THE SECOND ROOM
Summer 2007 – hot and full-on enough for you?; TPE/Noga breakthrough

TATEHARA KOUGEN, Nagano Pref. – Here we are more two weeks later and I can still feel the electric tingle of every hair on my arms going fully erect.

It’s a familiar sensation, one I’ve enjoyed many times before. The brain, knowing what’s coming, starts telegraphing advanced warning signals to every extremity. The muscles contract in a progressive wave that crests up onto your shoulders and foams around your throat before dripping down your spine and splashing out at your ankles.

This is what I love about psychedelic trance -- these physical manifestations of clarity so profound that for a few brief seconds you can sense some part of your own existence in the near-future, impatiently waiting for the rest of you to catch up.

Standing less than 2 meters from the source of this euphoria with a lifesaving grip on a professional video camera – knowing you can’t move when your body will demand it -- only intensifies the effect.

This particular hair-raising track is one I’ve heard nearly a dozen times at parties this year and even played in my own DJ set. But this time was definitely different. It was live, and it was Sesto Sento playing it. Plus there were a few thousand people behind me screaming their heads off. If you haven’t heard Sesto Sento’s cover of the Moby “Lift Me Up” track yet, then you haven’t lived in 2007.

What a fantastic Sunday morning -- the finest yet in 2007. With its 21 live acts and around 4,000 through the gate under a brilliant mountain sun at Tatehara Kougen, the “Open Air Summer Festival 2007” (July 27-30) firmly moved the TPE Records/ Noga Records partnership up a step.

Based on its number of parties, total attendance, CDs released and artists since last year, it’s fair to say that TPE/Noga has advanced to the No. 2 spot among Tokyo area organizers, although it still has a long way to go to catch up to Vision Quest. The criterion is not exact. But without a solid mid-summer festival from Solstice Music this year, there was a vacuum near the top and the TPE/Noga team has filled it, for now. More on that in a moment.

The funniest part is that TPE could have easily been a disaster. Some sort of transport strike in Israel was apparently lifted for the very day that TPE had advanced booked most of their artists to fly to Tokyo. The campground at Tatehara was also spared rain for just long enough to complete the second afternoon.

It turned out to be the year’s best big party so far and kicked off the beginning of a blitz of big summer open airs that we all thought would finish with “The Gathering 2007” (Vision Quest, Sept. 15-17). More on this in an upcoming blog.

An e-mail sent out last Friday by Solstice announces “smf 2007 – Returns” in Yokohama for Sept. 29 and 30, plus a 6-hour beach party this Friday (Aug. 17) at KULA Resort near Enoshima. This shows that Solstice is getting back onto its game and should make things interesting heading into the winter season.

As I write this, Mother Records’ annual “S.O.S.” blowout is going on up in Hakuba, getting into the heart of the second night’s music right about now. With no official holidays during this O-Bon season, it was impossible for me to get away. A whole lot of people do have time off this week, and I’ll know soon how this one turned out. Mother’s profile has also been on a steady rise in the past year, boosting their draw with splashes of house and electro.

Beach parties are especially tricky things to pull off perfectly in Japan for one simple reason: illegal parking. If you guessed “noise complaints” you were close; usually that merely results in cutting the volume, not shutting down the party. This is not new. It has been going on for years. Since the summer of 2002, I have only been to one beach doof where the music was not stopped by an illegal parking complaint.

Considering all that goes into setting one of these things up – and yes, I have lent a hand in this process – lugging tents, generators, sound systems, lights and the lot out next to the ocean and making it work, the organizer is up against certain limits to keep the cost for the customer as close to free as possible. These are usually on public beaches where parking notices are already posted.

So when the cops come around and stop the music because of where thoughtless idiots parked their rides, whose fault is it?

I launched this little rant because just such a thing happened at the peak of a killer beach party on the east coast of Chiba last weekend. Dears Music International and 122mg threw down one impressive soiree at Hitomatsu Beach, drawing around 300 with word out on their Web site and Mixi.

The weather was perfect, the most incredible sunrise was coming on, the DJs were playing precisely what I wanted to hear, when the inevitable happened. Eventually the music got going again and we pushed it as far as we could, but it was an unfortunate buzzkill for a while. OK, rant over.

DMI’s R and M DJ Ryosay is the source of that killer Linkin Park cover “Numb” you’ve hopefully been hearing at parties this summer. They are also in on the upcoming compilation “Olympic Sound,” compiled by Holymen and DJ Yagi.

(TPE photos by Hanako; DMI photos by DMI)