Nekojiru Ost

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Madox Valdivia

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Aug 4, 2024, 5:00:51 PM8/4/24

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HiI'm Sean and I met some of you during DFN. I wanted to share a little bit of afx/rephlex trivia that most of you were probably unaware of. My interest in Nekojiru's work was what led me to listening to Aphex Twin. I was writing a longer post earlier outlining the work of Nekojiru but I decided to strip down to the bare essentials of her connection with Aphex Twin in the interest of keeping things on topic (but still quite indulgent).

Nekojiru was an avant-garde manga artist in Japan whose career spanned from 1990 to May 10th 1998 when she committed suicide. Her musical tastes tended towards trance and goa, but her favorite musician was Aphex Twin and in accordance with her will, the entirety of SAW2 was played at her funeral and she was buried with a CD and a video of Aphex Twin. She had an intense fascination with Aphex Twin.

"In January 1994, a small part of the foreign music department at Sony Entertainment Japan (where big names like Mariah Carey are handled) began releasing catalog material from R&S, Warp, and Rephlex"

The purpose of Sony Techno was to introduce Techno music to the Japanese public. It was shut down at the turn of the century. From what I can gather from their closing notice at , they felt that the scene had widened to the point that it now needed to expand freely and without them, or something. Anyway, the result is that their website has lain untouched since 1999. Visiting the website we are presented with a pristine slice of 1999 web design. It's a bit of a goldmine for obscure Japanese interviews and ancient press releases for Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, mu-ziq, Cylob, and lots of others. I have experience translating stuff from Japanese so if there's anything you'd like me to translate from here let me know and I can give it a shot.

A short description of the comic: it depicts a party at Grant's house. The wavy haired guy is mu-ziq. The featureless blob is Grant. Perhaps he had a clean-shaved head at the time. DMX Krew arrives in sunglasses driving a showy car. Bochum Welt is a robot. Apparently Nekojiru didn't think much of Cylob. Squarepusher arrives loud and hyper and comments 'man this party sucks!' until his girlfriend picks him up and tells him to settle down (her breast area is circled and labeled 'girlfriend'). Finally, AFX drives his tank through the wall grinning wide and everyone runs for their lives.

I haven't been able to find any source of the other four liner note drawings or the second rephlex comic (titled 'rephlex hiking trip'), unfortunately. Apparently these were handed out in flyers at a rephlex party in japan, so it seems pretty unlikely that'll show up.

In a book of reflections on the suicide of three close friends of the author, (one of which was Nekojiru) Yoshinaga describes her experience seeing Aphex Twin live. ctrl+f 'the liquid room' at the following link:

One thing I've always wondered is if Aphex Twin was ever aware of Nekojiru's work or if they ever interacted. When I saw Squarepusher and Aphex Twin at DFN I thought about how Nekojiru would have enjoyed it too.

Oh right, this "crazy Japanese lady who buried herself with her Aphex Twin collection" was one of those rumours from back in the late 90's that cemented the whole Aphex myth cult. Kind of a sad story to be honest, but thanks for the write-up!

If any of you want to look into Nekojiru, I recommend her two anthologies Nekojiru Udon 1 and 2. They are her early work and it's some really abstract, unbalanced stuff. In particular, chapter four of Udon 1 is possibly my favorite work by her, and is the basis of the Nekojiru animated feature film, which was made a few years after her death. I greatly recommend watching that too, it's on 30 minutes and it's on youtube. It's seemingly abstract, but there is a concrete story to it and it is very nice. It might help to wrap your head around it if you read that chapter.

Her later work after the work that appears in Udon, becomes a lot clearer and concrete and humor-oriented. Because her popularity was swelling she was getting a lot of work which she never thought of turning down, and so it was no longer possible to draw the meandering, unhinged stories she was outputting in the beginning. But her messed up and irreverent humor shines through in these later works. However, it's difficult to say how much of that is her husband's voice and how much of it was her own voice. They were so inextricably connected during the entire time of her work.

"The encounters with strange people in her stories were a mix of reality and fiction. Yamano surely helped to mold Nekojiru's ideas into concrete form, but the division of labor is not at all clear. Their collaboration consisted of the delicate tightrope act of translating the fragile madness of Nekojiru's ideas into a concrete form that anybody could understand. Like siamese twins, there's no way of saying where Nekojiru ends and Yamano begins. In every story by Nekojiru there's always more or less Yamano mixed in.

But some stories do seem more purely Nekojiru. I think it's fair to say that her unpaid early work for Garo or for me - the work collected in books like Nekojiru Udon and Jirujiru Nikki - is high proof Nekojiru. Here it's obvious she was coming up with the stories quite freely." _yoshinaga_on_nekojiru_pt_2

Kyoshi Izumi released an EP on Rephlex that I really love - any info about this guy at all? All i heard was that he was a drummer ( with "Ruins"??). Is he active? Any rephlex-related interviews you can find in Japanese with him to translate for us?

Just now read this thread, very nice write up indeed. Like others I had heard that rumor of the 'Japanese musician that wanted to be buried with part of her collection' myth. Doing some looking into this now, thanks for sharing this. Also awesome to have met you in person and hang out at the festival, good times!

New posters always start out with nice, well intentioned, high quality posts, then it goes south over time as your neurons are eaten up by IDM. Too much to process. Then eventually you'll be drooling along with the rest of us.

Great post and very informative/fascinating. I had seen her journal entries re- the Aphex show but had no idea how much other work she'd done.

I wonder who the dj was at the February show- Luke Vibert did a stint around that time spinning before Aphex i wonder if she's making reference to him.

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I found a little bit of "nekojiru chahan" recently, another nekojiru y comic that was serialized in the Gothic lolita magazine Cure (キュア). I'll work on that soon so follow the Twitter for more frequent updates.