Tokyo Indie

As the dust settles on the New Year parties in Tokyo, everyone’s attention is turning to the plethora of great events in January which will be the ruin of many 2012 resolutions. Creativeman’s Radars show on January 28th sees a clutch of new and exciting bands heading to Tokyo to air their musical talents for the first time. Working in association with Virgin Atlantic, who are flying the bands over, the showcase aims to bring the freshest of talent to Japan. The Welsh four-piece Islet are one of the lucky bands to be making the journey over in a few weeks and we had the chance to find out exactly what this experimental rock outfit are all about.

First of all well done! It must be amazing to have the chance to come to Japan?

Yes most certainly! None of us have ever been there before. As another group of islands off the coast of a large continent, Japan has always struck me as a kind of parallel Britain, on the other side of the world with a totally different history and traditional culture. We are delighted to come to your fascinating country! The boys are planning to go to Ajinomoto stadium, which baffles me, so I’m going to visit an onsen and jam the cultural, touristy stuff in.

You were all in bands before Islet, is this band an amalgamation of those sounds or a chance to have a fresh slate and try something different?

We started this group as a fresh way of thinking for ourselves, with no set roles or instruments. We have no such thing as ‘guitarist’ or the ‘lead singer’ in Islet. So it is quite different to anything we’ve done before. We all love playing live too, we give it a collective good go!

It’s a question you are often asked, but why did you decide to avoid having any online presence when you started out?

We thought we’d set up a website once we had something to post on it. Music comes before all else and until we had some recording and live dates to put up we couldn’t see the point. We have recently built our new website, isletislet.com which which has a lot of visual content; gifs, poster archive as well as an ongoing archive of every gig we’ve ever played.

You produce your own fanzine, do you think this gives a more direct connection to your fans?

Our zine, ‘The Isness’, is great fun to do. It’s pretty sporadic, we do it when we have the time and feel like it, but it’s also totally free so I don’t feel bad about that! What’s nice is that people often send us things they have made, drawings, photos, zines and so on, so in a way it is a creative exchange. We like making things so in a way it’s a good excuse to get the paper and glue out from time to time. Mark and I do all our sleeves, posters, t-shirts ourselves and post a lot of it out from our flat, so it is a quite self-contained little machine.

I read that you made a conscious decision to keep your day jobs, what do you do?

Ha ha, I’d like to know where you read that! We have jobs because we would run out of food pretty swiftly if not.

Is it difficult to strike a balance between the work and music?

It can be hard squeezing it all in sometimes, we’re all aware that we are very lucky getting to do all the things we do! The only thing that sometimes bothers me is if people presume we’re full time musicians and think we sit around playing video games all day or something. We don’t get to spend as much time with each other making music as perhaps we’d like, but we appreciate it all the more when we do get together!

You are playing alongside fellow UK act S.C.U.M, are you fans of theirs?

I’ve not checked them out yet, but a quick look on Wikipedia tells me one of them is known for his ‘innovative hand movements’ which I will very much be looking forward to checking out.

Finally, why should Japanese music fans come to see your show?

They should come if they’re into bands who don’t believe in telling people what to do, who encourage free thinking and self-expression… (hang on, I’ve dug myself a hole here..!)

For more information and tickets for the show, please visit the Radars website.

URL: http://bignothing.net/islet.html

Words: Mark Birtles

Translation: Asuka Ozutsumi