Border

Japan (1987-1991)

In Japan I played some jazz in a jazz club, but my main musical outlet was a coverband called Hard on Soul, formed with an English friend, Chris Weyers, a Danish friend, Anders Petersen, and a Japanese friend, Yasushi ______. We recorded some originals in a professional studio, but I don’t know where the cassette copy of that session has gone to. If I recover it I’ll digitize it and post the songs here later.

I also bought a Roland R-8 drum machine while in Japan and used it to back up a short-lived country blues solo act I did, as well as a duo I formed with the lead singer of Hard on Soul, Chris, called Electric Tradition. This is the same drum machine I used later on my solo albums. Once in a while I would sit around in my apartment in Osaka and layer the drum sounds for fun, and then edit them into song-length compositions. There is no synthesizer on these tracks, it’s all the R-8’s sounds. The guitarist of Hard on Soul, Yasushi, was kind enough to let me master the drum machine experiments on his home studio over a weekend just before I left Japan to continue my travels. It being the 80s, he insisted on increasing the volume of the kick drum. We also added a little reverb. Besides that, there was no further mixing. I also recorded a bunch of songs with lyrics at his place, which together with the drum machine pieces comprised my first solo album, “Border.” All of the songs with lyrics were later redone on one of the solo albums I’ve upload here, “Pomo Pancakes,” after I had returned Stateside from my travels, so they’re not included here.

“Border,” 1991