Yaphet Kotto / This Machine Kills / Envy

Yaphet Kotto, circa 2003 (photo by Naz Hamid)

I'd imagine any show featuring these three bands would have been a pretty good one.

In 2002, Santa Cruz's Yaphet Kotto and This Machine Kills from Santa Barbara traveled to Japan to play with Envy from Tokyo. The tour was entitled "No Sleep Til Jaguchi". I have no clue what that's a reference to. When the tour ended, the three bands wrote a song called "A Collaborative Song", which was then performed by the lineup of Steve and Brian from This Machine Kills, Casey & Mag from Yaphet Kotto, and Masahiro, Nobukata, and Tetsuya from Envy. It's all pretty magical.

The divergent fortunes of each band after this Japan-only release fascinates me to no end. Yaphet Kotto would carry on for another three years, putting out one more 12" with Ebullition and making music that was out of step with the popular paradigm of the early/mid-aughts, but that fits in really well with what seems to be hot with the punx of 2020. Casey from YK now plays in an Oi! band with Lars from Rancid; Mag has a new band called Middle-Aged Queers that looks to be following the Limp Wrist template of fun queer punk.

This Machine Kills called it a day shortly after this tour. Steve Aoki became a pretty big deal in the following years. Dim Mak had already become the West Coast's answer to Troubleman by 2002, putting out super hip records from indie bands just emerging above ground. Within a few years, they'd be the home base for Bloc Party and Pretty Girls Make Graves. Then, of course, Aoki started making his name for dance music, becoming one of the few people to headline both the Ché Café and Electric Daisy Festival.

Envy really started hitting their groove and making their rep with this tour. They followed this up with 2003's self-released "A Dead Sinking Story", which would soon be championed by Mogwai in the UK and in the States by Level Plane Records. Their next three full-lengths would explode brains, melding post-rock sounds with Tetsuya's intenses spoken/screamed vocals. They collaborated with Justin Broadrick and Thursday on separate split 12"s, both of which continued to set bars for what could be done coming from the world of 90s hardcore. And after a break of three years, they returned this year with "The Fallen Crimson", which I really should buy a copy of.

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