Music for after after hours from cult favorite Japanese dream pop duo Sugar Plant, sometimes referred to as “Psychedelic Sade.”

With the POiSON GiRL FRiEND hype reaching a fever pitch recently (her upcoming show in Los Angeles sold out within 10 minutes), we thought we’d highlight another CD-era Japanese dream pop group that deserves more shine. Sugar Plant is a cult favorite Japanese group consisting of vocalist Chinatsu Shoyama and guitarist Shin’ichi Ogawa. Influenced as much by electronic music as they are by the Velvet Underground, Yo La Tengo, and space rock bands like Stereolab and Galaxy 500, the group’s sound can be described as “trance mellow” dream pop with the same transcendent late-night qualities of a great chill-out room track, but expressed through rock instrumentation.

Formed in 1993 when Chinatsu and Shin’ichi met at university, Sugar Plant released their first album hiding place in both Japan and the US via Boston-based indie rock label Pop Narcotic. The band then embarked on a two month, 25 date American tour, where they played with bands such as Lois, Magnetic Fields, Versus, Helium and the Dambuilders. When they returned, Chinatsu and Shin’ichi started going to clubs regularly in Tokyo, where they would be inspired by trance, techno, and other forms of dance music.

Describing their second album to an American interviewer in 1996, Chinatsu said, “This is music for after ‘after hours.’ Do you go to clubs? After you go to a club and come back to home, you’re going to be relaxed. This is music for after that. You put it on a CD player.”

Sugar Plant has always maintained a strong connection with the American indie rock scene. They played regularly in the United States throughout the ’90s and ’00s, have gone on three extensive US tours, and shared the stage with a number of legendary bands including Silver Apples, Low, Labradford, Jessamine, Windy and Carl, and Yo La Tengo. When asked about their touring of the States, the duo replied, “We like the American audience more than Japanese. It’s good… Japanese audiences are quiet… It’s easy to know what American audiences think.”

Ogawa: “We’ve been looking at the overseas scene from the beginning, and we toured America three times because we went to places where there were people who understood the type of music we were making, so we really wanted to go to a place that we felt was real.”

“This is music for after ‘after hours.’ Do you go to clubs? After you go to a club and come back to home, you’re going to be relaxed. This is music for after that. You put it on a CD player.”

In 2000, the band released their masterpiece fourth album dryfruit, which was engineered by legendary dub mixer Naoyuki Uchida of Dry & Heavy and Little Tempo. The album featured a more stripped-back, downtempo sound with a deeper sense of space and lush keyboards, jazzy chords, and elegant drum machine patterns added to the mix. Uchida’s “dub mixes” are some of our favorites in the Sugar Plant catalog.

After the release of dryfruit, the band was called “Psychedelic Sade” more than a few times in the press. While we’re not sure if we fully agree with that tag, Sugar Plant has, in a similar fashion as the reclusive quiet storm legend, kept a sporadic release schedule over their enduring career, at the most 18 years between releases. Recently, the band seems to be working towards a revival of sorts with a remastered version of the group’s classic 1998 album happy appearing in January this year. Their latest EP blue submarine (their first in 6 years) was released just last month and is said to “herald the arrival of a new golden age” for the band. We’re here for it and hope a new album and fourth US tour are in the works…

Read an extensive interview (including a US tour diary) with Sugar Plant published on their new label KiliKiliVilla’s website (be sure to Google Translate to English): https://note.com/kkvofficial/n/ne919ef001eb1

Ogawa: “I went to New York on a trip in my third year of college in 1992. That’s when I saw the Village Voice and went to a lot of live shows, seeing bands I’d only known from CDs, and thought, if that’s the kind of feel we can do, then we can do it ourselves. The following year, I went with Chinatsu, Sassy, ​​and Eno-chan, and that convinced me. By that time, I had already started buying 7-inch records at Rough Trade and saw those bands performing in front of 20-30 people, and thought, this is the kind of feel I could have. So when I got back, I immediately recorded a demo, and that was the beginning of Sugar Plant…”