As futile pieces of music writing go, this takes the biscuit. I’ve surveyed some sprawling discographies in my time but Tori Kudo is in another league. A platform that hosts music you say? He’ll have something up in a minute. A survey like this goes directly against his ethos – “archiving has always been linked to death,” he writes when I ask about his snowballing Bandcamp. By the time you’ve alighted on his group-cum-alter-ego Maher Shalal Hash Baz the tune you were chasing may have passed, a new song quivering on the tip of the tuba player’s wavering tongue.
The band’s name is a Hebrew Bible phrase that roughly translates to: “Be quick if you steal something”, or as he says, “quick spoil, speedy booty”, a line from the book of Isaiah. He says he just liked the sound of it, but I hold that Tori Kudo is the greatest thief in experimental music. Each time you listen, he executes a mind-emptying heist on whatever values and assumptions you were holding on what a song could or should be. Under the cover of some plodding euphonium, a timorous guitar solo, or recorder riff full of bum notes, Kudo walks right in and strips you of your preconceptions relating to ‘good’ music. It is a kindness and a gift, because hearing MSHB for the first time is often experienced as a seismic reset; a true epiphany. It can be like being born again (which Kudo was, in a fashion) or to put it more prosaically, as MSHB band member John Chantler said on first hearing this music: “Oh… it’s meant to be this fucked up.”
A continuous presence in Japanese underground groups since the late 1970s, Tori Kudo and his main collaborator, his wife Reiko Kudo, live in a small town called Toon in Japan. Over the years he has played with avant-folk of Ché-SHIZU, was in 1980s New Wave group Cockc’ Nell, had a brief stint in Fushitsusha (and played with Haino early on), attempted a Suicide covers band called Tokyo Suicide, as well as forming or joining other assembles like Guys & Dolls, El To Arnat, Snickers, Sweet Inspirations, and others.
He used to drive the library bus, and now draws a pension. He’s also a ceramicist, making experimental vessels that read to my eye as possessed of the same principles as his music – recognisable forms, but ‘rules’ broken or ignored; elements welcomed that mean collapse is a possibility. “Music and ceramics are exactly the same,” he says. “Half of the work is done by man, half is left to nature.”
He’s had periods of radical political belief, playing music as a form of resistance, protesting right wing anti-Korean marches; touring Japan playing folk music to Japanese minority communities, and time in Kenichi Takeda’s A-Musik group. In the 1980s he was a supporter (but not an active contributor to) the radical group East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, who exploded a train carrying the Emperor (and missed), but he abandoned his affiliations after a religious epiphany, and started reading the Bible, lines from which re-occur across the catalogue. When pushed on his and Reiko’s faith, Tori said: “God is her father, very close. I’m like a prodigal son.”
His work is often called amateur or naïve, but that implies he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and the consistency of his catalogue’s impossibly charming songwriting suggests otherwise, as do the references that come up in our brief email interview. In the course of a few brief emails he references the strategies of Takehisa Kosugi, how Syd Barrett was misunderstood in Japan, and dodges a question about his own catalogue by saying what he’d heard Nico thought about hers, while in answer to my final question about his own listening habits, confidently stating: “I seldom willingly listen to other people’s music.”
This is not him being tricky, Kudo says he’s punk and what I take this to mean – aside from the notion of learning three chords and being able to join his band – is a never-closed spirit of possibility. His output confounds the completist, and continues unabated after over 40 years. He once described himself as more like a film director than a band leader when it came to MSHB, with whom he performs in London and at Counterflows festival in Glasgow next month. The band is currently being assembled from those available. In the past it has included members of Luna Park Ensemble, High Rise, and Tenniscoats; as well as Chie Mukai, Yuzo Iwata, Kanji Nakao and countless other known and unknown musicians. This time around it will include Glasgow’s Bill Wells, McCloud Zicmuse (aka Linus Vandewolken), tuba player Danielle Price, and Rêve/Peru Peru’s Julie Fossaert, among others. “People come together somewhat, some are keen to come from far away,” he says when I ask how he recruits. “The better they are at their instrument, the more likely they are to be dismayed and not come back next time. Rehearsals are not possible… I can only hand out sheet music and explain my concept before the performance.”
So where do you tell someone to start with such a colossal catalogue which defies as cleaving into any normal delineations? Kudo certainly doesn’t want to tell you. The real answer to where you start is anywhere – just make sure you start.
