Interview: Nissenenmondai

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Nisennenmondai and I are in a Turkish restaurant in London, and we are trying to speak to each other in English. Katoman, their tour manager, translates some questions into Japanese, answers others on the band’s behalf. Sayaka Himeno (drums, driving force) concentrates on my words as if lipreading. Masako Takada (motorik riffs; quartzy loops) and Yuri Zaikawa (one-note bass thwacks) smile encouragingly, Masako chiming occasional responses. On the recording, her high, soft voice and Sayaka’s lower one bloom sporadically between MP3 harshness, traffic, the clatter of kebab skewers, shouted Turkish, Katoman’s “Let me explain…”, and my own voice, at its most annoyingly language-teacherish, as our words bump haplessly against one another.

Nisennenmondai’s music is the precise inverse of their interview recording, existing in a space where words fall back and a path is cut, roughly, through misunderstanding and into bright-white light. The band’s three-pronged no-wave is a hand-made interpretation of infinity that hovers on a knife-edge between the fierce propulsion of Neu! and a more feral, pragmatic post-punk scuttle. Songs exist at a point of permanent climax, an ever-popping firework. Live, process is laid bare: there’s a feedback loop between them and you, a challenge to never lose focus, as the three women play chase with guitar loop and raging disco hi-hat.

Sayaka, Masako and Yuri formed Nisennenmondai around 10 years ago, after meeting at university in Tokyo. Out of the three, only Sayaka had previous musical experience: when I ask about their early practices, Yuri leans forward suddenly. “I was,” she announces, “a beginner.” The restrictions created by untrained but attuned musicians can often result in a band’s vocabulary being well-formed early on, purely because they simply do not have the ability to sound like anyone else. Nisennenmondai’s 2004 EP, ‘Neji’ contains songs with titles like ‘Pop Group’ and ‘This Heat’ and ‘Sonic Youth’, and certainly channel, say, This Heat’s Health And Efficiency, or Essential Logic without the sax, or SY on Bad Moon Rising but, from these templates, the band’s own compositional voice develops almost in real time, plotting the course to their more assured, intricate recent work.

Nisennenmondai don’t like to talk about the titles, but I ask, because ‘Neji’ and follow-up, ‘Tori’, have just been reissued as one album by Norwegian electronic/jazz label Smalltown Supersound – for many European listeners, their first exposure to the group. Katoman insists they’re just working titles, not important. So is it hard for them to come up with names for songs, generally?

“Yes,” says Sayaka.

Why?

“Because we don’t think anything. We want no meaning.”

You want to reach a point where there are no words.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah – only sound is important.”

So if not those bands in the titles, which music did inspire Nisennenmondai? Their friends’ bands, comes the answer, and Boredoms. I broach minimalism, and Glenn Branca, of whom Masako’s guitar style reminds me a lot. Is she a fan?

“She doesn’t know it,” Sayaka answers for her bandmate.

“I feel in a way that they are the perfect Smalltown Supersound band,” says Joakim Haugland of Smalltown, when I ask him how the Japanese trio fit on his mostly Norwegian roster. “The music has elements of avant-garde, Krautrock, disco, no-wave and free rock, and elements of bands that I love: ESG, Neu!, 23 Skidoo, Sonic Youth, This Heat, Black Flag, DNA. So the band kind of summons both where Smalltown Supersound came from and where we are going.”

I don’t believe Nisennenmondai set out to mystify – even when Katoman tells me, “It’s not just the language, it is them”, explaining that Japanese interviewers glean not much more from the three. It is more that they started as a band from a very personal year zero (their name means ‘millennium bug’), and have obsessively refined the essence of that zero, in a way many of their no-wave predecessors could only have striven for. Their insularity renders them weirdly ahistorical, even as their songs patch together so many fragments of the past.

Haugland hopes also to put out Destination Tokyo, released in Japan earlier this year. It’s more indicative of the band’s current live set – psychedelic disco with a high-end steeliness right on the pain/pleasure divide. Yet I wonder if it is hard for any record to capture the combined psychic and physical energy flash of a Nisennenmondai live set. Sayaka agrees on the difficulty of pinning their music down in the studio. “We don’t know how to record is the best for us,” she says. “We have tried many ways. Now, we are trying more ways.”

www.myspace.com/nisennenmondai

Originally published in Plan B #38: back issues available here.