There’s just something about putting your hands on a piece of fabric. Unlike listening to music through a speaker or sampling art on a page, and much like cooking, actually being in the presence of clothing, of feeling its texture, its thickness, its cut and shape, can make one appreciatively understand, judge, and quantify its quality. I often think of how this experience feels similar to how we experience being in the company of others. Talking on screen or having a conversation relayed via messages never feels the same as an actual physical, one-to-one experience. It’s what makes life feel so impactful when someone’s existence is gone from our universe. In the end, how can we let them know how we value their life and work, if they’re no longer here to get their flowers, as Kensho Abe’s A.K.Deux will?
Kensho Abe’s obituary has already been written. Somewhere in Tokyo, his birthplace, on June 25th, 2011, at the age of 57, Kensho passed away after a bout with pneumonia (and some sources say lung cancer). Everywhere, after an allusion to his heavy drinking and battles with alcoholism, his accomplishments were left as a footnote: his brief time under the sun as an acclaimed Japanese fashion designer in the late ’80s, winning all sorts of design competitions like the Mainichi Fashion Grand Prix’s New Face Award, and coming into his own as head of the KENSHO fashion label in the ’90s, culminating with his impressive wardrobe designs for Japan’s entrance to the 2000 Sydney Olympics opening ceremony.
Nowhere could I find references to Kensho’s unique and singular flirtation and experimentation with music. Lost in the din of history, of a singular talent who let his life go astray, was the record that he was more than that — the fact he was a three-dimensional person. If I didn’t hold his work in my hand, this compact disc, I would have thought just the same. I wouldn’t know of this wonderful music and these other ideas floating in his world.
There once was a young man who envisioned himself more of a painter, whose self-portrait pictured him playing his chosen instrument as a musician: the flute. A Japanese gentleman in its most literal sense. Friends and acquaintances knew him as Kensho-san or Kensho rather than Abe-san, a sign of his kind and friendly personality. Others saw him as exceptionally handsome, an ikemen, who didn’t traffic in his good looks. In the ’80s, the whole world was his for the taking.
After attending and graduating from Tokyo’s prestigious Chuo University, not on a fashion degree, he enrolled in Shinjuku’s Bunka Fashion College to learn garment-making from the basics upward. A natural, at just 26 years old, after graduating from Bunka, Kensho would win 1980’s elite 装苑賞 (Soen Award), the same award now-iconic Japanese designers like Yohji Yamamoto and Kenzo Takada once won.
By 1984, his own fashion label and its clothes were a mainstay of Tokyo’s Fashion Week. Eventually, Kensho would marry a mainstay of the high-end Japanese fashion magazine Soen, the model Keiko Shiga. At one moment in time, many saw him as the heir apparent to Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo, someone who would follow in the steps of Junko Shimada. Yet, life took its course, and a fashion label that once registered billions of yen in sale was sold to Alpen TOKYO during the Heisei era, leaving Kensho in the red.
If I can don my amateur fashion critic hat, and if you can source pictures of Kensho’s clothing like I did, I wager you can instantly recognize the talent others saw in him. From cuts to silhouettes, many of Kensho’s best pieces show a spectacular and inviting blend of streetwear, sportswear, and elegant high-fashion. What’s most striking to me is how playful and colorful most of it is, effortlessly moving past the monochrome dourness of most Japanese minimalist fashion. In hindsight, it’s no wonder J-League soccer team Shimizu S-Pulse, beating today’s Venezia FC to the punch, chose Kensho to design their unique orange jerseys from 1992 until 2006 with an eye not just towards football fans but also towards aspiring fashionistas. Kensho was a designer whose aesthetic stood out in the best way, in myriad ways that escaped easy classification.
It was during the Heisei era, in the mid-’90s, when Kensho’s fame reached its crest, that he was afforded the opportunity to explore a little-known passion he had in music. Under Sony Records he recorded this album, his loving tribute to the influence of club music and new-form dance music played at that moment in his life. Featuring Kensho himself on flute and alto saxophone, serving as both producer and composer, he invited artists forming the vanguard of Japanese dance music — Ken Ishii, fresh from recording Jelly Tones, the album that broke him internationally; Susumu Yokota, who had just released Acid Mt. Fuji, a landmark of ambient-techno; Yukihiro Fukutomi, the Tokyo-based house pioneer whose POST I already covered; and Ryosuke Imai, best known for his work in the J-Soul and R&B scene — to create music fit to accompany his fashion.
An impressive work showing Kensho’s discerning taste in collaborators and music, A.K.Deux, released in 1995, captured Kensho and a certain slice of Japanese music in their peak form. The album’s opening and titular track, “A.K.Deux,” sung by Carla Vallet with Kensho and Yukihiro’s production, speaks to Kensho’s attempt to reach or create his own version of paradise music.
With Yukihiro, who’d helm the programming and keyboards of the title track, “Tornado,” and “Murmur,” you get to experience their warm and inviting fusion of house and jazz that utterly belongs pumping out of a massive soundsystem, inviting people to get sweaty together — or, in the case of “Murmur” (again featuring vocals by Carla), reminding us of thinking man’s club music, of IDM’s ties to the UK’s grimier trip-hop scene. Under Ken Ishii’s tutelage, songs like “Lotus Flower” and “Shades and Surfaces” take a detour into that other world of atmospheric IDM, albeit with Kensho’s flute giving this music a floating quality that’s different, richly human, and emotional.
As you go through the rest of the album, you’ll hear tracks like “Fire Waltz,” Kensho and Ryosuke Imai’s transformation of an old Mal Waldron piano jazz tune with Eric Dolphy into a roaring maelstrom of nu jazz and jungle led by Kensho’s sonorous alto sax. Their “La Nuit,” likewise, captures a different kind of smoky atmosphere, one with a luxurious groove that’s in the middle of dub and acid jazz, featuring Alison Roberts’s slinky vocals. Then, eventually, you’ll reach A.K.Deux‘s end with Susumu Yokota joining Kensho to create “Nymph,” a heartstring-pulling club track that’s equal parts minimal techno and sonic meditation on sense and being. Everywhere on this CD you hear Kensho’s gently flowing woodwinds and reeds, breathing new life into electronic music that in the hand of many faceless others can often feel too untethered from human connection.
In a different world, in a different timeline, I hope Kensho would be around to see that others can understand the content of his multitudes. In this uncertain one, I reach back into my stack of CDs, pull out his jewel case, and for a moment just try to imagine that he can hear us. In that moment in time, I’d write this: words have a way to transfer and give meaning to things we wish we could describe, and sometimes words fail to quantify quality. But music is different. Kensho’s music was special.
In the end, I believe music remains this perfect vessel that can communicate to anyone exactly its worth and value with just one listen. Although Kensho’s clothing might become ever more difficult to source, and his artwork is even harder to find or appreciate, it’s this specific dimension that other vessel — featuring his rarest work, and the one we can now most easily connect with — that speaks best to his life’s work and vision, and to that person we should remember.
