The Japanese collective After Dinner, which included ten musicians, could come up with more ideas in a four-minute song than most bands bring to an entire album. While their music is difficult to classify, it shared a kinship with the avant-prog Rock in Opposition (RIO) movement formed by Henry Cow, as well as the jumpy collages of The Faust Tapes. After a single and album released in Japan, they connected with ex-Henry Cow drummer Chris Cutler’s Recommended label to reach an international audience. While working with traditional Japanese instruments, they introduced aspects of European pop, rock and classical music. Singer-keyboardist Haco composed the songs and worked samples into them. While her roots began in new wave, she had academic training and learned to create tape loops and manipulate found sounds in the tradition of musique concrète. Seemingly ramshackle, their songs evolve constantly. Their whimsical sense of humor comes across even without understanding the Japanese lyrics. They incorporate such a wide array of sounds that it’s tempting simply to list all the instruments used. Haco’s even been credited with playing a bouncing volleyball.
Adding both sides of the 1982 single “After Dinner”/”Cymbals at Dawn,” Recommended rereleased the brief Glass Tube in Europe as After Dinner. (1982-1985 is a vinyl-only release of the same material.) With an “everything can be percussion” attitude, it’s the more eccentric sister of PiL’s The Flowers of Romance. Field recordings of birdsong bookend “An Accelerating Etude,” which ends with backwards tapes. On “Shovel & Little Lady,” Haco sings above a rising cacophony of drums. The album incorporates textures more often used as Foley effects. (Is that a snare or a block of wood getting chopped?) The songs skip around so much that they don’t quite fully sink in, with “Soknya-Doll” being the most accessible.
The Souvenir Cassette was recorded on a Walkman during After Dinner’s first European tour, then issued as a bonus with Recommended’s release of After Dinner. Its current incarnation adds eight songs taken from later tours to the original 10. As one might guess, the sound quality is fuzzy, but with a more limited array of instruments than they could access in the studio, After Dinner make their best attempt to rework their songs. A better recording might have brought out new power in their sound, with heavier guitar and drums than Glass Tube, but the bootleg-level murk means that it holds up mostly as an addendum to their studio albums rather than a work to be enjoyed on its own.
Paradise of Replica introduces a newly strengthened feel for songwriting, as unusual as it is. Rather than verse-chorus-verse structures, the songs are organized by rhythm and timbre. There’s a consistent method to the madness, which rewards active, repeated listening. “A Walnut” leans towards baroque psychedelic pop, changing time signatures so often that it sounds like a medley. Haco’s vocals show tremendous range, jumping over the melody from note to note and ascending from a childlike coo to operatic extremes. The uncommonly concise “Kitchen Life I” brings guitar and marimba to the fore. The eight-minute “KA-NO-PU-SU-NO-HA-KO,” written about Haco’s reaction to a museum exhibit of Egyptian mummies, lets its dynamics play out at length, repeatedly stopping and starting. Her voice delivers an extended, emotional rumination, especially during the section dominated by violin and gong. The CD, released in 2000, adds four remixes, although they’re no longer contained on the version available from Bandcamp. Paradise of Replica is the deepest iteration of the practice of liberation via play running through After Dinner’s brief oeuvre.