Renowned Japanese music critic, editor and historian Masato Matsumura (Studio Voice, Tokion) and musician, label head Shinji Shibayama (Nagisa Ni Te, Hallelujahs, Org Records) reflect on White Heaven founder You Ishihara's 1997 solo debut, Passivité. Shibayama's notes were first published with the original CD editions released by Creativeman Disc, Japan and are translated here for the first time. Masamoto's notes were written 25 years later and published for the first time with the remastered 2025 vinyl edition of Passivité released by Black Editions, now available for purchase.
The French title Passivité translates to “passivity” in English or judousei, which connotes resignation and nonresistance, in Japanese. But could this word also, paradoxically, denote subjectivity or autonomy? While your average musician proudly asserts himself on his first solo release, Ishihara instead takes a step back and tries to blend into a twilight scene wrapped in light that looks a lot like darkness. It’s as if he’s trying to cede his very existence to sound or reduce himself to the subject of a bird’s eye view – an approach I couldn’t comprehend in ’97, when this album first appeared. Perhaps I was just too young to understand. We often attribute art’s universality to its atemporality, but in direct contrast to work whose constancy we regard as truth is work whose worth is revealed only as it’s washed away by time. You Ishihara’s Passivité is a perfect example of this phenomenon, and a reminder to those of us now living in the world a quarter of a century later that, while everyone else was whispering about the end of history, Passivité was one of the few late ’90s works to expose itself to the merciless, endless march of time.
1997, the year of this album’s release, was a turning point for Ishihara. White Heaven, the group he had led since its formation in ’85, was slowly winding down after the release of its third LP, Next To Nothing, the previous year. In addition to Passivité, a White Heaven album also materialized in ’97. Issued by a US label, Levitation was a compilation of studio sessions recorded after the band’s first release, the live Electric Cool Acid album (’87), and before their debut studio album, Out (’90). Levitation may not have reached many ears, as only 700 copies were pressed. But with original member Tetsuya Sakamoto (formerly of Rotting Telepathies) gone, and Ishihara, Michio Kurihara, Soichiro Nakamura, and Ken Ishihara now filling out the lineup, experimental Levitation – a new, mottled mix of the band’s original heavy sound with improvisation – stood in stark contrast with the deliberately hollowed-out, contemplative Passivité. That Levitation and Passivité represent two aspects of the same person makes the gap between the two feel even wider.
Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that Passivité has a completely different line of force than any of White Heaven’s releases. The album opens with “K,” a loose, drum-less track filled with echoing sounds. Thanks to this reissue’s credits (missing from the original ’97 edition), we now know that “K” featured Ishihara on vocals and guitar, Kurihara on second guitar, and Chiyo Kamekawa on bass. This is likely redundant information for readers of these liner notes, but Kurihara and Ishihara had been close allies since the White Heaven days, and Kamekawa was the bassist for Yura Yura Teikoku, a group Ishihara produced. Kurihara and Kamekawa were also in The Stars, a band Ishihara formed in ’99 that made exceptional records in the first decade of the twenty-first century. I’ll write more about The Stars later, but this trio (Ishihara, Kurihara, and Kamekawa) is joined by ex-White Heaven drummer Koji Shimura to complete the lineup on Passivité. As if expressing his conviction that rock has no need for things like flashy guitars, clear rhythms, and the like, Ishihara organizes his musicians into a variety of configurations (solo, duo, trio and full band) to dramatic effect on Passivité. I hear him pose a question to the listener – Is rock without drums or bass still rock? – as if interrogating the classic equation, rock equals band. And Passivité’s structure, a steep arch with fourth track “Crevice” at the apex, doesn’t betray much of a song-centric consciousness at play. In fact, what’s most startling about Passivité is the way it mimics the “song-based album” via Ishihara’s highly conceptual method of working backwards from traditional ideas and forms of the album.
