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East and West,
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“Noh-wave opera” is how Alaska B and Ruby Kato Attwood describe their Yamantaka//Sonic Titan performance this weekend, a fundraiser for a jaunt to Germany. It’s a snappy tag, suggestive of their fusion of post-punk art attack and classical Asian theatre, disparate domains united by dissonant din. The term, however, fails to touch on the element of Eastern pop culture that informs their astounding stage sets and their non-musical efforts—the YTS “brand” ranges from installations to comic books to performance art. “We say ‘band’ sometimes so people will listen, but I consider us more a cultural collective,” says Alaska B. Their mandate is tackling the complications and contradictions of dual identity. Attwood and B are Japanese-Scottish and Chinese-Irish respectively—“We’re technically blood enemies,” notes Attwood. Their first show, under the name Yellow Peril, happened almost exactly three years ago. Their instruments included a shamisen crafted from a water chestnut can and a broken guitar neck, a 2x4 with two bass strings and a squarewave conversion box attached, as well as a chest-mounted Korean war phone. “I’m an instrument builder,” says Alaska B, “and the whole idea, three years ago, was we were building instruments out of garbage that approximated ancient folk instruments—” “—but with Western garbage,” adds Attwood. “It was talking about Asian-American identity,” B continues, “the sense that you’re neither here nor there, and trying to find something that negotiated both. From that point, we moved into a space where, rather than trying to distract from the exotic nature of what we were doing, we instead decided to make it into a huge spectacle. “It’s kinda problematic, it’s highly racialized, it’s cultural appropriation, but it’s done in a place where, in North America, when people say ‘us,’ they don’t mean us, but when they say ‘them,’ they don’t mean us either. It doesn’t matter what we actually are, what we do is always gonna be judged in a certain light. It’s too Asian or it sounds too much like rock music. There’s a constant push and pull between the two sides, and that’s the tension that keeps us going.” Going, and growing. Following a year-long break, B and Attwood reunited for a show involving fake blood, hell money tossed around and Attwood bashing B on her helmet-clad head (because of the contact mic inside, rest assured). But it was last spring, following the adoption of the YTS moniker, that their intense sets came into play, black and white riots of mutant manga mythology. If you missed that, you may have seen their installation Konami Komando in the window of Articule on Fairmount. It was a mechanized manga come to life, an Ogilvy’s display for over-stimulated otaku. “That show was good for us,” recalls Attwood, “because we found that we had a lot of support that we didn’t know we had. There were many people who were responding to it, from tiny kids to old people to musicians. We had to get the window cleaned because there was a layer of three-foot-high, tiny handprints. “We’re referencing this mass-produced identity,” she adds about the cartoon craziness. “We’re not interested in being super-didactic about that part, but more positioning ourselves within it. Where we find ourselves in relation to something like Hello Kitty is that we co-generate our own Asian space.” A tough gig when one’s stuck between insider and outsider, between Western individualism and the collective mentality of Asia—and unsure one wants to tilt either way. “We want to exist between those,” Attwood concludes, “because we’re more focused on the exchange.” WITH BLACK MAMMOTH, BLACK |
