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SHUGO TOKUMARU

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Shugo Tokumaru

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Latest setlist, shugo tokumaru on july 30, 2017.

Naeba Ski-jou, Yuzawa, Japan

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Experimental

Shugo Tokumaru

By Mehan Jayasuriya

By Joe Tangari

Port Entropy

By Jayson Greene

By Chris Dahlen

By Nick Sylvester

Night Piece

“Lita-Ruta”

By Nina Corcoran

The Top Music Videos of 2013

By Pitchfork

Ten Best Songs I Discovered in 2005

Watch Shugo Tokumaru's Elaborate Stop-Motion Video for "Katachi"

By Evan Minsker

New Release: Shugo Tokumaru: Port Entropy

By Tom Breihan

"Rum Hee"

Shugo Tokumaru to Tour With the Magnetic Fields

By Paul Thompson

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Shugo Tokumaru catches me off guard when he says that his life today is basically the same as it was in 2004. “Not much has changed really,” the singer-songwriter says. “I still do what I want to do, in the same style.” That’s not exactly convincing; just over a decade ago, Tokumaru was performing on stage alone with a few loop pedals in tiny Tokyo spaces to small audiences. When we meet in mid April, on the eighth floor of Tower Records Shibuya, he’s only a few weeks away from a nationwide tour of Japan, playing larger venues with a full backing band. A few posters advertising his latest release are hanging around the store.

“I think it’s like comparing different types of runs,” Tokumaru says, acknowledging he’s busier than before, but that it doesn’t necessarily impact his work. “Interviews like this, for example, I do them now and though I might not like them, it isn’t like I dislike them either. It’s OK to do it.”

With his sixth album Toss getting an international release this month (it came out in Japan last fall), Tokumaru’s schedule has shifted into overdrive. He has another interview immediately after ours, and more in the near future. He’s organizing the Tonofon Festival this June, which is named after the Japanese label he co-founded.

Yet Toss still sounds distinctly Tokumaru-ish: bedroom pop that barrels forward with songs boasting zig-zagging guitar melodies, sudden string-section blurts, and various click-clacking. It features an assortment of slower ballads for balance, but the bulk still leans towards the frantic. It often sounds seconds away from collapsing in on itself, but Tokumaru’s greatest skill is his ability to hold it all together, and locate a pop core within.

“Shugo’s genius is that he can make incredibly dense, challenging songs in off-kilter time signatures and orchestration that sound ‘nice’ to normal people,” says W. David Marx, author of Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style , co-founder of web journal Néojaponisme , and a long-running Tokumaru fan. “I am in awe of Shugo for both creating incredible music and being smart and diligent enough to find an audience for it.”

Tokumaru’s process for writing and recording changed during the creation of Toss . Previous albums were created from the comfort of his own home—with Tokumaru sometimes working in a dark room to force out upbeat music. He would play every single instrument on the album, and the physical version of his last album, 2012’s In Focus? , came with a bonus disc featuring brief snippets of every sound on the album, from piano and drums to ocarina and “frying pan.”

“When I made In Focus? , I felt satisfied making music alone, all by myself,” Tokumaru says. “This time, I wanted to try by doing something that triggers new music, and in this case that meant working with someone else.”

So he entered the studio with a variety of other artists, including members of his touring band, the composer Chikara Uemizutaru, and Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier. “I challenged myself this time around, seeing what other musicians came up with, and if I could make a song out of the material they came up with,” Tokumaru says. “I thought making music with others would shorten the process. It was actually the complete opposite—it took two to three times longer,” he recalls. “I don’t think I can even judge if it is good or bad at this point.”

As difficult as it got, Tokumaru still managed to craft an album of songs that both recall his signature style and expand on it. Numbers such as “Lift” and “Taxi” zoom ahead before making sudden twists—a backtracked xylophone line here, a chorus of chipmunked voice there—before hitting a hook’s sweet spot. “I’ve gotten feedback from the other musicians, and it doesn’t feel like they played this music,” he says. “They ask, ‘What part of this did I play?’ That’s the biggest reaction I’ve gotten.”

The album-closing “Bricolage Music” includes sounds crowdsourced from fans via the internet, and the resulting number is a mish-mash of instruments, voices, and animal noises. “Submissions ranged from everyday sounds, to pets, to original songs,” says Tokumaru. “Some of them were like, ‘What are they thinking?’” Instrumental number “Cheese Eye” feels like Tokumaru’s attempt at a  Merrie Melodies soundtrack, and is a direct homage to Tom and Jerry music maker Scott Bradley.

“When I was two or three years old, Tokyo Disneyland opened up,” Tokumaru says, “My father helped work on the ad team, so I went to the opening. It had a massive impact on me; I watched tons of animation from Japan and America after.”

That affection for whimsy has been a part of Tokumaru’s music since his earliest recordings . One of the first people to hear his work was Marx, who struck up a conversation with Tokumaru during a show. “Shugo played guitar in a backing band for a solo artist I knew,” Marx says. “I somehow started talking to him randomly about the Beach Boys. He perked up and said, ‘Oh, I love the Beach Boys.’ Next time I saw him, he gave me his demo CD, Fragment .”

