February 01, 2005
The First Lady of Japanese Noise Music Makes Cover of Index Mag! Meet the Boredoms' Yoshimi
Boom! Pow! Surpise! Walking into St. Mark's Bookshop in the East Village Monday evening, we were struck by the cover of the February/March 2005 issue of Index, the New York-based independent music-film-art-fashion-music mag. Screaming from the front of Index was Yoshimi, sometimes called Yoshimi Pee-Wee, singer-songwriter and frontperson for the influential Osaka, Japan noise band Boredoms.
If the name sounds familiar even though you can't quite place it, the reason may have something to do with the Oklahoma indie band the Flaming Lips, whose last record was inspired and named after the Japanese first lady of noise music. The album was called "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" and on it the Flaming Lips sing out her name--"Yooshiiiimiiiiii!"
Seeing Yoshimi on the cover reminded us of our salad days when, for a brief period of the 1990's, we lived in Osaka. During those heady days, we spent many a late Saturday night with friends in our tiny apartment sitting on the floor listening to the Boredoms' "Chocolate Synthesizer" over and over again, sipping hot sake while trying in vain to deconstruct the noise aesthetic and slowly getting cruelly drunk. (Aaaaah, to be young again!)
Yoshimi also fronts her own band, the all-female and accidental quintet OOIOO (pronounced oh-why-oh*), which released a record last year titled "Kila Kila Kila." We saw OOIOO perform a few years ago when the band opened for Buffalo Daughter at Club Quattro in Osaka. Yoshimi and her four bandmates blew us away.
In Interview magazine-inspired tradition, Yoshimi is interviewed in Index by one of her peers, Hisham Bharoocha, drummer for the NYC noise band Black Dice. The Q&A reveals that Pee Wee is now a mother, lives near the ancient Japanese town of Nara, not far from Osaka and Kyoto, and is really into Okinawan and indigenous Ainu music these days. To the uninitiated, this may seem a far cry from the screams, squeals, yelps and other indecipherable vocals Yoshimi is best known for on her many Boredoms' recordings. But the diverse musical forks of noise and indigenous Japanese folk music share some primal, vocal qualities.
Yoshimi also explains in the interview the connection between herself and the Flaming Lips. She relates a funny story about how she first found out that the Lips had sung about and named their CD after her--it was while in a record store in London while on tour with Boredoms, where she heard her name sung by the Lips on the shop's stereo. Of course, despite being friends with the group, the Lips' vocalist still managed to mispronounce her name.
RELATED LINKS
Index Magazine Web Site and Archive
Posted by at February 1, 2005 10:40 PM
