In Japan

About the album

Guy Blackman In Japan is a ragged but atmosphere-rich document of Guy’s time in Tokyo (September 2002 – March 2004). It features five songs recorded in one afternoon, with one microphone, the weekend before Guy got on a plane back to Melbourne, plus three songs recorded at the last live gig he played in Tokyo. Accompanying Guy are members of many of the Songs For Nao bands, including Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Tenniscoats, My Pal Foot Foot and Andersens. After the instruments were recorded in Tokyo, vocals were added back in Melbourne with Henry Wagons of former Chapter recording artists Wagons. The EP includes a live cover of Nat King Cole’s Answer Me My Love, sung as a duet with Tenniscoats vocalist Saya. Guy’s own songs display a newfound depth and subdued intensity quite different to his work in his more pop-influenced bands Sleepy Township and Sulk. Songs like Older, written on Guy’s 29th birthday, and Mortified, about the confusing world of Tokyo gay nightlife, have an emotional vividness that breaks through the somewhat cloudy fidelity. And as Guy says in the CD’s liner notes, “the recordings are very rough, but to me they sound like Japan.”