Mr. Murakami.
Katayama (K): Kyoju Murakami, I always call him Murakami Kun because he is five years younger than me?
M: I am 35.
K: Ok,4 years. When we met first time, he looks like Otaku(Nerd). I thought difficult to communicate with him. But when I entered the studio, it was so flexible to communicate with him until now. At that time, if i make a decision based only on the appearance, there is no now. That who looks like otaku guy effort have been pushed even further, so we are still continuing.
– (Laugh)
I don’t know its say sharpness or what, or the quality of the changing sphere has changed, and it’s going to be quite amazing. I think he is still crazy more and still searching.
– We are no problem with communication since then.
K: Yeah, he is so tight and straight guy and oppositely I pull and hold on(laughs). Cause I’m the flexible one.
M: About tour bookings and hotels are 100% arranged by me. Oh, sorry to my late additional, Murakami, part to plays guitar.。
– Ok well Then, I would like to ask you how the band te_ri was formed.
M: It’s been 10 years since I formed, but I originally wanted to do a duo band. So I was looking for a drummer. When I asked my friend if there was anyone, she introduced me to a good drummer in Osaka. That was Mr. Katayama.
– So you guys didn’t know each other face before . Did you have a concept or image other than a duo? And What you want from a drummer?
M: I wanted to do a duo band because I was aspiration about Ruins. From that time and still now , Ruins was a big influence, and I wanted to do something like that. So, I think there were some things that I think it would be nice if there were person who were close to drummer style as Mr. Yoshida (Tatsuya) more or less.
Ruins
– Did you mean “more or less” when you actually started your band, you didn’t have been explain about that want to be like kind of “Ruins”?
K:No, I didn’t get that information. When I first met with him, I was been asked that what’s my favorite band was, so I replied Arti E Mestieri of Italian Prog, and he said “I like it too” from riding behind the bicycle. And he sharing with me about “Ruins” later.
arti & mestieri
M: The body structure of the drummer of the Arti E Mestieri also look likes Tatsuya Yoshida. So I think even if we didn’t talk about “Ruins” on the day we met, I notice that we each other are similar about aspiration the drummer type through Arti E Mestieri.
K: Yeah, It was absolutely match a common language keyword.
– What’s the common point of Ruins and te_ri is that they act fast and crunchy.
M: Yeah, the technical and it feels like macho. I’m not a macho, but I like music that has macho and guts internally. It’s like hardcore.
– You guys are formed the band in Tokyo?
K: Murakami-kun came to Osaka when I was in Osaka. We met in Tokyo when I had the image that I wanted to do music a little more seriously, so I thought I could do something. So, when we first met in Osaka, the impression that maybe that guy is “geek” and I went into the studio for 2 hours (laughs). At that time, I took my equipment and recorded it, but the recorded sound source was quite constructive, and sometimes it was a betrayal, and it was the beginning of the amazing and an interesting story. And even released it as a first album on CD-R. So, our beginning was quite interesting.
M: I was very impressed that the harmony was matched at the very first session.
– Did you guys prepare for that very first session?
M: No,not. we do without any rehearsals.
K: It’s 100% improvisation, but it was surprisingly constructive to each other, and there were some nuances that we found out that there was something close to how to develop speed up and that we wanted to do each other. After finishing the studio, I shook hands and said, “Let’s do a band. Let’s do it for 10 years.” And our 10 years are coming soon.
– Do you feel like you were improvising at the beginning and then started writing songs immidiately after that? Have you ever improvised live event like that before?
K: Yeah, once in Osaka. It was an improvisation.
M: Well, but that’s a no-count.
K: Yeah, It’s about the eve of formation. I was making songs little by little after actually starting my activities in Tokyo.
Transition of composition method
Who composed the song?
M: I basically make it until now. However, when I started the band, I made guitar riffs and asked the drum parts to follow that.
– And for drum parts, Leave it to drums?
M: Yes. The first song I started with didn’t even make a score, it was a rough riff, like “If it is do it four times, and then jump to the next component number”. I made up one song with a composition that was so rough that I could not think of it from now on.
– I think I saw te_ri live for the first time about 7 or 8 years ago, but You hadn’t written a score yet back then.
M: Well, the precision is quite different from what it is now. It is 50 times more precise now.
K: Certainly (laughs).
M: It wasn’t score at the olden days, so it was a kind of interaction with the mouth shamisen.
K: Actually, I have been made the compose in the beginning (laughs).
M: Was there!?
K: There was, but very few. On the contrary, I wrote the score on a piece of memo paper and brought it with me. It’s a transitional period, but at the very first beginning.
– I felt it was precise at that time, but now you are making more precise and precise songs.
M: Yeah, absolutely precise.
– The previous work “far east debug” is a live recording, right?
M: Oh, not that one . I’m docking studio recordings and live recordings. To be more precise, the talking is recorded for each song, but that part is recorded as it is at in the middle of live. That MC is used as an introductory section to move to the song. The song itself was 100% recorded in the studio.
– Oh I remember. I thought that performance was very great in live recording (laughs). OK, Aside from that, at that time in that talk, you say that they are all quadruples. It sounds jarring, but the score is quadratic. So I personally remembered Tipographica.
