Manabu Deto / OGRE YOU ASSHOLE
Interview (2022)
You’re currently based out of Nagano, but is that where you’re originally from?I’m from Toyama. I moved to Nagano when I was in 5th grade, went to an art university in Nagoya, and then came back to Nagano after I graduated.
What kind of environment did you grow up in?When I was in Toyama my mother ran a local garment production workshop, which was actually adjoined to our house. So whenever I got home from school I’d be greeted by the 7 or 8 ladies who worked there. We lived right along one of the national highways out in the country, so it was pretty much all houses and fields.
What sort of memories or events do you recall from childhood?I guess maybe how my surroundings, friends, and really just everything changed after moving to Nagano when I was in 5th grade. Everyone pointed out that the way of speaking and acting that I thought was normal was actually strange. Pretty much as soon as I moved to Nagano, I had people telling me that my Toyama dialect I had always spoken was weird and stuff. That was the first time I ever wondered how I should be speaking, like I had just been going along, living my life, and now here I was having to view myself objectively and rework every little thing I said or did. I thought it was a complete pain in the ass. All the same, I do feel that’s when my identity finally began to grow.
And when did your interest in music begin to grow?When I was little, my father would get drunk and have people over to blast music, so I heard a lot of Western stuff from the 60s to 80s that way. He also played in a band for fun, which meant I also got to see amateur dad cover bands from time to time. Looking back on it now, the lineup and song choice of my dad’s band was kind of weird, like they would play stuff like Irish folk music or Johannes Brahms’ Hungarian Dances on guitar, mandolin, violin, sax, and keyboard along to a rhythm machine. It was pretty much a house party with grownups listening to tunes and having fun, and so I think was just seeing all that and thinking like, “Hey, sax is pretty cool,” when I was a grade-schooler sparked my interest.
That’s an interesting formative experience. When did you start discovering your own musical tastes?Probably in middle school or high school. I was in the band club, but most kids at the high school I went to back then were into visual-kei or melodic hardcore. I just couldn’t get into that stuff, so I picked up on music more from other places like people at my part-time jobs, a guy who ran CD stores, or my older brother’s college friends. A lot of the recommendations I got were for things like US indie bands, club music, and jazz, but the one that stuck with me the most was American indie rock.
What artists or songs from back then had the biggest influence on you?As far as US indie bands go, I would say Modest Mouse or Yo La Tengo, and then Thinking Fellers Union Local 282. It just so happened there was a CD shop called “Planets” that carried that kind of music in my hometown
When did you start playing instruments yourself?I picked up the guitar around when I started middle school. Some friends in my neighborhood had a bass and drums, so we would make noise and play at being a band.
Were you into anything else besides music at the time?I wanted to go to an art university, so I was doing modeling with stuff like clay and plaster in high school.
How did you form Ogre You Asshole?I’m pretty sure I came up with the name around the time I was in prep school or my last year of high school. We were a three-piece back then, a totally different lineup from now other than me. We did have some originals, but I’m sure they were really rough. Our current guitarist
Were you aiming to debut on a major label?Not at all. One day after we played a show back around my freshman or sophomore year of college someone approached us about putting out an album, and we just went with the flow, no questions asked...
Looking back over your life, how do you think you’ve changed since then?I think I’ve gotten old both mentally and physically compared to how I was 20 years ago.
Is there anything you would describe as a turning point for your band?Most likely when we released the album homely in 2011. We were at a point where we didn’t want to just keep doing more of the same musically, and the production was difficult, too, so at the very least I feel like a lot of this shines through in the album. The Great East Japan Earthquake happened a few days before we were meant to start recording, and then the rolling blackouts from that led to us having to head back to Nagano without getting anything done in the studio, and then our bassists quit... The rest of us discussed how we were going to bounce back from this, and then dove into the recording of this album like we had hit the restart button as a band.