| Kama
Aina - Club Kama Aina (Rumraket) |
 |
I came across a strange little album called Music Activist
by Kama Aina on the teeny-tiny Geographic label a couple of years ago. I dismissed
it, at first, as one of those post-post-modern ironic jokey things that tend
to sail right above my bald pate like clay-pigeons, but then it started to
grow on me, and then it became something of a chill-disc regular on tedious
and stressful car journeys to exotic places like Tesco and IKEA.
Kama Aina is the solo project of Takuji Aoyagi, who's as near as dammit to
a twenty-oughts equivalent of the itinerant troubadour - a traveller first,
but incidentally a musician whose music is just a touch more musical than
the crusty busker with a dog-on-a-string and a guitar ('just a touch' is sort
of a joke - one of those post-post ... oh forget it). Home is Tokyo, where
Kama Aina gleams, along with fellow DIY folk-popsters Maher Shahal Hash Baz
and Tenniscoats, in that currently ascendant scene, but it's as a rolling
stone, gathering only the green moss of musical ideas from other islands such
as Cuba and Hawaii ('kama'aina' is Hawaiian for 'Hawaiian', apparently), that
his restless imagination has come momentarily to rest here, in the perfectly
delightful Club Kama Aina.
Now, don't go all Ren and Stimpy on me just because I said 'delightful' -
there actually is a capacity for delight in the human auditory apparatus that
doesn't have to be equated with twee and whimsy: admittedly, an adult preference
for, say, Keane over Kent should properly be regarded as perverse and pelted
with righteous opprobrium. What I'm saying, though, is that the ten-year-old's
capacity for musical delight is not something that's necessarily lost in the
hormonal rush to maturity - it's just not much catered for in the sex n drugs
n rock n roll markets.
Enter Club Kama Aina - a forty-minute sensory holiday from
all things tediously grownup on that lost island of childhood memories that
we all look back on with more or less delusional nostalgia. It's a bit like
what the smell of a favourite teddy bear does, except without the sneezing
fit from the dust.
Just because the current epicentre of the childish music movement is in the
famously tectonically-challenged Japan doesn't mean that it was ever thus.
Far from it. There was a Scottish moment, would you believe, around 1982,
when twee pop was born in Glasgow in the form of a single called Songs
for Children by The Pastels, a group whose own critically underwhelming
presence has nevertheless been profoundly influential on the better-known
careers of bands like the Jesus and Mary Chain, Belle & Sebastian, and
Teenage Fanclub, inter alia. This was a movement towards wistful
whimsy and intentional naïveté that certainly wasn't - and isn't
- everyone's cup of tea, but, for whatever reason, its spirit has been wholeheartedly
endorsed in Japan, and artists like Kama Aina are absorbing and reinterpreting
it in their own inimitable and eclectic fashion, which means, amongst other
things, the subversion of the classical taisho goto (Japanese harp)
and wood-blocks to some totally hybrid songs that sound like a morris-dancing
manga might look.
It's nice - in a re-cyclic sort of way - to see a few of that original Pastels
collective turning up on this album as guests: Stephen Pastel himself providing
the soft-sung lyrics on the rueful, haunting Millport, Belle &
Sebastian founder member Isobel Campbell providing vocals and cello on Millport,
Car Song, and Club Kama Aina, and Falkirk jazz legend Bill
Wells appearing on piano and accordion on the same three tracks.
Club Kama Aina is released on Rumraket, the two-year-old
label run by the effortlessly echoic Efterklang, whose own take on life-affirming
intentional naïveté is as unmistakably Danish as Kama Aina's is
Japanese. That they should choose to extend the net of cross-cultural influence
in this way comes as no surprise after their release, earlier this year, of
Human is Music by Cacoy, another bunch of Japanese joy-guerillas
whose current high currency is as welcome as it is irresistible.
The sheer unlikelihood of such an artistic alliance (Tokyo - Glasgow - Copenhagen
- who'd a thought?) is something that has to be factored into any assessment
of its effect. It's the answer to some random bonus music question in a Channel
94 quiz show that never got aired because they ran out of sponsorship. Such
accidental cross-fertilisations have been historically responsible for whole
divergences of genre - from cajun to swamp pop, bhangra to hip hop - and,
just as the cruelly indifferent laws of natural selection apply to organic
evolution, so do they operate on cultural crossbreeds, and time alone will
tell whether or not all this excitable and exciting musical promiscuousness
results in a speciation or an extinction. Meanwhile there's a whole discful
of chillin to be done, and I have a feeling this one might last all the way
to Sainsbury's.
October 2006
