Tenniscoats

Tenniscoats formed as a Japanese indie avant-pop duo featuring Saya and Takashi Ueno. An ever-changing roster of supporting players—among them LSD-March, Eddie Marcon, Secai, Popo, Saibou Bungaku, Tim Barnes, and Tetsuya Umeda—has helped the Uenos craft understated, ethereal, intellectually inclined songs that merge stark chamber-folk textures with inventive studio techniques. Their steady output and collaborative bent produced an expansive, stylistically varied catalog whose notable entries encompass the 2009 joint effort Two Sunsets alongside Glaswegian indie legends the Pastels, the 2012 chamber-pop set Papa’s Ear recorded with Swedish band Tape, and the five-volume Music Exists anthology that gathered previously elusive material before receiving a box-set treatment in 2020.

The pair’s first EP, The Theme of Tenniscoats, appeared on the Majikick label in 2000. Two years later they issued the mini-album The Ending Theme through Noble/MIDI Creative. Their debut proper full-length, We Are Everyone, followed in 2004. Additional titles arrived over the next four years, among them Totemo Aimasho in 2007 and Tenniscoats & Secai in 2008. During this period they also pursued outside projects such as the 2008 ambient-rock collaboration Tan-Tan Therapy with Swedish outfit Tape and OneOne, a partnership between Saya and Deerhoof’s Satomi.

ROOM40 released the full-length Temporacha in 2009. That autumn Domino issued Two Sunsets, the album recorded with seminal Scottish indie-pop act the Pastels. Tokinouta surfaced in 2011, after which the duo again worked with Tape on the hushed chamber-pop collection Papa’s Ear in 2012. Later the same year they put out All Aboard!, an LP tracked between 2005 and 2009 that featured drummer Ikuro Takahashi, best known for his contributions to Japanese noise-rock groups High Rise and Fushitsusha. Further joint releases included the lo-fi folk outing Yaki-Läki with Pastacas (Ramo Teder) in 2013 and How Many Glasgow with Jad Fair and Norman Blake in 2014; a second album with Fair and Blake, Raindrops, appeared in 2017. The Music Exists series launched in 2015 to compile Tenniscoats recordings that had been difficult to obtain outside Japan. Five volumes eventually materialized, and Alien Transistor issued a limited-edition vinyl box set containing all five discs in 2020. Entering the new decade the group issued several cassette-only projects and other small-scale works while remastered editions of their Tape collaborations Papa’s Ear and Tan-Tan Therapy marked the beginning of a series of reissues for long-unavailable titles.