Kotaro Oshio × Depapepe, Live

Kotaro Oshio × Depapepe

Depapeko

I remember first picking up a guitar to learn one of Oshio's pieces in 2018, in the second year of middle school — nearly seven years ago now. From fingerstyle to playing in a band, Oshio kept me company through the whole long stretch of secondary school. I learned a scattering of his pieces; listening back now they still sound so beautiful, like the feelings of a reserved teenager, made for listening quietly.

Japanese fingerstyle has a very distinct character: beautiful, understated, sorrowful without being wounded, with a philosophy of nature in it and the lingering of feeling — Oshio and Masaaki Kishibe belong to that kind. Depapepe is a Japanese kind of optimism, the sunlight and courage that belong to youth alone, with recklessness and shouting in it. Taiwanese instrumental groups like Cicada feel to me like something drawn from the spirit of the island's own nature — toward nature it is more a tracing back and a feeling, with less of the human hand in it than nature's own truth.

In middle school we brought our guitars to the dormitory and ran back the moment evening study ended, to squeeze out ten or twenty minutes of playing before lights out. In high school I hid my guitar behind the stage in the gymnasium. I remember the night of the hundred-day oath rally before the entrance exam: I skipped evening study and went with a friend to the gymnasium to play Mia and Sebastian's Theme. I thought at the time that years later I would surely not remember that dull, rigid rally, but I would always remember that night. Looking back, it was the right call.

For a while I thought the guitar was a thin instrument. I was too much under the sway of the Western view with the piano at its center; I assumed only an instrument with two voices, high and low, like the piano, counted as complete — even for the Canon, written for violins, I thought it was whole only when the piano's two voices played it. Later I learned that a single instrument can hardly reproduce it; it takes an ensemble, and the original Canon has four voices, by which logic even the piano version is incomplete.

But listen carefully to fingerstyle pieces and you find that one guitar can produce a great many effects: the strummed percussion Oshio is best at; melody in the left hand and drums in the right; multiple voices, slapping, harmonics laid over strumming, and so on. Oshio's Canon even carries three voices — I think it can stand beside the piano version. Then there is plugging in and adding effects, and much more, and with this fingerstyle pairing my view of how rich the guitar can be shifted once again. Every instrument has its own color and its own soul.

Depapeko tonight was the second time I had seen fingerstyle guitars playing together; the first was an arrangement of Adventure of a Lifetime on the show Super Band. Tonight Oshio laid the floor, his signature palm-muting as the bed of chords and drum, while the two of Depapepe took turns with the melody and the harmony. It was full and complete, their interplay, full of energy.

The greatest test of craft, and my happiest surprise, was Oshio's solo Nayuta. Only that afternoon I had told a friend that Oshio must not skip Nayuta — how lucky it would be to hear it live. A slow solo piece is the truest test, because the joining of one note to the next, its length, whether or not to add vibrato, its weight, all matter; and a piece as steeped in atmosphere as Nayuta is especially hard to play. Oshio's rendering was ethereal and utterly beautiful; hearing it in the room is nothing like listening to a recording. I faced a small decision there, whether to record the whole thing: recorded, I could listen forever, but it would cost me the experience of being present. In the end I neither recorded nor photographed. I put the phone down and sank into listening. To give myself wholly to the beauty of that moment was enough.

At the signing, face to face with Oshio, I told him I was grateful for his music, that I had been playing his pieces since middle school, that I could play Kaze no Uta and Nayuta, and that I loved his work. He was pleased and a little surprised, and answered, "Nayuta?" I nodded. I think Oshio himself must love that piece — after all, he chose it as the evening's only solo :)

When the opening chord of You Are the Hero came at the end, it was truly moving. There are always melodies that may be tied to some latent impression in memory, which logic and words cannot explain, that simply reach the heart.