Make Believe Mailer 55: Omodaka's "Zentsuu"
Out Of Time
Omodaka — Zentsuu: Collected Works 2001 - 2019
When I first seriously listened to Omodaka, I could barely move. Weeks prior to 2011 came to a close, I caught strep throat. Due to bad timing and a general personal malaise reaching its climax, I did not even attempt schlepping over to a clinic before boarding a 12-hour flight home for Christmas. My condition worsened upon arriving, and for the initial few days I just laid in bed, sweating and truly feeling like “this might be it.” Thankfully, the local doctor prescribed a particularly effective bottle of Barney-colored prescription syrup. I’d be nursing that nonstop, as I also had scheduled a cross-continental trip to Washington D.C. to spend New Year’s Eve with friends.
Despite forcing myself to walk around the District and indulge in Ben’s Chili Bowl, I spent a large amount of the trip sprawled out on my college roommate’s wooden floor, staring at the ceiling. I listened to Omodaka’s then-new compilation Sanosa on repeat, zoning out and letting the syrup work its magic while a whirl of 8-bit notes, taiko drum smacks and enka singing took me away. For stretches of that transition between years, I felt completely detached from time and reality.
I lived, allowing me to see the future of music…which turned out to be the past. Even more so than what was happening at the time, the years after saw a neck-cracking pivot towards the past, powered by a variety of factors, including curiosity about yesteryear from online listeners and creative bankruptcy from the music industry itself. Being in Japan offered a particularly revealing perspective, getting the chance to see the nation’s own shift towards Heisei longing while also watching as the world fell head over heels for city pop — and then tried to make that it’s own contemporary trend, whether through music or branding.
Listening to Zentsuu: Collected Works 2001-2019, a new compilation gathering songs from Soichi Terada’s enka-chiptune-party-starting Omodaka project released by WRWTFWW Records, I’m struck by how well the electronic artist has been able to avoid nostalgia trappings. He — with an assist from singer Akiko Kanazawa, providing the vocals since the start of the 21st century — builds these songs up from genres almost exclusively associated with the past, but constructed in such a way to feel largely dissociated from them. Terada nods to history, but never settles for easy “remember this” memories. He stacks them up towards something previously unheard.
To some degree, this has always been Terada’s artistic calling card, whether on the breakthrough rattle of the Ape Escape soundtrack or on the dewey-eyed revelry of this year’s Asakusa Light1. Yet it’s front and center in the Omodaka oeuvre, to the point of providing both central tension and tipsy ecstasy to the songs on Zentsuu. It bleeds over to the visuals too, which are nearly as vital — Terada dons a mask, wig and traditional garb to fiddle with Game Boys and various electronic doo-dads while a screen alongside him projecting Kanazawa’s image offers the animating voice. It’s a mish-mash of ancient imagery and cutting-edge tech, made ridiculous by Terada frequently showing the microphone in front of the screen while Kanazawa “sings.”
It’s on the songs, though, where the blur of sounds traditional and chip-based, that this unique attempt at rewiring nostalgia works best. On their own, chiptune and enka are styles of music hailing from drastically different times working towards a common goal — offering listeners a glimpse into a world now long gone. That one does so via mournful ballads about rural life and the other does it by channelling Bubble Bobble isn’t important — both ache for times lost. Omodaka finds a middle ground, less worried about reminiscing and more about blurring sounds together to create lively arcade-ready matsuri music that’s traditional and retro, but not too much so.
Zentsuu works as a compilation because of how it captures every angle of the Omodaka project — including the outright joyous rap-pop of 2014’s “Galaxy Deca” to the electro-garbled strut of 2019’s “Nanbu Ushioi Uta” — while still establishing an artistic through line. He takes two sounds that are both representative of Japanese culture — and which have both become markers of bygone eras — and mixes them up to create a kind of anti-nostalgia, where two sounds referencing the past come together to form something totally new. He draws from actual Minyo, and isn’t afraid to branch out into the Western canon (which, due to a whole lot of criss-crossing, imperialism and war, became…the Japanese canon2). The past isn’t something to stare at, but something to play with and reinvent.
To further muck that up, this whole project started because he was trying to make a song about boat racing, as degenerate a form of gambling you can find in Japan centered on dudes going in circles on little vessels, a scuzzy world cutting against both of Omodaka’s sonic reference points.
At its absolute worst, references to traditional Japanese music in modern pop feel like the gift shops at Narita International Airport, where images of geisha and sumo and Pokemon intermingle amidst a soundtrack of shamisen and yooooooooooo. More mid, you get groups like Wagakki Band, who have a novel idea but only that. Best case scenario, you get pop approaching the past in the same way Omodaka does — something to play around with and blur. That’s FAMM’IN’s “Circle,” that’s Fujii Kaze’s “Matsuri,” that’s Batten Girls’ “Yoimiya.” Same goes for chiptune, really.
Yet even those examples of songs I love don’t quite pull off the sonic and situational alchemy Omodaka has always managed. For other artists, dipping into these sounds is just something to do occasionally. For Terada, it’s a starting point, to turn the materials of the past into their own sonic world. Zentsuu offers a convenient gateway into the catalog of a project that, in 2022, feels especially necessary. Rather than simply nod or stare slack-jawed towards the past, Terada and Kanazawa remind that history is very much alive, and ready to be molded into something new. Don’t settle for the past, when whole new worlds can emerge from those familiar sounds.
Also check out my review of 99Letters latest album at Bandcamp Daily, as that Osaka creator does something similar with traditional sounds, albeit in a more…warped kind of way.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
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Which, friendly reminder, should absolutely be in conversation for your year-end list as we enter that time of year.
The same year the first Omodaka best-of came out, Sakanaction released a whole single centered on Bach…maybe something was in the air then.
Just thought I might note this, I reformed my music blog to follow your newsletter style, and I noted the inspiration. I just think the post style is really good!