Rocking a dream one street corner at a time
With the intersections of Toronto as a base, Tokyo’s MunizO aims to be ‘more famous than sushi’
Even amid the off-beat bustle of the city’s busiest intersections, a crowd starts to gather when the three members of MunizO start to set up.
On a recent afternoon at Spadina Ave. and Queen St. with no shortage of other stimuli on offer, curious passersby started to cluster as the trio unravelled their instruments, noticing the group’s daunting tan- gle of cords and amps, and their red sun-peppered sign: “MunizO from Japan, support our travels & dreams to make our SOUND LOUD.”
Then they started playing and the crowd became more curious still.
That’s because brothers Taro and Jiro Fukae and drummer Yuta Sakai kick up a turbulent racket that combines the time-signature trickery of math rock with the aggressive funk bass of the group’s beloved Red Hot Chili Peppers, plus cheerful theatrics.
Afew blazing solos later (of both the guitar and drum varieties), admiring and bemused pedestrians began approaching to snap photos or throw up appreciative devil horns. Sakai, aged 25 with a Beatles cut dyed sienna, drew particular interest as he wildly pounded his drums, pausing only to receive fist bumps or for surprisingly frequent stick flips.
“Busking is a very good way to express our feelings,” said Taro, 28, sipping pints of Canadian with his band at the Horseshoe beforehand. “If we play badly, nobody stops. If we’re really into playing and we play well, then people crowd around us.”
Good thing, too, because MunizO is counting on winning the city over, one traffic light cycle at a time.
Taro and Jiro, 25, have been playing together now for 16 years, first as siblings inspired by the popular Japanese folk-pop duo Yuzu. In 2009, the brothers set off for London and, over the next few years, performed alongside Steve Vai and Scorpion, busked around Europe and won a competition in France.
Upon returning to Japan in 2013, Taro and Jiro signed a major-label deal with Imperial Records. A breakthrough felt inevitable and that was when the brothers began feeling anxious.
Taro felt the Japanese rock scene was waddling toward bland homogeneity and “originality was not really appreciated anymore.” And they worried they’d never reach an audience beyond their borders.
“So,” he said, “only one year and a half after we signed with them, I decided to quit. I felt no, I can’t make it with them. My dream has always been the same: it sounds strange, but it’s to be . . . more famous than sushi.”
The duo agonized over the decision. The Japanese music industry, they say, is unkind to amateur musicians, who generally have to pay to play a venue and then scramble to sell enough tickets to recoup. “If the band is unknown, nobody will come,” Jiro said.
“I broke my stomach; it was too much stress,” recalled Taro. “I felt sorry for my parents because they were so supportive and always (built) my courage up.”
The brothers recruited Sakai, who had been studying at Los Angeles’s Musicians Institute, and together set off for Toronto in March, despite knowing nothing of Canada except Justin Bieber, hockey, Simple Plan and poutine. (“Our first week, we really loved poutine,” Taro recalled, “but we ate it every other day and got sick and tired of it.”)
They shared short-term Airbnb rentals before recently signing a oneyear lease. They struggled to get gigs at first, perhaps because they told promoters up front they had no built-in audience — “maybe we are too honest,” smiled Jiro — but after much pleading, they landed at the Horseshoe last month. Via word of mouth they drew 100 people and earned another gig there July 20.
Another upcoming engagement (at the Goethe Institut’s Toronto Open Minds: Adapting to the Future program July 12) came about because co-curator and futurist Sanjay Khanna caught them jamming at Yonge and Dundas.
“I had to be somewhere else and I didn’t want to be,” Khanna said. “I wanted to stick around and watch them.”
The band isn’t really interested in prog or math rock. They’ve just always liked odd time signatures for the uneasy feeling they create. “We like to do tricks in our songs,” Taro explained.
“I love making songs that sound weird. We like it to be unpredictable.”
Well, that should help MunizO both stand out and fit in for as long as they’re angling for your attention on Toronto streets.