IA: In Japan, Noise Is Like a Flowing River [INTERVIEW]

wytwornia-ia-11.jpg, default, IA record label’s travels to Japan, photo: IA

The IA collective (formerly Intruder Alert), founded in 2015, has released a dozen or so albums and organised several dozen musical events. Rafael and Kry, the founders of the label, tell us why the Japanese music scene holds a special place in their work and lives.

At the beginning, IA concentrated on organising events and concerts. In 2016, they started operating as a record label. Since 2019, they have been organising concerts only for the release of new albums. In the previous year, they also organised two showcases: in Tokyo and in Brno. Their albums feature traits of experimental, club, noise and industrial music as well as punk rock and ambient.

Filip Lech: Who are you, what are you? A record label, a community, an artists’ collective?

IA: Over the past five years, our initiative has changed in every aspect – it’s evolved. Currently, IA mostly concentrates on releasing music. We refer to ourselves simply as a music label. However, our activities are more interdisciplinary – for instance, we pay a lot of attention to IA’s visual side.

FL: You’ve been to Japan many times. How did you end up there, and what did you discover?

IA: We visited Japan for the first time in 2016. The choice of destination seems to have been purely accidental, as we had no ties to Japan. Since then, we’ve returned to Japan every year for around a month at a time. We formed many wonderful friendships there and cooperate with numerous artists. We treat every stay in Japan as a sort of artist’s residency combined with intense travel, mostly around the countryside. We tend to visit places rarely frequented by tourists.

We’re far from idealising Japan. There are many wonderful places and people around the whole world; it’s just that we found a lot that suited us. We couldn’t pick one, two or three ‘most interesting’ places we’ve visited. There have been too many, they differ too much and yet they’re all equally remarkable. The gigantic Hotokegaura rock formations in the Aomori Prefecture are incredible but so is a crumbling, abandoned hut in a forest in Oga. The sight of a man playing the flute on the Tottori dunes is just as moving as a grind core gig in the basement of the Pit Bar in Tokyo.

FL: What are your recollections of Japan’s soundscape? People who describe Japan often mention the urban noise but also the silence on public transportation. I’ve also heard that there’s always some background music playing in elevators, restaurants and other such places.

IA: Of course, the soundscape of metropolitan areas such as Tokyo or Osaka, and especially their central districts and main streets, consists mainly of noise. It’s a peculiar kind of noise, definitely more intense than here but at the same time not as annoying as the noise of Polish cities. That noise, like the crowds on the streets of Tokyo, can be likened to an enormous, flowing river. It’s not chaotic but rather almost predictable; it’s easy to find oneself in it and navigate it despite its immensity and intensity. You can always easily escape it by entering any little street, where complete peace and quiet reign. Public transportation is perfectly silent, but in any convenience store there’s music playing non-stop. All chain stores have their own original soundtracks, which consist of very pleasant tunes. One exception would be the music in shopping malls such as Donki, where everything costs ¥100 or ¥200. It’s the most irritating, aggressive shop music we encountered.

IA Record Label’s Travels to Japan [IMAGE GALLERY]

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FL: What’s the Japanese underground scene like?

IA: We played at ten events in Japan, and we had the opportunity to get to know the scenes in a number of Japanese cities. They definitely differ from each other due to the character of these cities, which is determined by their history or even geographical location.

Last year, we visited our friend Bokugo in Hamamatsu, a city located on the Pacific Ocean, famous for the Yamaha piano factory, an enormous museum of musical instruments as well as a strong tradition of surfing. The whole music scene there is saturated with reggae and dub music. Even the events with a more experimental character, such as the one where we had the opportunity to see Bokugo’s live performance combining vocals and synthesizers, are interspersed with DJ sets with dub music.

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We witnessed a similar situation in Koriyama in the Fukushima Prefecture. At a concert at which we played, dubstep could be heard on top of highly experimental performances. That’s rather unusual at such concerts.

In Osaka, we were invited to perform at an event in a series called Art of Noise, which showcased avant-garde, noise and post-rock live acts. The noise, industrial sound of these events perfectly reflects Osaka’s character: raw, factory-like, somewhat rusty.

