Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama

A new Berryz Koubou single is coming out on August 27th… if you can call it that.

Right in-between the releases of their 17th single “Ike Ike Monkey Dance” on July 16th and their as yet untitled 5th LP on September 10th is a single involving a remix of their cover version of Dschinghis Khan’s eponymous single, which will have the collective release title Dschinghis Khan Onkochishin Remix. I do have to agree with those who think this particular release, on appearances, comes several months too late, given that the original Berryz single came out this past March. Remixes usually tend to come out within weeks of an original version’s release, rather than months, no?

Is Tsunku running out of ideas, as some of us have feared? No. Considering that a new, original, Berryz single is coming out the month before this remix EP, and an album of new material plus “Dschinghis Khan”, “Yuke Yuke Monkey Dance” and “Tsukiatteru no ni Katamoi” is coming out the month after, it’s not even a possibility. Since the EP is coming out on Piccolo Town, Tsunku’s only real role in the release in question is probably just approving the final master of the CD. So many Berryz Koubou releases coming out in a very short time period is nothing new either: Their first three singles came out in three consecutive months in the spring of 2004, and the band closed out 2005 by releasing in a five-week period the Dai 2 Seichouki LP, the “Gag 100kaibun Aishite Kudasai” single, and the Special! Best Mini ~2.5 Maime no Kare~ EP.

However, it should be pointed out that as of this writing, “Dschinghis Khan” is Berryz Koubou’s biggest selling single to date, having sold over 37,000 copies in outlets whose sales are counted by Oricon. It’s also the Berryz single that has had the most first week sales of any single in their career and the single that has had the longest stay on Oricon’s sales chart (eight weeks). The song apparently still has some wings over in Japan; although the single hasn’t been on the Oricon chart since May, the song is presumably still getting scattered airplay on Japanese radio, and given the song’s origins as a popular European and Asian disco hit in its original incarnation in 1979, it’s not unlikely to think that Berryz’ version is getting some club play as well, in spite of its radio-length brevity.

It’s also not unlikely to think that some enterprising bedroom remixer somewhere hasn’t done an unofficial remix that combines the Berryz version with the Dschinghis Khan original, or that some DJ in a dance club in Japan hasn’t already crossfaded between both versions in the course of a club set. Hence this impending release.

The Onkochishin Remix CD EP is set to include an official remix that blends both the original Dschinghis Khan recording and Berryz Koubou’s cover version, as well as the original versions of the recordings by both artists. While the inclusion of the original Berryz single mix may seem a bit redundant to the casual Berryz fan who already has a copy of the single (it’s only a slight exaggeration to suggest that a really hardcore Berryz fan would buy bootleg CD-R’s of the group eating burritos and farting if they were available), it should be pointed out that, given that the CD EP is being credited to both groups, the inclusion of the Berryz version is there as a benefit to those that may not have ever bought the original Berryz single, just as the original Dschinghis Khan recording is included for the benefit of Berryz fans who never heard the original recording. I purchased a Dschinghis Khan double-CD anthology early in 2008 partly out of curiosity and partly because talk of their infamous single “Moskau” at the American Wota board was such that I couldn’t get the damned song out of my head, but curiously, their eponymous theme song wasn’t included on the compilation, which I found odd.

As for why this EP is coming out months after the original, while I can’t say for sure, it’s likely that a few corporate and technical gremlins may have been to blame for any delay. Dschinghis Khan, the group, recorded for the Ariola label in Europe during their heyday, a label that is now part of the Sony-BMG empire everywhere but in Japan, where Sony and BMG remain two separate companies. Berryz Koubou, as we all know, record for the venerable Japanese major label King by way of the Up-Front Works-owned imprint Piccolo Town. As mentioned earlier, the EP is coming out on Piccolo Town, which means that UFW and King negotiated for a master-use license with BMG Japan. The licensing of masters from one label or production company to another is a frequently common and often painless procedure. The actual difficulty may have been technical.

Like most modern acts (any project involving Jack White, Jeff Tweedy, or Steve Albini are the only exceptions at this point in time), Berryz Koubou record to multi-track hard disk recording systems like ProTools, Logic, and Cakewalk, rather than the increasingly expensive and frequently unstable but age-old medium of analog tape. 16-track and 24-track analog reel-to-reel tape were the state of the art recording mediums in Dschinghis Khan’s day (digital tape was still in its infancy in the late 70’s, and only audiophile-minded classical labels like Deutsche Grammophon and Telarc were using such systems with any frequency). Although the likes of Jack White will praise analog tape to their dying day for what they feel is the medium’s relative warmth compared to digital recordings, analog tape itself is almost literally a dying medium. The last analog tape manufacturing facility in America, Quantegy, stopped making analog reel-to-reel tape last year, and the people in the reissue and remastering departments at the major labels have long discovered that the shelf-life of analog tape, especially tapes made starting in the late 70’s, is more notable for losing copious amounts of oxide off of the tape ribbon than for retaining the music once recorded to it. Such losses can be countered only by baking the tapes for several hours in a convection oven at a temperature between 120 and 140 degrees Farenheit, and then transferring the reel immediately to a hard-disk system.

Doing an official remix combining both group’s recordings would have to involve locating both the hard disk containing the multi-track recording of the Berryz version, which would be relatively easy to find, and the 16- or 24-track tape of the Dschinghis Khan version, which had to be a pain in the ass for UFW and BMG given that the multi-track tape was most likely still sitting in a studio or warehouse somewhere in what used to be West Germany. Throw in the possibility of the tape not being in as mint condition as it was when the box was unsealed in the studio at the start of the day, having to bake the reel in a studio in Germany (the tape probably would not have survived a FedEx or DHL shipment to Japan), and then transfer the tape to a hard-drive, and you’ve got a tedious situation on your hands. Locating the original Dschinghis Khan tapes, in short, was probably the most time-consuming part of the process – ask anyone who works in the archive department at a major label how hard it is to locate master tapes in their vault (Universal Music’s archives, derived from the combining of MCA, Motown, and Polydor/Mercury must be both a treasure trove AND a nightmare to go through for their employees!).

And that is before whoever was hired to do the official mash-up of the two versions by UFW had to sit down with two multi-track hard drives, sync them together, and keep doing remixes until he or she settled on the right amount of elements from both versions to make the final version for the EP. I say this not to pick on those who put together their own remixes on their home computers – I recorded an entire five-song techno EP myself in four consecutive nights in 2002 – but a more professional mash-up like the one commissioned by UFW for this project requires professional everything : professional-grade equipment, an experienced audio engineer, and considerable professional patience, especially when you’re dealing with two 24-track recordings recorded on different mediums in different decades.

The end result will speak for itself.