Which genre or kind of music has had a profound influence on you? What kind of music would you like to see (and hear) played on shamisen in the 2020s?
For me it was all electronic for a long time, 70’s synth like Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, and so on, going on to the 80’s. A bit of western classical at times too (this was mostly baroque, ie. Vivaldi and Bach stuff).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHTzs2TjwQo
Then came the 1990’s and techno hit the musical world like a tsunami. Eventually I ended up with trance: minimalist neo-acid and goa/psy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xYYsomKNIk
In 2000’s my taste pretty much exploded across the board and now it’s vocal music too from tender enka to manly gangsta rap. Not sure if there is any definite influence to my taste from any particular genre.
Come 2010s and the electronic explosion seems to go on. The tools to create music have become commodized. Macbooks seem to outnumber synthesizers on the stage and people are creating distant imitations of japanese music with their home computers using samples and software plugins.
There’s various efforts to modernize shamisen playing traditions, too many to summarize briefly, really. Aki’s ten ten has some quite interesting original stuff for shamisen, and Kevin/Kyle/Mike have pretty much proved western music is playable on shamisen. I like the God of Shamisen style quite a bit. However there’s also been steps to combine shamisen with western orchestral/contemporary classical music.
However shamisen might need to integrate with the increasingly electronic traditions of western popular music. There’s several possible starting points for this. Perhaps you could eg. marry etheric nagauta to the psychedelic synth style of Tangerine Dream. In goa/psy trance they have already sampled tabla and digeridoo heavily, so world instruments are no stranger in the core of western electronic traditions.
Maybe the most obvious entry point for shamisen to make it big in the west would be world music/synthpop groups like Juno Reactor.
