AMV chronicles #66: Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou + The Fragrance of Dark Coffee

The history of jazz in AMVs is as scarce as you’d expect, the vast majority of which is made up of videos featuring music from Yoko Kanno’s Cowboy Bebop-soundtracking jazz project The Seatbelts. Sure, there’s a “Take Five” AMV out there if you look for it, but most instrumental jazz AMVs I’ve been able to find feature big band/swing classics, not really the era of jazz that I’m into or curious about. There’s no good reason for me not to include AMVs using songs from Louis Armstrong or Billie Holiday, other than doing so would quickly blur the lines between jazz, blues and a whole world of pre-rock music I’m not quite ready to parse. Nor would I include lo-fi hip-hop AMVs, no matter how prominently their music samples the kind of classic jazz that I’m looking for. So what I’m “looking for,” anyway? AMVs like LowEffort’s “Giant Steps,” for sure, a seemingly abandoned work in progress that I’m more than happy just to get a minute’s taste of. And there’s not one but three Sun Ra AMVs edited by emerpus , all released back in the mid-aughts. Oh, and there’s this AMV, one I only stumbled across during a YouTube deep dive in search of… I don’t even remember anymore.

No matter how much I actually want to, I’d be hard pressed to recommend Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou to anyone who hasn’t seen it before, although this AMV does as good a job as any I’ve ever seen of accurately depicting its source material (more on this in a minute). This two-episode OVA from 1998 is unlike anything I’ve ever watched, evoking a pastoral, peaceful tone to a degree I never thought possible. It’s a quiet, slow, reflective anime, perhaps more so than I should assume most viewers will have a desire to sit through, regardless of how much of a pleasure it was for me to do so or how good for the soul I truly believe it is. And even while I sincerely believe YKK (and its 2002/2003 sequel, Quiet Country Cafe) to be a worthy investment of any anime fan’s time, I think it’s best experienced as a personal discovery to go into with as few expectations as possible. Unfortunately, “just watch it” is never a compelling imperative, but I feel that preserving the simple surprises of this beautiful little show is key to a rewarding experience with it. No one needs to be told how a work of art is going to make them feel, and I feel that an authentic response, be it rejection or boredom or confusion, is more valid and worthwhile than a positive one that’s been coached.

The music in this AMV is jazz as I enjoy it most, composed in a classic tradition that evokes a specific feeling that I can’t describe without bringing up a bunch of clichés. Because this is a feeling I rarely get from any jazz recorded in the past 40 years, I was surprised to find this was a relatively new composition. It took time for me to sort out my confusion towards its unexpected source: a Nintendo DS game I’ve never played, one originally released in Japan for the Game Boy Advance back in 2004. I’m well aware this is a very famous series of games, the very definition of popular media, not at all the strange cultural oddity that I’m approaching it as. That one would feature a character theme popular enough to be covered by a “real” jazz group and even performed by a full orchestra, racking up millions of views by enthusiastic fans who’ve come to appreciate the piece as, uh, “rainymood” music… probably shouldn’t surprise me at this point. I’ve been to the video game symphony. The future of classical, jazz and all music that hasn’t been destroyed or absorbed by pop will probably be found here, as video games continue to consume every last crumb of our entertainment and culture, but that’s one of those safe bets that almost goes without saying.

This AMV is, without a doubt, one of the smoothest and most relaxing I’ve ever watched. It may also be the simplest AMV that I’ve ever enjoyed, its slow pacing allowing shots to run their course much longer than most editors would ever dare. Just following YKK‘s main character through the course of an uneventful day in which she never leaves the house, brewing coffee for guests who never arrive and watching the day pass through the windows of her idyllic, seaside breakfast nook, the video achieves the long-awaited realization of the “ambient AMV.” By including the original audio of every scene that appears in the video, the editor achieves an intimate effect that, at least for myself, made the scenes feel more real. Due to the quiet nature of the original clips used here, none of which originally contained any background music or more than a few short lines of dialogue, the decision actually works, giving the viewer a real fly on the wall-sense of watching someone going about their day with no drama or interruptions.

This AMV was a beautiful introduction to this both YKK and its sequel, two hours of truly unique animated science fiction that I’d never have seen otherwise. Even after watching the series, I can still come back to Mei Linwau‘s work and appreciate it was an quiet ode to simplicity and solitude. But the degree to which this video is her “work,” well, how do I finally get around to this…

“Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou + The Fragrance of Dark Coffee” is nearly six minutes of unedited video taken from episode 2 of the original YKK OVA. The visuals and the sound play out exactly as they do in the episode, only with the first 5 minutes and the final 12 minutes of the episode cut out, and with Godot’s theme from the Ace Attorney games playing on a separate audio track. This is every bit the “lazy” editing I so love to complain about, and certainly moreso than any other AMV that I’ve ever criticized for it. This time around, for whatever reason, I don’t really care. The fact that anyone even thought to try something like this is unlikely enough, but for it to actually work for nearly six minutes is either the product of very clever juxtaposition between the source material or just great luck. It’s not Dark Side of the Rainbow, but… well, maybe it actually works better than that pairing.