Frühschoppen mit Sasebo

American fleet activities around the Japanese bay in Munich's West End

It's dawning, and not too close! Foghorns drone from ships in the distance, lured by a crankshaft close to the ear, which dawns and simmers away as a stoically continuing general bass engine, as a blues riff without chord progression, far removed from the schematic essence of the blues ... And yet, with the onset of a magical formulaic singsong portamento, in an airy proximity to a tribalistic, Malian desert blues. The ship's horns and the crankshaft send codes - it is always the same code: Twilight twilight, it dawns and thaws, it hums and roars! A backdrop is built here with staged means.

The foghorns are already turning into alpine horns, their waltz pausing on a step, as the first light breaks in the surf with a ghostly glissando, and distant cruisers and star destroyers become ships in bottles, canned as models. Each bottle neck is the extension of a tanker pipe, each string a hair-thin rope that pulls up the rigging, all in miniature. This is followed by the hum of propellers, a threat from the air, the vocal chords tear with a hiss and a crash in the fall, they still shake, they are already ebbing away, the Pacific detonations.

The city of Sasebo was founded in 1902 as a naval base. Japan's imperial colonial assertion was immense at the turn of the century, and continued unabated until its defeat by the Americans in the middle of the 20th century; in June 1945, Sasebo was 48% destroyed by an American attack, only to be refloated immediately afterwards in the service of the American Navy. Today, Sasebo is the twin city of Albuquerque in the US state of New Mexico and home to Japan's best hamburgers. Albuquerque with its unsolved series of murders and Sasebo with its high-rise burgers - leaden, gloomy twilight zones.

The dusky twilight can easily be brought about as an effect - by squinting your eyes. Gangsters and yakuza like to do this in films so that they can always see their opponents and their audience in the twilight. And look cool at the same time! Sasebo's songs have the creeping body movement of such a gangster with narrowed eyes and have titles like Cobra, Gagac, Gogo and Coja, all of which sound like synonyms for the word cool. Carl Tokujiro Mirwald is this evil head honcho, the Great Robber Tokujiro, who is absolutely terrifying. And at the same time, it is of course hilarious when the boss announces in the play Unsari: "I'm fed up with a life like this, just having to obey from morning to night."

The behavior of Tokujiro's opponent Toshio Kusaba is generally imbued with a comical theatricality, for example when he transforms into Tokujiro's lover in the play Gagac and asks his adored one to kill "her" if he does not return "her" love. And in Nechan, a traditional geisha game ensues between the two, where the loser of "rock, scissors, paper" or "fli, fla, flu" has to take off his clothes. Meanwhile, the gang lurking outside sounds like the beanie boys in Walter Trier's illustrations for Emil and the Detectives, peering out from behind advertising pillars, except that they are not detectives but crooks themselves. Once whistled out of their corners by the boss with his whistle, they all march down the street in a dazzlingly mischievous chorus with the sole aim of courting the "beautiful sister".

In Gogo, sung by Tinka Kuhlmann, she thinks about how to make the bird sing. Gogo is one of the courtly songs penned by guitarist Yutaka Minegishi, all of which seem like a counterweight to the bold pieces by guitarist Ivica Vukelic, which in turn have their origins more in American traditions, black underclass traditions, mind you, the real folk music. Everything on this record has two faces. And each of these two faces in turn has two faces ... Monkey Business was the name of the yacht that became the undoing of US Democrat Gary Hart when he boarded it to satisfy his extramarital mating urges during his presidential candidacy in 1987. And Monkey Business is also the original title of the slapstick comedy The Marx Brothers on the High Seas, in the course of which the brothers, as stowaways on board an ocean liner, get caught between two rival gangster bosses. In the end, of course, they manage to enter America thanks to their cunning trickery.

The group Sasebo have been playing their cunning game with cultural clichés for several years now. After two vinyl releases in medium format on the Echokammer label, the Gutfeeling label is now bringing their first large format to the world. This mischievous musical circus was recorded, mixed and supervised by Zoro Babel and Manu Rzytki. Just come in and listen for yourself, listen!

(Pico Be)