Your Ears are my Punching Bag: JapCore underground Tokyo psychnoise
Original position in magazine: pp 45-51
Contents: Keiji Haino, Cosmic Kurushi Monsters, Resonance Japanese issue, Melt-Banana, Ché-SHIZU, Cinorama, Ground Zero, Marble Sheep, Musica Transonic live
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Keiji Haino: Blackbird Descending
By Ed Pinsent
Suitably admonished by Chris Cutler I have been reassessing my view of Haino somewhat. I have a Susan Sontag note in front of me which seems apt: ‘The Romantics thought of great art as a species of heroism, a breaking through or going beyond. Following them, adepts of the modern demanded of masterpieces that they be, in each case, an extreme case - terminal or prophetic, or both.’ By these lights Haino could be the last of the Romantics - I had been using say, Jackson Pollock as a visual guide, but perhaps John Martin would be better. In any case, here’s just three examples of CDs you might not want to blow your paycheck on unless you’re a Haino completist.
With Loren Mazzacane Connors:
Live at Downtown Music Gallery, NYC 1 August 1992
USA Persona Non Grata #2 / Father Yod FYPC06 CD (1995)
This is just plain dull. The sound of two strangers meeting for the first time and stalking around each other very carefully. The story of Haino coming to New York for the first time in ten years sounds more interesting, as does any story involving rare record collections, which is why on paper this record should have been a great idea, but it ain’t. I’ve tried to be generous to this one. Save your money. Connors himself has made some more than decent records, one of which I hope to review in due course.
Saying I love you I continue to curse myself
UK Blast First BFP-109 CD (1995)
I had to get this as my memento of the blistering heatblast that I had witnessed at Disobey 94. But this unfortunately is a poor recording of it. Haino like many Japanese guitarists is an Emperor of Overload - not simply extreme volume, but denseness of sound enriched with every conceivable electronic effect. Sound as a weapon, a physcial presence. The very air around Haino becomes charged with a million seething particles of hyper-saturated acoustical neurons. The recording process used here simply doesn’t take this into account, and you experience that annoying cut-out effect which tells you the condenser in the microphone is waving the white flag, and whatever you end up with on the tape starts turning into a species of mucilage. So much for the technical shortcomings; this CD also fails to capture any of the excitement or tension of that evening. This was not the performance I saw, of which the intense clarity lacerated the listener like a forest of steel razor blades.
I Said, This is the Son of Nihilism
USA Table of the Elements Ar 18 CD (Argon)
This is just too plain long. Hate to say it but after the first 20 minutes or so, Keiji is almost on auto-pilot. The piece starts out as an excellent raging monster, then switches midway into a gentler lyrical mode. The guitar sways into mandolin-like strumming, the voice sobs and moans. This yields up many moments of characteristically intense beauty, but somewhere Haino loses the thread a bit and starts sawing off the limb behind him. I’m unable to translate the lyrics, yet I wonder if there’s a trace of needless self-pity creeping into the tenor. Finding the piece has nowhere left to go he carries on anyway for another 25 minutes. Having said this, it’s a very high-quality recording that can hold its head up with any of the Japanese releases.
We still love you Keiji! Even your failures embody the kind of success that most improvisers can only dream about. Long may you continue to produce your monumental masterpieces, be they terminal or prophetic!
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Bad-Nice Art
Various Artists
Tokyo Invasion Volume 1: Cosmic Kurushi Monsters
UK VIRGIN TOKYO 1 2 x CD (1996)
Resonance Volume 4, Number 2: Special Japanese issue
(Edited by Clive Bell) ISSN 1352-722X. 60pp
As a cultural event and artefact this CD collection Cosmic Kurushi Monsters takes some beating, a pioneer compilation bringing a taster of the Japanese underground rock scene into the UK’s high street chain stores. Available on budget-ish CD on major label Virgin, compiled by Tony Herrington, with deep background from such folks as Trevor Mainwaring and Edwin Pouncey. The package eschews photographs of the artistes (and background information, unfortunately) in favour of a stunning state of the art Sav X line illustration sleeve with computer colouring.
Some of the early faithful are rubbing their chins thoughtfully and wondering if the UK audience are ready for these exotic Japanese delights to be so ‘popularised’. Granted, the loudmouth at the Musica Transonic gig didn’t get it, drunkenly misapprehending them as pure ego-meisters with loud guitars. John Bagnall tells me the NME reviewer was a bit bewildered by this comp, but conceded that here was rock music that had somehow bypassed the conventional blues-based route of development that so much rock music has followed. One way of seeing it is perhaps taking a cue from one of these Godzilla-like monsters on the cover - Jap NoiseCore artistes are insatiable inhuman creatures eating everything in their path. Consider the massive influx of popular music culture over the last 30 years, via records and discs, from the West into the East. The Japanese set up stations and sites for this material to thrive, on a gargantuan consumerist scale unknown to us Westerners; I believe they have entire record shops dedicated to the output of single bands! They listened and assimilated at a frightening rate, understood with quicksilver brains what makes this stuff work, and more importantly how to improve on the basic model. Like an evil computer they set to work rewiring rock into a cyborg simulacrum that surpassed the original. John Lennon asserted that three-chord rock’n'roll is like a perfectly designed chair that cannot be improved upon. The Japanese Underground is proving otherwise, right before our very eyes. If it’s true that every permutation of rock has been exhausted then what are we listening to here? Perhaps a new strain of virus, a mutated gene? Then what fabulous monsters may result!!! This promises to be a fascinating phenomenon, one which is a particular 20th century thing, the near-instantaneous communication of ideas via electronic technologies, to generate a new faster, leaner, fitter form of global folk music.