In every city, you can locate the points around which the most interesting music scene is concentrated. In Tokyo, it’s the iconic club Forestlimit, in Osaka it’s Environment 0g. These are usually very small venues, inconspicuous at first glance. They often resemble ordinary basements, but they’re created by incredibly passionate people. To conclude: Japan’s underground music scene is a vast phenomenon, difficult to describe in a nutshell. Every city is home to a completely different scene. There’s a correspondence among them, but each nevertheless maintains its own unique character.

FL: You’ve released music by many Japanese artists. Could you tell me about these relationships? How did you establish cooperation?

IA: We had the honour of releasing albums by Nobuiku Tokieda, Constellation Botsu and BI KIN, as well as pieces by Nuji, Bokugo and Kentaro Minoura. Most of them we met in person at concerts in Japan. We met Constellation Botsu while planning a trip to Tottori, his hometown. Nobuiku Tokieda found us himself and sent us a demo of his. We had the opportunity to spend time with some of them in their hometowns, and they took us to places from which they draw inspirations or where they simply flee from the hustle and bustle of the city. We’re immensely grateful to them for deciding to join the catalogue of IA’s releases, but what we find most valuable is the time we could spend together with them.

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FL: How would you describe the music you release and play? I don’t mean the names of music genres but more like a description that also makes sense to those who aren’t necessarily familiar with the world of experimental electronic and club music.

IA: It’s difficult to summarise. We left the world of club and experimental music a long time ago now. Of course, such elements still appear on our albums, but IA doesn’t draw from only one source. The music we release covers a wide spectrum of styles, all of which share an organic, imperfect, emotional quality.

FL: IA is not only music but also a visual setting and scenography.

IA: Music released by IA started departing further and further from electronic club music, our events increasingly started to assume the form of live performances. We started to pay more and more attention to their visual setting. It was a very natural process. We got used to having Marcin (Neho Tigra) take responsibility for the design of the spaces where we performed. These were initially single elements, such as nets and lines. Later, his interference assumed more spectacular forms – he’d sometimes completely rebuild the club space.

FL: What does running a music label in 2020 involve? How do you select and prepare the materials you release? You don’t release albums on any physical medium…

IA: We’ve worked out our own release process, and we plan our operation well in advance. We usually begin with introducing the person and their work long before the album’s released. How? For instance, we spotlight the person who’s a part of our release plans by placing them on the top of the track list on the compilation we put together. That’s how it was with BI KIN: first, people could listen to his piece opening the Larum compilation; a few months later, we released his album. Similarly, our last year’s compilation Love Songs features an opening song by Bokugo, the artist from the Japanese city of Hamamatsu.

So far, we’ve been focusing our efforts only on streaming platforms. One example was Rejection, Blessing, an album by B.yhzz, which also came out in a limited collector’s edition: as a USB stick containing files with the album, an additional song and some content about the history of the carpentry tools which belonged to B.yhzz’s grandfather and which the artist used as instruments. All this was additionally accompanied by a silk-screen mesh image. 2020 was the first time we released music available also on a physical medium, a limited edition of a cassette tape with an extra in the form of an illustrated album with song lyrics.

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FL: You donated the money earned from the album ‘Larum’ (2017) to the Women’s Rights Centre, and your profit from ‘Love Songs’ (2019) went to The EDGE of Existence, a programme for the protection of endangered animal species. What kind of non-musical activities can running a record label involve?

IA: So far, we’ve released two compilations, which are important elements in our catalogue. They serve as suggestions of sorts: we release them at the end of each year, so they point to the direction IA’s music will take in the following year.

Larum was very eclectic but embedded in experimental electronic music, strongly oriented towards a clubbing vibe. Our later releases in 2018 were similar. Love Song, however, is different. Each piece includes vocals, sometimes raw, as if recorded with a phone, at other times highly processed, barely audible.

Conscious of the large potential of these compilations, we wanted them to contribute to some worthy cause. Together with the people involved in creating the albums, we decide how to donate the money. On the 20th day of each month, profits from selling the compilations on Bandcamp are transferred to the accounts of the two charities you’ve mentioned.

Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny

Language English