The Dokidoki Festival in Paris, day two out of three – Kumisolo, Chris Club, Don Nino and Tujiko Noriko.
March 8, 2008 
Dokidoki is a congregation of mainly Paris-based electro-pop artists, and during an ongoing three day period – under the catchphrase ‘I regret not having kissed’ – the association arranges a music festival at the Point Éphémère.
The venue holds approximately 300 people, and when I arrive, Tujiko Noriko has just gone on stage as the second act of the evening. In the beginning, Tujiko live sounds just like Tujiko in the studio. It’s the kind of music that makes your mind wander in and out of different worlds, harmonious yet broken up, raw yet gentle. My thoughts are drawn to Björk and Sigur Ros, and I wonder, if this musn’t be their Japanese equivalents. Towards the last couple of songs, a seemingly anonymous DJ joins Tujiko on stage, and from there the songs take on a slightly more psychedelic tone, a more industrially hard hammering of hypnotically disquieting noise. The audience stands completely still throughout the performance, on occasions perhaps screwing uncomfortably, but Tujiko receives applause after each song, and she does deserve it.
Tujiko Noriko
When I go outside during the break after Tujiko’s performance, I get to hear that I had arrived just after Chris Club had finished their gig. Slightly disappointed, having wanted to see them in particular, I do, however, speaking of devil, run into the bands singer a little later during the night, and I manage to grab hold of her for a one minute conversation. When explaining the bands music, she answers that “our music is a promulgation of our photography. The photography that we do aims to portray the beauty of the most normal and basic forms, like landscapes for example. Photography inspires us to express something through music” after which there seems nothing more to say, and we excuse ourselves.
The next artist up on stage is Don Nino, and his performance is, in lack of a better word, memorable. Describing the gig seems difficult, the musical versatility of it making it difficult to classify and categorise. Don Nino navigates between rhythms, a cacophony of introspective monochrome, and a consciousness-expanding harshness. After the gig I am, lo and behold, allowed to run back behind the stage and have a five minute chat with Don Nino.
Amazing gig. Would you describe what has inspired you to make this kind of music?
“The last record is a cover record, so pretty self-explanatory. But what regards our music before that, well, I grew up in America, so the American independence thing is important to me, but also to a very large degree Syd Barret, and Pink Floyd during that time when they were mainly under his influence. We also take inspiration from afrobeat music, and very very ethnic music – that is a very large part of my background, mainly repetitive music, and as you saw, I use looping on stage.”
Your live performance tonight doesn’t sound like anything I’ve heard in a very long time. It was remarkably different from the studio version of your songs. Explain, please.
“On stage, it’s an interaction between me and the drummer, it’s kind of like a free-flow – every night’s going to be a different gig. The process of playing these songs are that I’m going loop my guitar, then arrange the loop with vocals, and then a gimmick and then sing, again, without doing anything with my hands, so in some ways it bears resemblance with what we do in a studio, but now its very much about live energy… for example the ‘Like a Virgin’ cover that we did tonight, we’ve never done that before, this was the first time on stage, so I mean, every time is going sound a bit different, depending on how we feel about that nights venue”.
Don Nino, MySpace
Last out for the night is Kumisolo, the gig that makes the least impression on me. Kumisolo’s high scaled nintendo-pop provokes parts of the audience to some sporadic dance moves, but in whole, she doesn’t quite manage to reach over the stage. The gig bores me, and I don’t bother to stay until the end.
Kumisolo
Dokidoki MySpace
tmG
That anonymous DJ who played with Tujiko Noriko is Lionel Fernandez, best known as part of Sister Iodine and active in a lot of other bands/projects. And the guy playing guitar in the back with Don Nino is Erik Minkkinen, another Sister Iodine member that is maybe even more active and mastered the Dokidoki comp this festival was named after.