They are not Japanese, “just two Anglo-Saxons” who go by the name Fujiya & Miyagi and who play at Solyanka on Wednesday.
Steve Lewis and David Best from Brighton formed Fujiya & Miyagi in 2004, creating the strange Japanese duo in the band’s name by combining a character in “The Karate Kid” movies and an old Japanese vinyl player.
Since then, the group — now expanded to four — have helped to revive krautrock, making it appealing even to those who were born long after it went to the great electronica club in the sky.
Lewis met Best while playing football 10 years ago, promptly inviting him to play guitar in his techno band. The two then became a duo that developed into Fujiya & Miyagi. They had little impact until the album “Transparent Things,” named after a Vladimir Nabokov novel, came out in 2006 and people started to take notice.
Their latest album “Lightbulbs” may have only reached No. 187 on the UK chart but has been heavily praised by NME, The Guardian and Pitchfork. “Their gentle Italo-disco funk is a particularly welcome development, and the oscillating organ is reminiscent of a pop-art Radiohead, hard to resist,” wrote The Guardian.
“I think it’s important initially to get good reviews in NME or Pitchfork or whatever,” said Best in an e-mail interview. “But once you are known, people can hopefully make up their own minds.”
Listening to the group, you can hear that they borrow from everyone, a bit of Hot Chip here, Kraftwerk there and even Serge Gainsbourg somewhere in the middle, but the result sounds unlike any of them.
They are “a strange hybrid of James Brown on Valium and Wire gone pop. Or maybe Serge Gainsbourg with a Ph.D. in electronics backed by David Byrne’s Eno-produced scratchy guitar mixed by MF Doom. It’s Darwinism gone mad,” according to their description on their MySpace page, and that almost — but not quite — makes sense.
Their lyrics are as confused. The trite themes of love are not for F&M, as they linger over everyday processes such as changing light bulbs and photocopying.
“Sometimes you could be influenced by what you had for dinner or what you read in the paper,” said Best, adding that in their music, “I think the rhythm, especially when playing live, is probably the dominant force.”
Fujiya & Miyagi will play July 22 at 10 p.m. at Solyanka, 11/6 Ulitsa Solyanka, Bldg 1. Tel. 221-7557. Tickets cost 500 rubles. Myspace.com/fujiyaandmiyagi
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