Biography
“Holy Joe’s was hotter than hell. The small room at the top of what seemed like an endless series of stairwells was filled with an enthusiastic crowd, with much love being exchanged between OK’s mercurial frontman, Kay Grace, and the NXNE devotees.” (SoundProof Magazine, Toronto)
No one was more surprised than ok city ok when the band made their international debut in front of a packed Holy Joe’s in Toronto during the 2007 North By Northeast Music Conference (NXNE). The Tokyo indie outfit crossed the Pacific for the first time in June after being invited to perform at NXNE, and despite a lack of record company or management support, word of mouth sufficed to fill the room with curious music fans. The crowd quickly became converts with ok city ok’s “surprising, hilarious, open and free” (www.download.com) songs, prompting Toronto's Mondo Magazine Online to rave "the band's presence was really something to be seen . . . I immensely enjoyed their performance." Soundproof Magazine added “definitely worth seeing, and likely capable of great things.” A post-show run on the band’s CDs (Made By Elaborate Process, available online at www.cdbaby.com and iTunes) and shiny new T-shirts convinced ok city ok that they have a potential new home in Toronto.
The band followed that show with a short tour through New York City, St. Louis, Austin, and Dallas, making a bilingual appearance on Austin’s Red River Rocks show on Music Entertainment TV and winning plaudits from the Dallas Observer (“sharply weird pop songs”) and NYC’s Rock of Japan blog (“Is it J-rock? …wry observations on life and relationships, as if a folk poet had been unevenly wrapped up into an alternative pop/rock assemblage”).
Family obligations and health problems restricted ok city ok's activities to a handful of shows in Japan over the next 12 months, forcing them to turn down invitations to festivals in the US and UK. After regrouping and working up a number of new songs, the band made the trip to Toronto for NXNE 2008, prompting NOW Magazine to say "Japan's ok city ok return to the festival with a sophomore album in tow and plans to distribute it in North America. If this collection of distortion-fuelled spiky pop is any indicator, it's a well-laid plan."
[an abstract]
“Love songs” that fail to mention dread and surveillance are plainly deficient and hardly worthy of the name. ok city ok’s self-released Made By Elaborate Process conducts a musical tour of the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition), saving listeners the trouble of hauling out their household copy when they feel like a browse through the stew of personality disorders that characterizes the modern human relationship.
The ok city ok team recognizes the need for a user-friendly interface when bringing the Japanese public up to date on thorny societal issues in English. Using Pavement, Todd Rundgren, and Beck as jumping-off points, the songs on Made By Elaborate Process usher the listener into a secret clubhouse cobbled together from scavenged beams of majestic pop, post-modern funk pastiche, and angular guitar rock.
Listening to Made By Elaborate Process is like wandering through a used bookstore, where the first-edition canon-dwellers and the undiscovered gems are shelved cheek-to-jowl with smudged screeds on alien abductions, atlases of unknown continents and exhaustively reasoned, obsessively footnoted pamphlets proving beyond a doubt’s shadow the connection between [something eminently reasonable] and [something absolutely deranged].
Instrumentation
Tom Suzuki - bass & vox
Y. Shibata - drums & vox
Kay Grace - guitar & vox
Discography
made by elaborate process (12-track album, 2007) available via iTunes, CD Baby, et al.
baby got religion (5-track EP, 2006)
Links
| http://www.okcityok.com |