Vintage Asian Music Collectors
A few years ago, Ed Povey (Jeju Digital) was digging into the world of Asian Music, and asked a few collectors five questions about their hobby, before answering those same questions himself. Let’s see how they came drawn to the hobby, along with some photos from their collections!
Chris Cabrera (Nagoya, Japan)
1. Tell us a little about yourself and what led you to collecting music.
I'm originally from Guam and I am living in Nagoya, Japan now, going to grad school. When I was younger, CDs were still a thing and I continued to purchase music even when I got into Japanese music during high school. Sometimes it was easier to buy CDs if the artist was really obscure. The genres of Japanese music I've been interested in changed over time, but for some reason the ritual of collecting and purchasing my favorite music has always stayed with me. I've always tried to support musicians (though I guess buying used isn't always exemplary of that...).
2. Which specific genre(s) and era of Asian music are you interested in?
I like Japanese music the most, and that's what I've been interested in for the longest period of time. I've always been really interested in the latest indie and underground bands but...in the last 3-4 years I've been going backwards and listening to older stuff from the 70s and 80s, mostly City Pop. I also really like soundtracks from Japanese films and anime, and video games. As for other Asian music, a friend of mine introduced me to some indie music from China and Taiwan...and I'm hoping I can learn more about the bands from there in the future. Since I've been so preoccupied with listening to music from Japan, it's like a completely unknown realm to me and that in itself is really cool.
3. What formats do you collect? Where and how do you buy music?
There isn't a specific format I collect, but now that I live in Japan and don't have to deal with the insane shipping costs I mostly purchase vinyl. There are no record stores where I'm from, so buying vinyl has never been an option for me and I find it really fun to peruse the stacks of vinyl here. It's also really inexpensive, and 70s-80s Japanese music is probably easier to find on vinyl than on CD anyway. On the other hand, stuff like video game music or stuff in the genre of shibuya-kei was never really released on vinyl, so I always look for those on CD. I guess the format depends on the music, so I'm not entirely picky or format-specific. I pick up tapes too, but they rarely come up here.
Before moving to Japan, I used Discogs for records and bought CDs from just about every Japanese site (Amazon, from the artists themselves, record labels, random record stores, etc.) but since coming to Nagoya I visit record stores pretty regularly and get most of my stuff from there. There are a ton of record stores and places selling CDs here and the prices are insane: much cheaper than Tokyo and always full of surprises and hidden gems. I could go on and on about record stores here. They are so much fun and affordable.
4. Tell us about a few favorite albums in our collection.
I think one of my favorites — also one of the more rare albums I have — is Yoshiko Sai's acid folk album Mangekiyou. I saw it once and passed it up, then regretted it, but was lucky enough to run into another copy a month or two later in pristine condition. I love the music, but the cover is also really amazing. Same for another of my favorites, Yumi Murata's Krishna album, which is a bit more groovy and features Yasuaki Shimizu. I looked for this forever and got it around my birthday on an auction site. Again, I think my favorite part of this album is the cover, but the music is also really good, too. Lastly, I never thought I'd own a copy of Sugar Babe's Songs, but I got one — albeit kind of beat up — for really cheap once at a record store nearby. It's one of the albums that got me into City Pop in the first place; so I'm really happy that I have a copy even if it isn’t a very good one, since usually it goes for a lot of money.
5. If you’re a fan/aware of vaporwave, how is it related to the vintage music you collect and your habit of collecting?
A lot of the first City Pop and 80s Japanese records I bought were by artists that were sampled in vaporwave or future funk music. Although it doesn’t really influence my taste anymore, I think that kind of music introduced me to a lot of older music and helped guide me to a bunch of great artists in my early days of collecting vinyl.
Logan Owlbeemoth (Tachyons+)
1. Tell us a little about yourself and what led you to collecting music.
I am a video gear builder by day and video artist by night. The constant desire for new alien music.
2. Which specific genre(s) and era of Asian music are you interested in?
I am really into late 60's and early 70's Cantopop. Records from Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc. Music that sounds like it was made in a smokey underground basement. Noir atmosphere. Dreamy wet reverb guitars, crispy drums, strange horns and lovely vocals. Sometimes the records are filled with slow burners, and sometimes they have a few mega jams filled with sonic animation. Beautiful little creative pop gems that feel like a giant psych umbrella is taking you off into another dimension.
60's and 70's Cambodian, Thai, Korean, Vietnamese... garage psych rock and traditional. 80's Japan pop, jazz, all the now-popular City Pop of course, the YMO family tree which never ends, some of the more traditional 60's Japan lounge and 70's Japan jazz. And last but not least, VGM Records, which is mainly centered around Japanese composers.
