Occasionally the guitar got harsh, but sophisticatedly so: Bravo Komatsu – the guitarist who temporarily replaced founding member Keitarō Takanami on the 1995 tour – could wail on his instrument while flaunting enviable chops: Check out the virtuoso surf-metal spew he shoots over prerecorded “Twiggy Twiggy” tracks while Konishi dances the Frug on UK music show The Word. In the video to “Sweet Soul Revue”, she struck moves like Jagger while radiating the poise of Hepburn before morphing into a Pan Am-esque flight attendant.Įven more than the early De La Soul and Deee-Lite records that almost certainly provoked their initial Maki-era shift, P5 were vigorously post-modern: A Pizzicato jam might feature astoundingly accurate pastiches of the vocal and orchestral arrangements from baroque pop acts like the Fifth Dimension and the Left Banke, discothèque breakbeats played live and continuously at double time, and hip-hop production techniques that recall Godard’s jump cuts. Her favored fabrics were vintage and synthetic her wigs even more fake. Like early Warhol superstars Baby Jane Holzer and Edie Sedgwick, Nomiya exuded larger-than-life glamour: In the mode of subsequent Factory graduates like Mary Woronov, she was a beautiful woman presenting herself like a drag queen imitating a faded Hollywood starlet. James Bond” was a souped up 1991 remake of a track on her 1981 solo album that streamlined and simplified its source material with a caffeinated, sample-invigorated arrangement that would serve as the prototype for most P5 to come. A professional model before, during, and after her P5 reign, Nomiya was rail-thin like the face of ’60s Swinging London, Twiggy: Pizzicato Five’s most internationally popular song, “ Twiggy Twiggy/Twiggy vs. As P5’s vocalist, Maki was unrelentingly cheery and extraordinarily composed, as if she were biologically incapable of striking an unflattering pose or emitting a wayward note. “I have three superstars: Godard, Warhol, and Maki,” Konishi told Puncture. P5 found inspiration in both the sunniest and most radical qualities of the ’60s. I think music should be more of a magical entity, something that lets you escape from reality.” “I don’t think music should reflect reality. Intrigued by my concert review, the band merely wanted to meet the American critic who they felt understood them. “I don’t like dark, brooding music – I don’t understand the purpose of it,” Konishi mused during a 1996 interview I conducted with the pair that went unpublished until now. Juxtaposed against the furious flannel-clad sasquatches of the Pacific Northwest, P5’s worldly, feminine lightheartedness was even more refreshing than it would be today. Even the guitars were often downtuned to sound more ominous and growling. Although the ’90s featured more successful women rockers than any other decade, the era’s sensibility remained traditionally male – loud, brash, barbaric. The resulting electronica was hailed as “the new rock” while Britpop reintroduced previously retired orthodoxies. Even house music – severed by this point from its gay and black roots – was straighter, whiter, less melodic, and more formulaic. Their international arrival occurred between the sudden deaths of Kurt Cobain and Tupac Shakur, figureheads of the grunge and gangsta rap that defined American music in the ’90s. When popular music was at its bleakest and most monochromatic, Pizzicato Five were neon-hued and eclectic. When the act called it quits in 2001, Pizzicato Five had released 14 studio albums, at least that number of compilations, about as many EPs, and every kind of single conceivable. By the time leading American indie rock label Matador Records introduced them internationally with the 1994 samplers Five by Five and Made in USA, P5 was only two, the absurdly productive songwriter/multi-instrumentalist/producer Yasuharu Konishi the sole original member. They’d started in the mid-’80s as an easy listening quintet, switched vocalists to favor smooth plastic soul, discovered samplers around the time their third (and defining) singer Maki Nomiya arrived in 1990, then morphed into a dance/pop-art/retro-futurist act that pulled from just about every musical genre and aesthetic movement since the mid-20th century. Pizzicato Five were many things, but never ordinary. Even looking back today, I still think about my initial 1995 encounter with P5 as one of the most startling, fully realized concerts I’ve ever experienced, and their records remain among my most beloved. These are some of the words I wrote nearly 20 years ago about Pizzicato Five’s San Francisco stop on the Tokyo-based group’s first US/European tour.
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