An extremely important track that introduces the album’s overall plot, opener “K” is tranquil and beautiful, pairing Ishihara’s baritone with a shimmering melody. I assume the title refers to someone’s initials, but I’m not familiar enough with the backstory to know for sure. Regardless, prying is unnecessary here. If “K” actually refers to a Ken or a Keiji or a Kevin, it also works as an anonymous “K ,” like the surveyor in Kafka’s The Castle – a character designed to excite a fictional narrative. But the fiction that emerges in “K” is consistently oriented towards an “other” – something different from the here and now – and Ishihara’s ironic lyrics may be a natural extension of Passivité’s underlying ontology. Alluding to these sorts of questions, Ishihara steps into whiteout territory on second track “Nachbild” (German for “afterimage”). This acid track – the only song on the album featuring just Ishihara and his guitar – shows not only Ishihara’s chops as a singer-songwriter but also the unique flavor of his guitar playing. Of course, Ishihara’s mostly strummed performance isn’t particularly eccentric, but the combination of Ishihara's playing with the rich, colorful timbres of Kurihara’s guitar work gives the music a remarkable tonal shape. Their collaboration on the album’s third track, “Immortal Nothing Blues,” offers a perfect example of this dynamic, with Kurihara’s feedback-laden, distorted guitar marking a radical shift from the two prior, quieter tracks. Although discordant, the echoing noise on “Immortal Nothing Blues” seems less a product of rock intensity than a sign of a minimalistic, drone-based approach, as if the noise were sculpted to keep time for Ishihara’s performance. Repetition and duration – the relationship between music and time – are likely key concepts for Ishihara. With a recursive pattern that reflects the title’s suggestion of a slow progression, the second track on side B, “Nightwalker,” hints at this theme as well. With the band carefully riding a steady rhythm under a Derek Bailey-esque solo from Ishihara, “Nightwalker” almost seems to intentionally subvert “Immortal Nothing Blues.” With its bright texture and fiery groove, the track would later become an important part of The Stars’ repertoire as well. (Something about the arrangement of “Immortal Nothing Blues” [retitled “Subway”] on The Stars’ second album, Perfect Place To Hideaway, makes it seem like an aggregation of Passivité’s methodology).
With regard to alternate versions of previously released material, it should also be noted that the ’96 LP version of White Heaven’ s third album, Next To Nothing , included an instrumental version of Passivité’s “ Wednesday” titled “ Wednesday’s White Arm.” While Passivité ’s “Wednesday” has a lightness perfect for its position at the top of side B, the instrumental version is more upbeat and has a stronger soft rock vibe. This is especially apparent on Next To Nothing, where “Wednesday’s White Arm” immediately follows a cover of Burt Bacharach’s “Look of Love.” Traces of an earlier era are few and far between in “Wednesday’s White Arm,” but listen carefully to the harmonies and you’ll hear counter melodies with hints of bossa nova, jazz and soul – not just the sound of ’60s America, but the very fabric of underground psychedelic culture. Listen further, and you’ll realize “Wednesday’s” two-chord intro also appeared earlier, in “Nachbild.” And once you’ve discovered this recurring motif, the album becomes something more than a mere collection of songs. The impression the album leaves – that the songs are in dialogue with each other and connected – places it more in the realm of epistemology than aesthetics, but as a conceptual artist You Ishihara has what it takes to nonchalantly pull off this feat. I’ll leave it to wise listeners as to whether or not my interpretation makes sense, but I think Ishihara’s solo works in particular exhibit this quality I’ve described. And I wouldn’t dare make these sorts of fanciful proclamations if it weren’t for Ishihara’s second solo album, Formula, which arrived in ’20, a whole 23 years after Passivité. Some might find the album’s equal treatment of field recordings and music peculiar, but its straightforward, decisive experimental spirit demonstrated how Ishihara approached his solo works differently than his other releases — when working under his own name, Ishihara was inclined to reveal which layer the “subject” occupied in the hierarchical arrangement of his compositions.