3. What formats do you collect? Where and how do you buy music?
There is not much info on the internet for a lot of this stuff, due to the language barrier. Though I have found a few over the years in thrifts, flea markets in Florida. [I] used to have a nice collection when I lived in San Francisco, records I scored at thrifts around the Chinatown area.
4. Tell us about a few favorite albums in our collection.
The Stylers are an amazing Singapore band, usually anything with their name on it is gold. They were a house band for a ton of singers. Great guitar fuzz psych rock. Their Disco Drums album is their take on disco which is fantastic.
Moving over to obscure Japanese music: Visinda Og Leyndardómur by Saeko Suzuki is amazing. Experimental art pop in the 80’s and 90’s via Japan is the pinnacle and this is a strong leader.
One final record with a quality use of Moog is Wonderful Moog Sound by M. Sato and 1864 Cotton Field Rock Band. Easily, one of the finer outstanding Moog records of the time when Moog records were a dime a dozen.
5. If you’re a fan/aware of vaporwave, how is it related to the vintage music you collect and your habit of collecting?
The wild tension of seeking rare new music is a drive in the hunt, which can be found in vapor or any rare form of music collecting for sure. And when you find it! Not a better feeling in the world and the years of enjoyment revolving around the physical medium. It becomes a tangent memory. Not throw away.
Check out Tachyons+ at: www.tachyonsplus.com
Frankie Sebastian Filleti-Melonik (New York, US)
1. Tell us a little about yourself and what led you to collecting music.
I’ve always loved music since as young as I could remember. Growing up in NYC, I was exposed to an array of music and cultures that you could not experience anywhere else in such a small space. While I mainly listened to whatever was on the radio as a kid, I also enjoyed hearing the different types of music you’d hear out of storefronts and cars just by walking down a few blocks. Within the span of a 10 minute walk you could hear music from Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Europe. While I enjoyed this music, I never really started collecting until around May 2017. That is when I discovered a cassette collective on Facebook dedicated to creating, designing and selling vaporwave cassettes and concepts. Of course I knew about the genre before finding the group, but I never collected physical releases before. But since vaporwave does a great job of making you feel nostalgic, I remember the few cassettes and CDs we had when I was still too young to know how to even play them and I thought about getting a few tapes of my own. I never thought it would lead to where I’m at right now with my collection and I couldn’t be more pleased. I actually don’t focus on vaporwave much anymore and mostly buy from Japan.
2. Which specific genre(s) and era of Asian music are you interested in?
I’m interested in all different genres and eras of Asian music, from ancient times to modern times. I can’t limit myself to one specific genre because they are all so different and equally beautiful. I love Japanese Enka and Min'yō which are more traditional genres of music, but I equally enjoy City Pop and J-Pop. I’m also a fan of Cantonese/H.K. Pop and collect from a multitude of artists such as Cally Kwong, Teresa Teng, Chang Siao Ying etc.
3. What formats do you collect? Where and how do you buy music?
I collect multiple formats, but since I am mainly a cassette collector the vast majority of the pieces I have are tapes. But I also have records, CDs, Mini CDs, VHS tapes and DVDs. Finding the cassettes are actually the most difficult as they are pretty rare to find even in Asia. I believe 1st edition Teresa Teng cassettes can sell for as high as $500, and maybe more. For the most part I buy online through shipping agents that mail the items straight from their origin countries. I mainly use Jauce and Superbuy, although sometimes they are difficult to use and fees are always high. I have no choice, however, because these are the only places of which I’m aware that have these rare items. Once in a while I take a trip to Sau Voi, a Vietnamese deli located in Lower Manhattan near Canal Street and I find some VHS tapes and CDs. Nothing extraordinary; I believe they also sell Laserdiscs but they are too expensive for me and not worth it as I do not have a Laserdisc Player. There’s also a Chinese bookstore on 8th Ave in Brooklyn that sells Cantonese Pop on CD and DVD and I buy from them once in a while. But you will never find the cassettes locally, unfortunately.
4. Tell us about a few favorite albums in our collection.
I’m always terrible at picking favorites because I like everything in my collection. I guess some of my most favorites are my cassette copies of Mignonne by Taeko Ohnuki and This Boy by Hiroshi Satoh. I also have a sealed copy of Miki Matsubara’s Pocket Pocket that I display on a shelf with Tatsuro Yamahsita’s Come Along trilogy box set. I also love my Cally Kwong cassette collection, and I have my favorite album Keep Spring. Her voice is so clear and relaxing and it’s great to listen to if you want to relax or meditate. I also have a North Korean propaganda cassette that I value very much and a set of Vietnamese albums by Sơn Tuyền.
