2·5×6 metres of space: Japanese music coffeehouses and experimental practices of listening

2·5×6 metres of space: Japanese music coffeehouses and experimental practices of listening


DAVID NOVAK
132 W. 112th Street, Apartment 3F, New York City, NY 10027, USA
E-mail: den12@columbia.edu


Abstract
This article describes a specific history of technological mediation in the circulation of popular
music by examining local practices of listening to recordings in Japanese kissaten (often
shortened to kissa and meaning, loosely, ‘coffeehouse’). In postwar music kissaten, Japanese
listeners were socialised to recordings of foreign music through new modes of hyper-attentive
listening. While jazz kissa (though famous as crucibles for radical pro-democracy politics and the
explosion of modern urban cool in post-war Japanese cities) encouraged local listeners to develop
musical appreciation through the stylistic classification of distant recorded sources, later
experimental music kissa helped forge unique local performance scenes by disturbing received
modes of generic classification in favour of ‘Noise’. I recount the emergence of a genre called
‘Noise’ in the story of a 1970s Kyoto ‘free’ kissa Drugstore, whose countercultural clientele came
to represent ‘Noise’ as a new musical style in its transnational circulation during the 1990s. This
ethnographic history presents the music kissa as a complicated translocal site that articulates the
cultural marginality of Japanese popular music reception in an uneven global production; but
which also helps to develop virtuosic experimental practices of listening through which imported
recordings are recontextualised, renamed and recreated.

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