Noise – Tenno (1980)
Tenno means Emperor in Japanese, and Noise, which began as a larger improvising noise unit called Worst Noise, was Reiko and Tori’s first collaboration on record. They have been deeply entrenched in one another’s work ever since, and the lines between their work are often blurry. They collaborate as a duo, on albums like Tangerine that fuse the idiosyncratic gait of Tori’s songs with the dreamworlds Reiko builds, and their child can also be heard on recordings over the years. Tenno though, is gnarly, and not just because the recording is pebbledashed with scuzz. It is an album of collapsing organ dirges originally recorded in 1980 that comes on with more grit and tooth than usually present in the Kudos’ work. Tori learned organ when he was a child, and later piano, but you wouldn’t know it from the playing that falls apart across this record.
Tori Kudo/ La Consumption 4 – Atlantic City/New York Tapes (1981)
Young Tori pulled on a leather jacket and shades in the Big Apple in 1981, and moped around emulating the guitar tone and tape flutter of 1970s New York. Originally self-released under the name La Consumption 4, these recordings have come and gone, been expanded with outtakes, reissued and remastered over the years. Kudo once said one of his pots, which used a form he inherited from his father, felt like working with a Suicide or Les Rallizes Denudes bassline, but these variously punk and ballad-like recordings are more evocative of live Velvets recordings – ‘To Alan’ in particular is redolent of an instrumental version of ‘Candy Says’. Expanded with three volumes of outtakes (and a cassette collecting them), the NY Tapes era is essential: the Complete Fun House Sessions/Matrix Tapes for the sentimental optimists of the amateur underground.
Maher Shalal Hash Baz – ‘Unknown Happiness’ from Return Visit to Rock Mass (1996) et al
Sometimes MSHB tracks come on and I ask: is this deja vu, or have I just heard this? Undermining the principle of this article is the fact that there are three versions of ‘Unknown Happiness’ on From A Summer To Another Summer, one of which first appeared on Return Visit To Rock Mass. The former is itself a compilation of sorts, pulling together recordings from the 80s up to a 1999 show in Glasgow, a fact not always explicit. This is par for the course. Sometimes songs are differently renamed across releases, sometimes a track or album is listed in English in one place, Japanese another. On Bandcamp lurk entire albums (one covering ‘Over The Rainbow’) released under a different name to the vinyl edition. Return Visit to Rock Mass was the band’s first landmark release, bankrolled by Shinji Shibayama of Hallelujahs via his Org Records, and it was being hailed as legendary just a few years after release. From A Summer To Another Summer had something to do with time spent in London: “The fanfare that is repeated several times has a bit of Globe theatre in mind… by the way, everyone has to be a foreigner wherever they live”. Previously he has also said: “I judge the melodies by how it affects one’s heart… If some angry and negative feelings come up… it’s not a good melody.” ‘Unknown Happiness’ is the epitome of this. It will carry you through a bad day. A classic in their songbook, but is this like a jazz standard, such as ‘Dark Star’ or ‘The Last One’, or is it something else entirely? This live version is particularly dissonant, thanks to an absolutely terrible soprano saxophone player.
Maher Shalal Hash Baz & Bill Wells – ‘Tipsy Cat’ from Osaka Bridge (2006) et al
Some records alter you forever, and it was with this record that Kudo executed his heist on me, from which I have never really recovered. I come back to John Chantler’s quote – “It’s meant to be this fucked up” – and think of it as a Wings Of Desire/Stalker moment when your perceptions switch from black & white to colour. Osaka Bridge was my beginning: a promo CD in now-battered cardboard sleeve received in a batch of electronica I was reviewing age 19 or so, for a Manchester blog. Amid all that cool, architectural electronic music, it had so much flesh and heart, I wept. If you ever feel that life might not be what it’s cracked up to be, that humans are terrible and the world is a cold dead place, you need ‘Tipsy Cat’. Discogs comments on this include: “Sounds like a middle school band attempting to play Bacharach” and “This is the album which is able to make aliens understand what humankind is about”.
Maher Shalal Hash Baz – ‘Gilles Deleuze’ from C’est La Dernière Chanson (2009)
I could have picked anything from this double album which packs 170+ songs on two albums, of miniature anthems and pocket-sized motifs repeated a few times then abruptly dropped. Most are 30-second earworms. This conversation between Sarah Hennies and Tori Kudo is one of the more enlightening interviews Kudo has ever done, particularly when it comes to this release. Hennies says she teaches C’est La Dernière Chansonin her composition class at Bard College every year, to show them something about working in restricted forms. He replies that: “Whether to repeat a musical idea once or twice and then finish it, or to repeat it several times for minimalist expression can depend on the strength of the material. In the case of C’est La Dernière Chanson the material often wasn’t worth repeating. When I think about why, it’s because the world was as undeserving of me as I was of the world, and the number of repetitions was determined within that framework.”