5. If you’re a fan/aware of vaporwave, how is it related to the vintage music you collect and your habit of collecting?
Originally I started my collection with vaporwave cassettes and I feel like that has influenced my habits as a collector. It’s worth noting I always loved music and enjoyed songs as far back as age 5, so I’m actually not surprised with how fast my collection expanded into what it is today. If you are a fan of the future funk style of vaporwave, then you know it samples from City Pop songs from the 80s. It doesn’t exclude sampling other genres, and other vaporwave styles like broken transmission get their samples from Cantonese music and Japanese commercials, but City Pop is the main source for these songs. There are so many samples at this point, so I co-founded the Facebook group Vaporwave Source Club to gather as many sources as possible. This lead me to take a closer listen to these sampled tracks and I realized that they are pretty amazing. Telepath’s Mysterious Lover under alias 泰合志恒 samples a song by Zheng Yi and from finding the original I began exploring more artists and the ways I could go about collecting cassette copies of their albums if they even existed. The methods I applied to finding vaporwave cassettes helped me locate some favorites of mine and it’s fun to have physical artifacts of not only the vaporwave albums but also the albums they sample.
You can see Frankie’s enviable collection at: www.discogs.com/seller/FujiFilmTV1996
Edward Povey (Seoul, South Korea)
1. Tell us a little about yourself and what led you to collecting music.
In the late 90s I started DJing in the UK rave scene, and in those days the only option for DJs was playing vinyl on turntables so it grew out of that. I was buying about 20-30 records a week and it cost a fortune! Then as I started to diversify the music I played, I started picking up old records from punk, ska, reggae, funk, soul, electro, house, etc. The habit of collecting has stayed with me and now I live in Korea there’s so much new stuff to collect!
2. Which specific genre(s) and era of Asian music are you interested in?
The pop music genre of Korea from the 60s-80s is called trot, which is an abbreviation of foxtrot. But it doesn’t really sound like foxtrot — it’s kind of a mix of old Korean folk songs and a Korean version of pop music from that era. A lot of it sounds like really cheap Casio preset drums with crazy jamming over the top. It’s really nostalgic and, even though I didn’t grow up in Korea, seeing the old folk dance and sing to these classic tunes brings back unexperienced memories, kinda like listening to vaporwave.
Trot has several variants. My favourites are café (카베 / 다방 음악) and cabaret (카바레 / 지루박). Café music was played in the cafés back in the day. It’s kind of a slow, lazy, sleazy take on the pop hits of the day. Cabaret is the dancing music, mostly electronic with no lyrics. That stuff has some wild synth solos. A lot of trot music is bootlegs of popular songs and folk music, so most of this stuff is unofficial releases sold in old markets.
3. What formats do you collect? Where and how do you buy music?
I collect vinyl, cassettes and Video CDs from old markets in Seoul. Vinyl is always risky to buy because of scratches and jumping needles. It’s also valued quite highly in Korea, so the prices are sometimes insane. Cassettes are my preference because they’re cheap, often bootlegs, and the music is often rarer than what was officially released on vinyl. Video CDs are my new thing. It’s a strange old format that only really took off in Asia, to my understanding. It’s great because you get the music along with old video footage of beach scenes and mountain scenery. And of course, old rare formats are fun.
The old markets in Seoul are really special. The atmosphere and stalls [are] unlike anything else. There’s a huge flea market on the weekends that stretches for several miles. It took me a few years to learn every alleyway, and I still find new stuff. They have everything from clothes, to old media, to household items and old tech.
4. Tell us about a few favorite albums in our collection.
As I said, a lot of trot is bootleg releases, so my fave actual albums were picked out of bins full of cassettes where they sell four tapes for 1,000₩ (about one dollar). I like the lower production value of the bootleg stuff and the raw synth/drum machine vibes, rather than the polished orchestral sound of the more official releases.
5. If you’re a fan/aware of vaporwave, how is it related to the vintage music you collect and your habit of collecting?
One of the reasons I collect tapes in Seoul is for sampling to make music. I like really lo-fi degraded vaporwave, so I decided the best way to get that sound is [to] go straight to the source and take samples from old cassette tapes. It’s great because if a tape is old and messed up, then the audio quality is already warbly and mangled, without having to use effects to achieve that sound. Vaporwave has given me a renewed interest in collecting and producing music.
If you’re interested in learning more about these genres, chatting with other collectors, or figuring out where to start your own journey, join the Vintage East Asian Cassette Collectors Facebook group here!
