Clive Tanaka y su orquesta - Jet Set Siempre 1°
I am admittedly a little late to the whole cassette revival party. Not that I wasn’t aware of it and didn’t already understand most of the reasoning behind it (nostalgia aside, tapes are cheap, portable, can hold a lot of music, have that warm analog sound, force you to listen through each side w/o skipping, etc.), I just hadn’t bought cassettes of new music with the specific purpose of enjoying them as cassettes. But when your blog is as small and unread as mine and the purported liaison to a morbidly reclusive Japanese artist emails you offering to send a tape (presumably because you mentioned it very briefly while flaking on your Spanish), you don’t say no. A quick google search reveals I’m not alone in this situation, which makes me wonder if this ‘Clive Tanaka’—given as he is to being mysterious—may simply be a persona invented by Francis Hofstetler, sender of the email, in order to shroud the origins of this music and pique the interest of people like me who are used to having a lot of information about everything at their fingertips all the time.
Whether it’s fictional or not, I think that sense of insularity is an important part of Jet Set Siempre 1°. For one thing, there is no digital-download version of this tape in totem anywhere. The five songs in the widget to the left come from mp3s ripped by bloggers (I assume), so only about half of Siempre is available for your immediate perusal. Beyond that, it’s designed to be specifically two-sided, with the upbeat Side A ‘For Dance’ and the chilled-out Side B ‘For Romance,’ so even if you could get all eight songs onto a playlist, you wouldn’t necessarily have that break in the middle where you’ve got to purposefully change sides and thereby create a mental separation in how you listen to them. And when Tanaka sings, he almost exclusively warps his voice through vintage vocoders reminiscent of those in Giorgio Moroder’s electronic disco. What all of this says to me is that Clive Tanaka is very concerned with the ‘total package’—from the songs to the album structure to the way people acquire and listen to it—and carefully engineering the listener’s experience while keeping himself hidden is a large part of his art.
But if we’re going to say that Siempre forces us to take it on its own specific terms, it seems we should consider whether this two-sided album accomplishes what it supposedly sets out to do. The four songs on Side A, the ‘For Dance’ side, are indeed built around four-on-the-floor beats at an optimum tempo and pacing for the dance floor. Along with the Moroder-ish vocoder, there’s a distinct air of Ed Banger (er, Justice) style house rock on “I Want You (So Bad)” and “Brack Lain,” with heavy limiters, a few patches of glitchy static, and even some cheesy electric guitar. “All Night, All Right” and standout “Neu Chicago” (which contains the tape’s best lyric, “So you’re digging a shallow grave / for your heart ‘cause it won’t behave”) skew closer to disco pop, with sweeping hi-hats and bouncy bass lines. If you had a high quality rip, any of these songs would make smashing additions to an indie-minded DJ set. But nobody in their right mind DJs from a cassette deck—it’s just not practical given the limitations of the medium (i.e. it being almost impossible to queue up songs). What the ‘For Dance’ songs represent, then, is the idea and the image of dance music—dance music for people wearing headphones plugged into a tape deck—and Side B closely follows suit.
The predominantly instrumental pieces on Siempre’s second half mark a slight shift away from electronic voices toward hazier organic sounds. “Skinjob” features upright bass and a jazzy rim-click beat that lands somewhere between tango and boss nova, while “International Heartbreaker” drapes orchestra strings and thin acoustic guitar around a thumping psuedo-funk drum track (I get flashes of the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” at points, but that’s kind of a stretch). “The Fourth Magi” pairs more washed out etherea and tape-damaged guitar with a heavy, throbbing pulse, ending on a synth-led section that suggests an echo of Alphaville’s “Forever Young.” There’s a flushed, cinematic tone to each of these, an implication that Side B is for ‘Romance’ in the physical sense, but the final song “Lonely for the High Scrapers” reintroduces lyrics and turns the whole thing on its head. Over clipped, looped guitar and lithe tropical percussion, Tanaka whispers through his most pillowy vocoder setting yet. “For those nights when you get lonely…You’re not the only one / You’re not the lonely one.” he repeats. And suddenly, just like ‘Dance’ on Side A, ‘Romance’ comes to be a distanced image of a feeling, not a soundtrack to the feeling itself.
Ultimately, this preference for musical images over musical utility and the sculpting of a narrow listening experience mean that Jet Set Siempre will likely be somewhat dismissed as part of the ‘chillwave’ barrage, even though it’s far more stylistically diverse and lovingly detailed than a lot of the ambient pop that attracts that label. The title and images on the cassette sleeve point to high-class leisure, but the specific form Clive Tanaka has chosen for (and as) his art puts it squarely back in the irrefutable present, where a young person plays tapes and imagines living a life that sounds like this.
(Buy it here!)
