Makoto Kawabata in October’s The WIRE
October’s The WIRE magazine (#296) has as the subject of its Invisible Jukebox feature, Makoto Kawabata, the Japanese guitarist responsible for Acid Mothers Temple, its associated label and numerous offshoot bands. I like in the last paragraph where he describes how some innocent misconceptions about Western Rock and Psychedelic music helped to shape his progressive style of guitar-playing and songwriting.
“We had so little information that we had to use our own imagination. I’d see photos of a stack of Marshall amps and imagine that they were all turned up to ten. I never realised that most of them were just spares. I imagined that they played at crushing volume and I’d try to do the same. Or I’d see some guitarist whirling their guitar around and imagine that they played their guitar like that through their whole set. When I picked up a guitar I thought that was how you had to play it. Our whole rock culture began from those kind of misconceptions. But those misconceptions and the fantasies they allowed to exist have almost all gone now. Kids today grow up on J-Pop and hardly listen to any Western music at all. In a good or bad way, they’ve lost that yearning for something other.”
Digital and hard-copies of the mag are available at The WIRE online shop.
Photo by Pelcinary.
Posted in Media & Music by Martin Skivington on September 26, 2008.
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