Tenniscoats

Tenniscoats are a Japanese indie avant-pop duo comprised of Saya and Takashi Ueno. With the help of an ever-shifting lineup of backing musicians, the Uneos make the kind of gentle, willowy, cerebral tunes that bring together austere chamber folk instrumentation and interesting production methods. The duo's prolific nature and affinity for collaboration led to a large and sonically diverse discography, including highlights like 2009's Two Sunsets, a joint album with the Pastels, 2012's Papa's Ear, one of several beautiful albums made with Swedish band Tape, and their extensive Music Exists series which collected their hard to find sounds over five individual volumes and culminated in a box set repackaging in 2020. In 2025, they proved their ability to work with outside artists was intact when they worked with Nicholas Krgovich and Joseph Shabason on Wao.Tenniscoats released their first EP, The Theme of Tenniscoats, via the Majikick label in 2000. This was followed two years later by another mini-album, The Ending Theme, which was released on Noble/MIDI Creative. Tenniscoats' first proper full-length album, We Are Everyone, arrived in 2004. Several more releases followed in the next four years, including Totemo Aimasho (2007) and Tenniscoats & Secai (2008). In addition to their own recordings, Tenniscoats were involved with various collaborations and side projects at this time, including Tan-Tan Therapy with Swedish ambient rockers Tape in 2008 and OneOne, a collaboration between Saya and Deerhoof's Satomi.Tenniscoats released another full-length, Temporacha, via the ROOM40 label in 2009. Two Sunsets, an album made in collaboration with the seminal Scottish indie pop group the Pastels, was released on Domino that fall. Tokinouta appeared in 2011, and the following year the duo reconvened with Tape for help on production of the quiet chamber pop collection Papa's Ear. Later in 2012, the group released All Aboard!, an LP they recorded between 2005 and 2009 that featured Ikuro Takahashi, a drummer known best for his work with Japanese noise rock bands High Rise and Fushitsusha. They collaborated with Pastacas (musician Ramo Teder) for the lo-fi folk of Yaki-Läki in 2013, and with Jad Fair and Norman Blake for 2014's How Many Glasgow. (A second album with Fair and Blake, Raindrops, was issued in 2017.) Their Music Exists series began in 2015, collecting Tenniscoats material that may have been hard to track down outside of Japan. The series eventually grew to include five volumes, and in 2020, a limited-edition vinyl box set with all five discs was released on the Alien Transistor label. As the 2020s began, the group put out several cassette only releases and other minor projects, and some of their long out-of-print albums were reissued, beginning with remastered versions of their Tape collaborations Papa's Ear and Tan-Tan Therapy. When musicians Nicholas Krgovich and Joseph Shabason booked a two-week tour of Japan in 2024, they enlisted Saya and Takashi to serve as their backing musicians. The four hit it off so well that they decided to record an album of new music together. Highly improvised and recorded mostly live in the studio -- the 100-plus year old Guggenheim House in Kobe -- Wao was released under the name Shabason, Krgovich, Tenniscoats on Western Vinyl in late 2025.
© Tim Sendra /TiVo