Mountain Mocha Kilimanjaro
Subscribe
X

Get the latest from Beat

Mountain Mocha Kilimanjaro

mountainmochakilimanjaro2.jpg

“We’re more than excited. We’re so fortunate that this is our third time touring your awesome country. We’re doing probably our biggest headline shows in each city. We’re very confident that we can bring a bigger show than the last time as well.”

The band will also drop by the Corner Hotel in early January and anyone who has witnessed one of Mountain Mocha Kilimanjaro’s hair-raising performances will be quick to advocate their ecstatic virtues. Thanks to the lasting impression left by their live show, the band’s audience continues to grow.

“We’ve always done festivals first then people will talk about us, whether online or to their friends,” says Fukuzumi. “When they go back to their hometown, we’ll have a date there and they turn up and they bring their friends. So it’s really a nice organic growth that you see. As a band, things like that really make us feel happy and makes us feel pumped that we’re doing something great for them.”

Rather than a reserved display of instrumental ability, Mountain Mocha Kilimanjaro’s hard-hitting funk gigs encourage plenty of audience interaction. “As a band we try to create an energy within the room, whether it’s a big festival or a small room, [so] that it’s pumping and it’s hot and steamy in there and sweaty and dirty. Just really an intimate atmosphere that [means] there’s no border between the band and the audience,” Fukuzumi says confidently.

The band’s on stage energy is optimally captured on their four full-length albums. The recently released Perfect Times is a particularly animated document. Fukuzumi details the album’s key features.

Perfect Times is a lot more aggressive, more attacking than previous albums that we’ve done. There’s a lot more, for example, distorted guitars and jazz-jamming elements to it. It’s a lot more loose. I think it’s more of a live-oriented record.”

The album is an unrelenting invitation to start moving and Fukuzumi explains that the band aimed to expand their sound on this record.

“We did have that intention to make it a powerful statement, not just sound-wise but as the style of the band, [to show] that we can do a wide range of things but you can still recognise it as Mountain Mocha.”

Indeed, the record isn’t restricted by genre boundaries, masterfully infusing conventional funk with a heavier rock music edge. Fukuzumi is enthusiastic about how the new songs explode on stage.

“I think the newer songs, even compared to the older ones, have a lot more of a high energy, more rocking out. We’ve had people, even the shy people of Japan, mosh to it. It’s going to be a bigger show, louder, in a good way, and we can’t wait to play a lot of those new songs this time.”

Mountain Mocha Kilimanjaro come from the relatively unknown Japanese city of Saitama, situated on the outskirts of Tokyo. Their energised funk is an anomaly in Japanese music but Fukuzumi is determined to boost the credentials of funk music countrywide.

“The funk scene [is] not necessarily growing that quickly, so our next mission is to try to be a force to let that grow so that we can cross over. A good example is what The Bamboos have done over in Australia, where they came up as a funk band but now they’re recognised as just a great band. We’re aiming to do a similar thing over here, to try to make more people listen to funk music, to make more people recognise funk and soul as a progressive genre.”

BY AUGUSTUS WELBY