For Ishihara, perhaps the solo album is more of an outlet for conceptual experimentation than self-expression, a place to conduct a dialogue with that most familiar other – the self. Viewing Passivité through the lens of understanding that Formula provided, we see a different sonic landscape than we did 25 years ago. We see that the “you” in album closer “For You” is Ishihara himself, and that the avant-garde synthesizer part (recorded 17 years prior to the album’s release) functions less as music distinct from its surroundings, and more as a symbol to emphasize the disconnection between past and present. Dropping the needle on Passivité 25 years later feels like crisscrossing ever more complicated layers of time. But there is a remarkable lack of the sort of nostalgia that usually accompanies such an act. Perhaps this is because Ishihara cleverly avoided aligning himself with any particular era and instead anticipated what most needed to be said and done through concise expression. At the heart of Ishihara’s creative impulse is a kind of clarity, a brightness like that of broad daylight. Ironically, it’s the twilight imagery on Passivité that reveals this brightness.
Masato Matsumura, 2022
In his liner notes to Kousokuya’s debut album from 1991, Maher Shalal Hash Baz’s Tori Kudo wrote, “I get the feeling listeners will split into two camps in the ’90s, separated by something like the subtle difference between those who can have what I’ll call the Tim Buckley experience and those who can’t.”* White Heaven – a band that included You Ishihara – released their first album around the time Kudo wrote those words. Perhaps mere coincidence, but I find the timing interesting.
Setting aside whether or not Kudo’s prediction was accurate, there’s no doubt that when it comes to differences (in food preferences, sexual predilections, whatever) that can only be expressed in terms of subtle nuances, the more subtle the nuance, the greater the impact on the overall quality of the item at hand. This is especially true when it comes to music.
When I listen to Ishihara’s work, I get the sense that he understands this well.
Even music in its many forms is sometimes reduced to something trivial – little more than a salesman’s business card or a tool to justify a particular dogma. But neither Ishihara nor I have any use for that sort of thing. In music, we look for truthful reflections of ourselves and the
world, and a certain sense of urgency.
That urgency can be something like, for example, the madness of an intimate sexual encounter, or the emptiness of a midday picnic next to a highway on a lawn littered with cans and other garbage. But what sort of feeling is Ishihara after exactly?
The seven scenes painted by the very simple performances on this solo album convey the fragrance of a still, sunny day, even on songs with nighttime themes. Ishihara’s vocals suggest a strange objectivity, certainly when they float along calmly but also when they sound restless, as if Ishihara were suffering from convulsions. He sounds as if he’s standing motionless in the sun, or looking down on himself from above, forced out of his body by something or someone.
What a departure from the rock ’n’ roll tradition where musicians egomaniacally push themselves into a state of crazed rapture through performance (or drugs?) in order to feel something “real.” And yet, Ishihara’s music doesn’t deviate from the basic rock format. If anything, it betrays a sincere attachment to the classics. This is clear even from his style of singing – in English, with what sounds like an Angelino’s accent.
In other words, as a Japanese person looking to feel something genuine through rock, perhaps Ishihara had no choice but to understand and embrace these sorts of contradictions (let’s call them contradictions) and come up with a new way of doing things that was compatible with these contradictions. That this process was both necessary and natural for him is obvious – even the album title, Passivité, reflects this.
With its transparent display of Ishihara’s raw sensibilities, Passivité fills me with a mix of nostalgia and pleasant discomfort. Despite the seventeen-year gap between the final two tracks, Ishihara’s ongoing search for the light of day remains consistent throughout.
Where was I in ’80, and what was I looking at? Where am I in ’97, and what am I trying to see?
April 25, 1997 Shinji Shibayama
Nagisa Ni Te / Org Records
*This wasn’t about experiencing Tim Buckley’s music specifically, but rather an ability to perceive an “essence of music” in seemingly run-of-the-mill singer-songwriter style folk rock, a reference to an aspect of music that can’t be put into words. The circle of characters affiliated with the bizarre Modern Music record shop (symbol of the ’80s Tokyo underground) campaigned for a reevaluation and reinterpretation of artists like Tiny Tim, Tim Buckley and Peter Ivers as the originators of “real” psychedelic music.
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