Marx sent ripped files of Fragments to a friend in New York, Trevor Sias who ran a label called Music Related. Smitten, Sias wanted to put it out, but Tokumaru wanted to record something more polished. The result was Night Piece , his debut, which was released by Music Related in 2004. That’s when the praise from Western writers started coming in.

“The moment I knew Shugo would be huge is when I met some random American tourist in Japan a year later, and she had Night Piece on her iPod,” Marx says. While subsequent albums continued winning fans abroad, Tokumaru remained relatively unknown in Japan. Then, one of his songs soundtracked an ad for a Sony touchscreen computer and exposed his sound to the Japanese audience for the first time. Night Piece made a surprise appearance on Japan’s album charts. Since then, he’s appeared at some of the nation’s biggest festivals, toured large venues, and had the chance to launch his own label, Tonofon, which grew out of a blog where he would showcase new music. Tonofon grew even further in 2011, when it became a proper music festival.

For all these new challenges, Tokumaru is already eyeing his next move. He’s changed up his schedule, recording at night until 5am and waking up at noon. He doesn’t share specifics, but he’s once again pushing himself to try something different.

“There were times I didn’t want to do it anymore, because of how difficult it could feel,” he says. “For me, I always tend to choose more difficult paths to making music, as a way to challenge myself.”

— Patrick St. Michel

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• June 13, 2021 Setlist

Shugo Tokumaru Setlist at Laguna Ten Bosch, Gamagoori, Japan

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1 activity (last edit by FFalex , 3 Jun 2023, 10:22 Etc/UTC )

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Shugo Tokumaru Gig Timeline

• Nov 11 2017 Play Yard by Studio Bar Bangkok, Thailand Add time Add time
• May 06 2019 Hibiya Yagai Ongakudou Tokyo, Japan Add time Add time
• Jun 13 2021 Mori, Michi, Ichiba 2021 This Setlist Gamagoori, Japan Add time Add time
• Apr 08 2023 KOBE SONO SONO 2023 Kobe, Japan Add time Add time

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Album Review: Shugo Tokumaru – Port Entropy

• Shugo Tokumaru

The reputation that had preceded Shugo Tokumaru before listening to this disc was one of home-recorded-pop mastery. Notes of his use of over 100 instruments abound, as well as his apparently skyrocketing status in his native Japan. Considering the state of lo-fi, bedroom recordings in America, one couldn’t be faulted (I hope) for expecting drugged-out, scuzzy, reverbed, even sadsack from another bedroom record. Instead, as the cutesy MS Paint-style drawings on the cover of Port Entropy suggest, this is a record bursting at the seems with childlike joy and wonder. The only problem that this sort of enthusiasm can bring, though, is the dreaded “too much”-ness, that moment where you can take no more playfulness, not another layer of offbeat instrumentation, not another high five or wide-eyed smile. While multiple listens in a short span of time may delve solidly into that Too Much realm, the instrumental control and inventiveness, the intensely mastered song-crafting are indeed remarkable.

From the introductory pulse of “Platform”, the disc races off on unexpected twists, seemingly drawn to whatever shiny object is off at the distance, pumping its fist and smiling the whole way. Whistles, triangle, and toy piano all stake their claim for attention, the epic, video game-ish theme rooted in acoustic plucking and barely there vocals aahs. The waltzing guitar of “Tracking Elevator” gets banjo, upright piano, bell, a choir, and more, all adding to a powerfully cute overload. Fans of Sufjan Stevens not too tied to down to lyrics (or those who can speak Japanese) would find this directly on their radar.

Even at its most downtempo, Tokumaru infuses wonder and affect wherever he can find it. “Linne” is a piano-driven ballad with a musical saw solo and intermittent visits from a horn section. The song is pretty and remarkable in its construction (as are most on the record), but its almost like he couldn’t make it pretty enough, daubing on layer after layer. The perfectly pitched pop of “Drive-Thru” is composed of what sounds like percussion played on a kitchen-full of pots, pans, and bottles while countless strata of melodica, guitar, and what may be steel drum drive the melody along.

But when Tokumaru is fun, he’s ridiculously fun. The rapid tin whistle, sleigh bells, guitar, and staccato vocals (adding “and more” at the end of any list of instrumentation should be taken as standard from here on out) on “Lahaha” feels like a run through a candy forest, recorder birds and glockenspiel rivers overloading the senses. The vocals occasionally verge on Sung Tongs era Animal Collective (talk about messed up forest-y feelings on that one), but nothing gets that psychedelic or uncontrolled. Instead, this is an album of total mastery, of control in the face of extreme mass. The endless repetitions of the title of “River Low” similarly evokes Sung Tongs , but the honky-tonk piano, saw, and whistle orchestra are pure, controlled chaos. Things sound totally out of human hands, but close listening would reveal everything fitting into a plan.

And when Tokumaru is too much… The severely over-long choir outro on “Orange” gets an even-longer addition of calliope sounds, discordant whistles, and telephones ringing. The whole thing is tooth-grindingly sweet, a control freak trying to go out of control, which is precisely not where Tokumaru should be going. While Port Entropy certainly holds up to repeat listens, too many in a day might be the wrong idea for this one. It’s a wonderful record of a musician and songwriter in his prime, but one that requires a willingness to go on a ride, with an open mind and a willingness to have some fun.

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