Tipographica
M: Yes, it’s been very influenced. The composition from Tipographica and Ruins has been very influential. The two bands are slightly different in the direction of composition, and if Ruins is a gradual prog rock, and repeats short riffs a few times and goes to the next stage quickly. I think Tipographica was dividing each measure into smaller and smaller pieces, and had a slightly incomprehensible rhythmic rhythm, so I pick up the good point of both bands.
-Oh, I see.
M: So, when I first formed the song, I used to make riffs with mouth shamisen, but now I’m making music score with computer.
-Oh, I see.
M: Also, between the mouth shamisen period and the computer period, I think it was about 6 years ago, but there were times when I was writing the guitar score by hand on the music paper. So, in 10 years of te_ri, there are three stages: when there is no score, when there is a score but handwriting stops, and when used with computer software.
– How about the output result, different?
M: It’s quite different. When I didn’t have the score, I admired Ruins and Tipographica, so I was looking for how complicated it was, but I couldn’t get it at that time. Since I wrote it out on the music paper, I was able to output a little more complexity than before, but it’s really just a little that i can do that time. For example, even if I wrote on the tadpole, “I’d like to put an octal rest here and here to make it a little incomprehensible rhythm,” there was no tool to reproduce how it actually sounded, so I couldn’t do such complicated thing even with a tadpole.
– Uh-hum.
M: Now that we input strange tadpoles using the software on the computer, when we press the play button, it’s reproduces them straightforward again, so the computer plays them correctly in any situation.
– Then you can pursue more complexity. Does the current score even describe the drums?
M: No, there is no drum notation. How do you make Mr. Katayama?
K: First of all, the data I received is only a click sound, so I think that I want to do this for the groove developed on that guitar. First of all, if I don’t listen it, then I don’t understand the meaning….don’t understand the meaning even if I listening(laugh). While listening and watching the score, I search for what I want to do there. Thinking myself that I wanting to add this phrase . I don’t really touch the drum set, so I imagine the timbre and rhythm of the drum set, and when I rub them together I say, “I want to do this.” There are times when there is a chance to match then we add but there is no matching such as “No, I did not have that image.” the composer said ,and then I think and make it again, taking into account the composer’s intention. So, there is no drum score.
– I see. You would have an image in your mind, and then later you would rub it together as you matched it up.
M: That’s right. There are times when I interfere with what the drummer has made.
Composing with bugs
M: If you try out one song, I think you’ll understand if you look at the score. (Figure 1).
– The drums are just quarter notes, but that’s a click sound.
K: When I play it back in midi, it’s just “beep, beep, beep”.
M: When I type in the computer software, I end up with two things: the PDF score and the midi data to play it back with the software. I send them to Katayama via dropbox, and when I press the play button on the midi data, it’s like a so-called demo tape is played. It only hears the guitar part and the click sound, so it’s like asking me to make the drum part to match this vertical line. In terms of the complexity of composing on a computer, for example, the second bar of the third row of this score.
– It’s where it says “inevitably staccato”.
M: This first beat is not possible in Western classical music theory. The “inevitably staccato” means that there are two consecutive chords, but that one in the first half was actually at the end of the previous bar. However, I think there are two eighth rests at the end of the previous bar, and by entering these two beats, you’ve pushed them out to the next bar. So the part that says “inevitably staccato” is very close to the chords that it points to, and the distance between the chords is so close that it’s almost a pinch.
– Hmmm.
M: Another example is the third bar of the fourth row, another lower row.
– It’s the part where it says “ghost”.
M: If you look at the top of the bar, you can see that the quatrains and the triplets are nested together. This is also impossible to write in the Western classical writing style. But the software is capable of writing it, so when I force the computer to do it and press the play button, for some reason the sound comes out at the position where the monster is written.
– Whoa!
M: Our current way of composing music is to copy and paste the music to the point where it sounds weird.
– By writing an impossible score, when you play it back, it sounds strange, but when you copy it again, it sounds even stranger.
M: An impossible score that is not acceptable from a Western musical point of view, but can be written on a computer. When you play it back, it sounds dull, strange, very gaping, and very much like a sloppy mess. With the computer’s stupid honesty, it creates a song with a weird vibe, and we copy it by ear. So we did a lot of research to see how far we could go rhythmically with this software, and tried to find the limits of what we could do.
– I see, it’s like looking for secret techniques for games.
M : I think it’s similar to debugging.
– Writing the score on the computer is not so much about writing down your own imagined musical ideas, but more about trying to find out what happens when you put a different shape on the computer and play it back?
M: Our current way of composing music is to copy and paste the music to the point where it sounds weird.
– By writing an impossible score, when you play it back, it sounds strange, but when you copy it again, it sounds even stranger.
M: An impossible score that is not acceptable from a Western musical point of view, but can be written on a computer. When you play it back, it sounds dull, strange, very gaping, and very much like a sloppy mess. With the computer’s stupid honesty, it creates a song with a weird vibe, and we copy it by ear. So we did a lot of research to see how far we could go rhythmically with this software, and tried to find the limits of what we could do.