Maher Shalal Hash Baz – ‘King of The North’ from Blues Du Jour (2003)
Blues Du Jour is significant as the last record made with euphonium player Hiro Nakazaki. In ‘King Of The North’, Kudo sings lines from the Jehova’s Witness New World Translation of the book of Daniel with solo guitar, punctuated by a despondent brass herald for Kudo’s pronouncements: “He will certainly go forth, to the holy mountain of decoration”. This was their second release on Glasgow label Geographic (run by members of The Pastels and was also recorded in the city) and it is peppered with Biblical references. It includes some of the most coherent and restrained performances of their catalogue, such as the unusually controlled strings on ‘What’s Your Business Here Elijah?’ their smoothness later tempered by a wayward recorder on ‘His Banner Over Me Was Love’. ‘Open Field’ became one of their best-known songs after it was covered by the Silver Jews.
Tori Kudo – ‘The Last Song Of My Life’ (2020)
“Who is this person who can’t play guitar?” my pal asks over dinner, with Tori Kudo’s The Last Song Of My Life playing in the background. He is entertained, and not dismissive: “I’ve been trying to unlearn guitar”, he says, “but it’s really hard.” Kudo, it is important to realise, can read and write music (his scores are on his website) and has played instruments all his life. The song felt familiar, and we talked for a while about whether what we were hearing was a cover of a Miles Davis tune, a church hymn, or something totally original, as Kudo’s motif churned around and around in the air above us. It is the most heavyweight of all Kudo’s work, drawing together a timeline that has the caustic organ of Tenno at one end and this at the other, and indirectly summarising the whole quest, as he once described it, which is “to provide melodies with a proper funeral”.
These two ceramic goblets (2023)
Kudo’s father is also a potter, in the porcelain-producing area of the Ehime Prefecture which is renowned for its distinctive blue and white Tobe ware. The sound and the ceramics are connected, and for me, these two goblets are essentially an MSHB song. Look with me: those pale bowls are fine porcelain, but are, I am guessing, slipcast on a slump mould – this is a weird way to make that shape and potentially quite difficult. Nobody would usually do this, but it gives that strange texture and the torn, fragile rim which may crumble or split your lip if you sipped from them. Secondly, one footring has chipped from being stuck to the glaze shelf so they’re technically broken, and the glaze on those stems is bubbly and weird, perhaps made from soil or other material gathered not bought. They have also slumped a little in firing. All this makes them an MSHB song – ‘wrong’, ‘bad’, ‘a failure’ by usual standards but as a creative strategy producing utterly idiosyncratic, totally charming work. I am reminded of Soetsu Yanagi’s account of experiencing the Kizeamon Ido, an ordinary Korean tea bowl without a maker and one of the most treasured tea bowls in Japan: “A typical thing for his use; costing next to nothing; made by a poor man… the uncalculated, the harmless, the straightforward, the natural, the innocent, the humble, the modest: where does beauty lie if not in these qualities?” When John Chantler first met Kudo at a community ceramics exhibition in Matsuyama, he remembered, “lots of tables around the perimeter holding lots of nice, basic pottery and then one table that was something else. A number of bowls cast with scone mix and glazed with sugar, small ceramic buildings with planes embedded, a cast of a face surrounded with dirt, a sheet of paper with the text: ‘I am the kind of irony, I do not fear adjacent islands’”.
‘Why Are We Sitting Here Until We Die?’ taken from A Bandcamp lucky dip
This 21-second recording of a single sung phrase was chosen at random. But it could have been anything, like an entire new album for instance. Trying to navigate Tori Kudo’s output will expose any assumptions you have about what constitutes a ‘proper’ record release. Not just the songs but the modes of release themselves are a tangled mess of multiple takes of single songs; cover versions and original material; an ‘album’ might have over 100 tracks, or just one. Don’t believe his Discogs, which largely lists releases on established or ‘official’ labels, or that were pressed in big enough numbers for someone to catalogue them. Not included are hundreds of releases Kudo has uploaded on whatever platform is currently primary – it used to be Soundcloud, now it’s Bandcamp. There were three releases last month alone – two releases of 20+ songs, a two and a half minute long single. There’s no easy way to find a route through, and being systematic comes with its own absurdities given the repetitions. It’s not a catalogue; it’s not even a body of work – it’s a life in and of music, and it’s still going as strong as it ever was. Don’t try and keep up. Go to him when you need something, and if you find it, give thanks.
Maher Shalal Hash Baz and Sonic Bothy play Counterflows on 6 April
