Late Assignment: What I Did on My Summer Vacation
(still feel like an exile)
(Thanks for the extension -- I've been swamped all semester.) My experience of the trip to Europe actually began a few months before I left. One day last spring, I was driving with my car radio tuned to the University of North Carolina student station. The music was some bracing, limpid minimalism, and when I called in to ask who was doing it, the DJ told me "Ogurusu Norihide," which I made her spell. Research revealed that Norihide is a young Japanese Shinto priest who, in his spare time, composes music in a genre known as "Laptop Folk." Hey, that's what I'd do too, if I had any spare time. Either that or send long personal essays into the abyss of the worldwide web.
I bought Norihide's album -- all instrumental -- entitled Modern, and spent some quality time with it for the next month or so. Its mood is pastoral, and its tonal palette is traditionally Western rather than Japanese. Except for the acoustic guitar (I think), every sound is digital. Some tracks verge on slight funkiness, and although it's nice to hear beats, that's where the record threatens to become the soundtrack to a TV ad for a hip new car. But as long as Modern doesn't dally in New Age electronica, and as long as Norihide resists over-instrumentation (which would make the album insufferably schmaltzy and irrelevant), it works. I don't hear a priest inside the notes, but there's undeniably a religious modesty that keeps Modern humble. In its best moments, it may be sacred.
By chance, I found out that Norihide, by slimmer chance, would be playing in my town in June. So I took my sister to see him at Nightlight. When we arrived, an American duo was doing noisy, arty computer music. By day, Nightlight is a bookstore/café called Skylight Exchange, and even though it often moonlights as a music venue, its coffeehouse quietude persists during shows. The noisemongers ebbed into the background with the rest of us, and that owed somewhat to our introspective mood and wayward attention. Some people were tuned into the band, but others were searching the bookshelves, and many were lounging or lying on the sofas scattered around the unkempt room.
When the duo finished, Norihide emerged to set up his laptop and microphone. He was much younger than I expected. Even though his record-company bio divulged exactly how old he was (twenty-five at the time), I clung to the ignorant idea that 'Shinto Priest' had to equal 'Venerable Old Japanese Man': I pictured an ancient monk, about five feet tall, in a long white robe. Norihide wore horn-rimmed glasses and a buttondown shirt. After setting up his laptop and his microphone, he said in very thickly accented English, "Hello. I am Ogurusu Norihide. My music is very quiet. But please enjoy." And then he played for about an hour. All of the pieces save the last were from his two albums (the other is called Humour), and indeed they were "very quiet." Someone had brought a dog to the show, and every time it shook its coat, the jangle of collar tags competed with Norihide's music. A woman fell asleep on the couch across from mine. A guy flipped through records just a few feet from Norihide's computer setup.