– I see, it’s like looking for secret techniques for games.
M : I think it’s similar to debugging.
– Writing the score on the computer is not so much about writing down your own imagined musical ideas, but more about trying to find out what happens when you put a different shape on the computer and play it back?
Oval
M: I’ve only heard of Oval in name only, what is it?
– To put it simply, it uses the sound skip of a CD to make a song. So it’s a systematized version of that.
M: I see, that sounds close, but it’s a bit far away. I think the first band in the Japanese music scene to use computer errors in a live performance was a band called Expo. I think they were probably involved in the composition of Tipografica. There’s a song on YouTube. There’s a song on YouTube, I think. It’s a song about having a sequencer do something crazy.
EXPO
– Oh, I see. The other thing I’m reminded of when I heard you talk is the recent jazz. People influenced by hip-hop and R&B. For example, when you sample a drum phrase in hip-hop, instead of cutting out a bar nicely, they’ll cut it out of alignment at a little bit halfway point. When I do that, it’s just a little bit out of place, and it loops. I’m trying to recreate that displaced looping rhythm pattern live.
Robert Glasper Experiment
M: Will Mark Juliana be in?
– Oh, I’m going in.
M: That’s about all I know. What about Katayama?
K: I love Mark Juliana’s playing, too. I’ve bought quite a few albums as well. She’s so strong in electric music and can play all kinds of jazz. It’s not so much the style of her playing, but the person is amazing, her presence. I’m not sure about it as a scene, but I can imagine that it would be interesting to hear it just from the sound of it, and it would be fun to do it yourself.
Mehliana (Brad Mehldau & Mark Guiliana)
– Are there any bands in today’s Japanese scene that you feel are similar in terms of songwriting or anything else?
M: Well, yes, there are a few of them. To be specific, a band from Nagoya called turarika.
K: I like turarika.
turarika
M: And Doit Science in Kumamoto, both of which feel like tipografica followers.
Doit science
– I think te_ri is often referred to as “math rock”, but do you think you have anything in common with so-called “math rock” people?
M : To begin with, we never said it was math rock. We’ve had the opportunity to listen to other math rock bands of the same era because we’ve played with them, but I think what they do is quite different.
– Yes, I think it’s different when I listen to them.
M: It’s a strange thing to call the current math rock ……, but I think what they’re doing is an extension of post-rock.
– Ah, yes.
M : I think it’s a little bit faster and more emotional and solid than post-rock, and that’s how I see it. But what te_ri does sounds like math rock, but their approach, or what they do is quite different, I think.
How to practice long-distance band
– This is a bit of a different story, but for the last few years you’ve been playing as what you call a long-distance band. So, I’ve figured out about the compositional method, but a simple question is how do you practice?
M: I practice on the internet.
– On the internet?
M: There’s a Yamaha application called “netduetto”, isn’t there? We install it on each other’s computers and practice – it’s like a version of Skype without the video.
– Yeah, just the sound.
M : It’s like an application for sessions. For example, if it were me, I would hook up a direct box (DI) from my guitar, hook up a console, and connect it to my computer. What about you, Katayama-san?
K: I have an environment where I can connect my electric drums to my computer via console and share them with netduetto.
M: The sounds we make are inputted directly into the computer, so we don’t have video, but we can still have sessions. So somehow or other, we practice over long distances. But there’s a time lag between the two. It’s just a little bit.
– With this kind of dense music, even a little time lag can be fatal.
K: It’s fatal.There’s a 0.5 second delay between Iwate and Okayama, and if I want to play on-time in Okayama, I have to always play 0.5 seconds ahead of the Iwate drummers. So I’ve made a video of my performance and uploaded it to YouTube for limited viewing.
– Ho: …… (I’m getting a little confused).
M: To summarize the story (laughs), when we practice at netduetto, I play all the guitars in a little bit of a pre-flavored way so that Katayama-san can be heard on time in Okayama. That’s how we practice. And then it’s not really my practice.
– I know.
M: So I’ll have Katayama-san take a video of her practicing and put it on YouTube, and I’ll practice my guitar while watching the drum video later.
– Ah, …….
M: We were able to do it because we were a two-piece band. It would have been impossible with three of us. If there were three of us, we would have broken up (laughs).
K : When we said we were going to Europe and America, or touring all over the country, the footwork was much lighter with two of us. If there are three, four or five members, it’s difficult to get them all together. Even at practice. I think it was good for us to have a two-piece band. We were able to go into the studio for individual practice (laughs).
M: Individual rehearsals were huge. Even though I had the idea of wanting to be a duo band in mind in the beginning, there are so many advantages to be gained by being a duo.
– I’m glad we’re a duo, even more so than I thought we would be.
K: When I first met you, I was in a band of three or five at the time in Osaka, and after the first session with guitar and drums, I was able to say, “Hi, I’m looking forward to meeting you. Most people would have said, “Okay, let’s find a bass player. I think it was a great encounter for me to be able to go without that concept and feeling.
M : I wanted to play like the Ruins, so I didn’t want to find another member. I didn’t want it in the first place. But we’ve talked about that another time. A few times after we met.