Last year on a hike with strangers in western Tokyo, I felt the bass before anyone else. I strained my ears to see if I could figure out what direction the music was coming from, but the trees obscured my senses. I concluded the rave was happening inside the mountain itself. It was May, I was new to Tokyo, and it had been over a year since I’d seen the inside of a club. The others seemed to notice at last, and people exchanged looks of irritation. “I wish they’d be quieter,” one woman said. “Sounds pretty fun,” I said.
Wata Igarashi could be any guy on the train. Slight and unassuming, wearing thick-rimmed glasses and a cap, he’s the guy here to pour your coffee or do your cable installation. The first time I saw him perform was in a valley in Gunma last fall. For a few hours I watched this clean shaven nerdy face attached to a long-sleeved white tee send beams of clean airy dirty rude sexy laser spacey computer fog music directly into the loins of the crowd. The DJ teepee was placed right on the grass, so I was eye-level with the bop of his cap. In those hours I felt as if I danced off two years of anxiety, straight back into the mountain behind him.
A few weeks ago I went to see him again in Shizuoka. The day we drove down, the weather was relentless. Acts were canceled after the outdoor stage got rained out. Two friends got lost for an hour looking for the car, because their tent was flooded, and they had nowhere else to sleep. I didn’t sleep because most of my stuff, notably my sleeping bag and all my socks, were wet, and I shivered until morning.
But the next day the sun came out, and we went to onsen to get clean and warm and finally dry. The women of the festival took over the facilities, crowding three to a mirror to do face masks and curl their hair. The bath on the outdoor terrace was hot against the skin and the sun hot on our faces. We replayed the night before, made a human boil of hangover sweats, a nabe of salt and rubbery regret that eventually boiled off and lifted into the air.
By the afternoon, the clouds had come back in. Igarashi played an hour-long live set, which means instead of stringing together prerecorded tracks he made the songs on the spot. The stage at this festival is built high up, a menacing black pyramid, a disco kaaba towering over a sea of the devoted. From the front of the crowd, one couldn’t see the DJs at all, so I backed up to the line where I could just see the faraway little brim of his cap bouncing to his alternating metal monster and crystal sounds.
I first heard about Igarashi from N, who knew him from the cult upstate rave, Sustain Release. What is it about him? He plays all the time in the city, given that it’s been hard for him to play abroad, though that’s starting to change. I’ve seen him in other venues, in other lighting, and it’s never like seeing him outdoors in the natural light, preferably in some kind of triangular structure. The reason, my un-sober brain concluded that afternoon, is that this musician in a Genius Bar costume, seems to have built a following of people who are willing to go into nature and watch him, in essence, try to build a spaceship.
To watch Igarashi in this setting is to witness an elaborate feat of engineering, one that needs a very particular combination of trees, human “vibes,” and weather, to work. But he only had an hour; was he really going to manage to get us to space? Maybe this time there were too many variables, too much fog in the machines, too many ponchos, their plastic slicing against the sound, too much mud obscuring the truth, and so for an hour we watched this IT dad’s musical tinkering, and then he packed it in. Meet you in the mountains next time, he seemed to say, and we’ll try again.
After that DJs Nobu and Sandrien played a set together that required a lot more body than intellect, which was also quite a lot of fun. It did feature an extremely involved, somewhat stressful, lighting design that made it feel like UFOs and/or space cops were circling overhead, underscoring one of my many developing conspiracies about techno.
In all, though, I’d say the weekend’s water to Wata ratio left me wanting.
Is this my life now? I just follow Wata Igarashi from failed shuttle launch to failed shuttle launch, trying to understand the appeal? It’s becoming more of a puzzle than a pleasure, a trance you can only analyze once you’ve been put under.
Maybe I like the idea of going to see an artist try to make music to match the moisture. Rainy season is coming in a few weeks, and then everyone in the country will be pumping energy into various machinery to try and condition the air around them to a tolerable level of heat and humidity. When I used to work in conferences, it was often the goal to create an ideal hermetically sealed experience: the right temperature, ample bathrooms, free flowing food, so the audience would forget all together about their bodily needs, to free up the mind for its intellectual theater. A club is similar: A dungeon from which you can’t tell the time of day, a room with no intervening sound or light, nothing that can’t be controlled, other than the humans. Shut up, weather; I’m trying to listen.
But a festival is this process inside out: Hundreds of people are dragged outdoors, where they contend with bees, barometry, and their own bladders for an optimal experience. Sheets of plastic, jackets that say things like H2NO, layers of socks, air-activated hand warmers, moisture wicking underwear, so, so much Gore-Tex. For what? Just to weather some skinny person in headphones attempting to harness your energy into a party for you. Alright, atmosphere: Give me your dirty worst.
And then the release.