Stewart Gardiner explores the delicate microcosmic worlds of Kama Aina in this archive feature from Plan B magazine

Solitary music need not lead to despair. It need not be narcissistic or pessimistic: the music of Kama Aina, the musical persona of Takuji Aoyagi, is neither of those things.

In selecting a pseudonym (it’s Hawaiian for ‘islander’), Takuji acknowledges that some distance is necessary from the most personal of endeavours. It’s as if before lighting out for his inner vistas he must rid himself of outer trappings. The results are inviting rather than isolating, and a source of considerable joy.

As well as his own musical excursions, Takuji co-runs the Folkcore record label and Orca clothing/ephemera brand from his native Tokyo. You’d imagine he has the kind of ingrained cool that the likes of James Lavelle would salivate over, but for his lack of bombast and reliance on understatement. Outside of Japan he has remained a marginal presence, although the recent release of the Music Activist primer on Geographic may change that.

The Geographic label, run by Stephen and Katrina of The Pastels, is a natural home for this musician, who conjures up such delicate, microcosmic worlds between the lines and around the cadences of his aural scrapbooks. When Takuji visited Stephen’s flat recently, it was evident from their respective record collections they had much in common. Stephen points out that many of the Japanese artists he has worked with have a “kind of innocence” similar to what’s so endearing about bands such as Beat Happening and Marine Girls. “It’s just introduced something very new to our ears,” he says, “but also something to identify with.”

The familiar in Kama Aina is stacked in such a way that it’s sometimes difficult to detect if you have come across a rhythm or sequence of notes before. Of course, it doesn’t really matter if you have; for, listening to the gentle strum of his banjo, or the rare interludes where his voice speaks to you directly, you are hearing everything for the first time. And Takuji hopes that you will hear it thus on each subsequent listen. “My music has lots of space,” he tells me. “And [external] noises are part of my music.”

Takuji transplants his particular notions of scale into each and every listener, his nuanced collisions causing the individual’s own concepts to merge and alter as a result. Far from being intrusive, it’s a natural and soothing process. There are inherent difficulties in transferring this music into a live setting, most of which are factors outside the artist’s control. The room for one – Takuji’s recent Glasgow performance being a case in point. The venue, Monorail, combines a performance space, bar, vegan restaurant and a wonderful record shop, and attracts what you’d imagine to be an enlightened, intelligent crowd. However, the constant chatter all but drowns out Takuji’s kaleidoscopic tone shifts.

Somewhere between the stirring voices, a gentle Casio hums away. He picks up his banjo to sing an instinctive, childlike lament, external concerns subsiding along with a palpable reduction in audience noise. But then the murmur rises once more when Takuji foregoes words for groaning, slow-krush hip hop beats. Such bursts of contrast are splashed across the otherwise deeply embedded silence of Takuji’s canvas. Occasionally, loud crashes in on quiet’s parade, overlapping with the ongoing build and nudging the intent listener into a subtle vortex of perspective, shade and imaginings.

Takuji appears undaunted; the hyperreal refocusing of scale does not disturb his near somnambulist concentration. Of course, it was never about attention-grabbing in the first place. The table before him, with a teapot resting upon its surface, seemed at first a welcoming, inclusive gesture, but I see it now as an image of solitude.

“A Pinocchio heart at the point of redemption”, I scrawl in my notebook, but I no longer know what that means.

www.dominorecordco.com/uk/geographic

This article originally appeared in issue 3 of Plan B magazine (December 2004/January 2005)

Stewart Gardiner
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