Russell Haswell

Tokyo: Mark Fell, Russell Haswell, NHK’Koyxen & Aoki Takamasa - Need a lead into our deep-PAN (sorry) showcase of experimental goodness in Tokyo? Ever-excellent Tokyo writer Mike Sunda has you covered:By his own admission, Kohei Matsunaga - a.k.a. NHK yx Koyxen - doesn’t own a mobile phone, but if he did, you’d have to imagine that the contacts list would read like a who’s who of experimental electronic music. In the years since releasing his debut on German label Mille Plateaux in 1998, Matsunaga has gone on to work with everyone from legendary figures such as Merzbow, Rudolf Ebner, John Watermann and Ralf Wehowsky through to contemporaries that include Laurel Halo, Julia Holter and Rashad Becker. That’s not even to mention the breadth, depth and sheer amount of solo productions that he comes up with - he makes up to five tracks a day, and jokes that PAN label-owner Bill Kouligas has had to beg him to stop sending over new compositions, such is the deluge of material that is constantly hitting his inbox.And yet for all his relentless musical output, it’s fair to say that Matsunaga is somewhat underappreciated in his home country. Perhaps it’s because he spends half of each year abroad, living in Berlin - from where he can more easily accept European bookings - or perhaps it’s because his productions occupy a liminal space: abstract and rhythmically challenging but yet still demanding to be heard in a club context. His latest release as the duo NHK - a long-running project with fellow Osakan Toshio Munehiro - is a masterclass in dense machine textures and post-punk digitality, albeit one that Matsunaga plays down with typical humour: “[Toshio] is a typical Japanese salaryman. Normally when we're recording he's asleep the whole time. I always think it's better not to wake him up, so with the most recent album there's a lot of quiet, minimal tracks... that's because he was asleep!”Matsunaga’s latest endeavour, “Phantasmagoria”, is an event he’s co-organised with DJ Nobu. A festival of sorts, with future instalments planned, the event was originally planned for outdoors, before being relocated to Tokyo nightclub Unit. As well as featuring some of Japan’s most exciting noise acts in the sub-floor, including Miclodiet and Blackphone666, the line-up also features Mark Fell (with his avant-house project Sensate Focus), conceptual artist Russell Haswell and experimental producer Aoki Takamasa. All three will be playing short live sets at an exclusive Boiler Room session before the main event opens - as, of course, will Matsunaga himself. When I recently interviewed Matsunaga for The Japan Times, he mentioned that he and Fell had begun collaborating, and joked that their new unit would be titled “Potato Version” - a play on Raster Noton’s Diamond Version. He also anecdotally remarked that he once showed up for a gig in Finland with nothing but a contact microphone on his person. It’s hard to imagine what Matsunaga might have in store for Friday night, but it’s a safe bet that it’ll leave you with a smile on your face.