This really shouldn’t surprise us if we look at a parallel - for example the work of Tadanoori Yokoo, a Japanese poster artist who since 1965 has been enthused by Pop Art and American graphic designers. Images of uncanny power have poured from his studios, delighting in the violation of visual taboos. In 100 Posters of Tadanori Yokoo (New York Images Graphiques Inc 1978, ISBN 0-89545-022-4), the editor writes ‘If Japan has been voracious in its adoption of Western motifs, styles and goods, it has also been very savvy in first spotting the works of leading American posterists…Tomi Ungerer, Paul Davis and Milton Glaser.’ Glaser himself, in the preface to this book, could almost be describing Boredoms music when he says ‘In these collage-like works, Tadanori walks a risky line between the banal and the esoteric…masterful in his use of bad taste, compelling us to pay attention to his message by its sheer irritation value.’ And on a personal note, I feel Yokoo’s books have titles that read like Keiji Haino CDS: An Escape to Incompletion, 1970; Groping in the Dark, 1973; A Dove flying from the Ark, 1977; My Zen Apprenticeship, 1978…
If you read the special Japanese issue of Resonance, you may feel as I did that there is simply too much for the Western mind to cope with. To begin with, in the UK we’ve only been getting hints of the fecundity of the scene since the early 1990s, yet it’s being going on for a long time before that. Secondly, you realise that Boredoms and Fushitsusha are ‘big names’ on the scene, just one part of the massive explosions of endeavour in the East. The very futility of understanding it defeats me, as does the apparently tenuous nature of the music’s existence in some cases (microscopic editions). This issue is a fine job edited by Clive Bell, who gives a useful perspective - if Japanese culture has a traditional ‘aesthetic…of empty space and tranquility, why not produce the densest, noisiest music anyone has ever heard?’. After 1870, he reckons, the country began to abandon its traditions and tried to ’swallow Western culture whole’…. Ed Baxter interviews Otomo Yoshihide about his ’shocking’ music, who reveals that shock is simply a personal response of anger to society and things that cannot be changed; more established, older musicians hate his work! In his own article, Otomo gives a touching account of his adolescence haunting the ‘jazz kissas’, cafes in 1970s Tokyo whose proprietors played free jazz records non-stop - or any other music to their taste…Thurston Moore’s story of his packing case full of obscure noisy cassettes makes the head spin. He bundled up some of them - including tapes by Violent Onsen Geisha and Volume Dealers - to assist in remixing a Yoko Ono track off her Rising LP, filling up dozens of free channels to transform an otherwise quiet and minimal recording …Stefan Jaworyzn makes a valiant attempt at compiling a complete Boredoms discography, a task he reckons is doomed from the start; only regretting now that he neglected to include catalogue numbers. ‘We’re not really into the chaos but we like the word chaos’, they tell him. Boredoms in art-mode provide this issue’s coup de grace, a centre-spread pen and ink drawing detailing the band’s family tree / history in words and pictures…if Pete Frame had been a Manga artist, this would be the result.
Not for a minute would I consider myself an expert, but even so I felt relieved when I bought Cosmic K to find (a) that I’d heard of at least half of the performers and (b) I owned some of the original CDs from which these tracks were glommed. To these ears CKM is a topnotch selection box of choice names and performances, representing some of the very cream of this music. From the PSF roster there’s High-Rise, Musia Transonic, Keiji Haino, Boredoms and Ground Zero; from Skin Graft, the fairly useless Space Streakings and Melt Banana. The God Mountain artists include Hiahito’s ‘Metaric Machine’, one of the quieter weirder tracks - a queasy yet steely synth behind a whispered prose poem. Optical*8 deliver the required mayhem in ‘Halle Halle’, solid chunks of nasty sneering full-on cheap brilliance, world-class music. Kato Hideki - who is also the main man of Bass Army - turns in ‘Savage’, a fantastic studio assemblage spotlights a disconcerting horn blowing over a wobbly guitar arpeggio with added loops of foreign material - it redefines the meaning of tension! Also of note is K K Null and Ichiro Agata’s ‘Love Isn’t Blind’, surely chosen because the guitar riff approximates the voice of Godzilla himself!
It has to be said Magical Power Mako remains a revelation and ‘Blue Dot’ is the track that does it for me every time. It’s virtually a coda to the double CD set, and positioned directly after the all-out hysteria of contributions from High-Rise and Altered States. Mako is a mystical guru riding inside his blue mist, whipping up an ethereal maelstrom of tape effects and guitar manipulation that defies belief. There’s a gradual drifting apart of the track’s constituent components, aided by clever mixing technique, shifting elements from simpatico to antipatico in seconds. His effects devices just sit up and beg; where Keiji uses a battery of pedals and amps to unleash his full-force magic, Mako deploys his machinery with surgical precison. The piece starts off as a whirling improvisation coming to pieces, then finishes as loops and echoed phrases dissolving into atomic substructures, then reconfigures into something else again. Unbelievable - a musical rendering of Continental Drift. Mako is a veteran underground genius on an equal footing with Haino, and has been producing records since 1973 at least. I’d buy his solo records if they weren’t so darned expensive.
ED PINSENT
Melt-Banana
Scratch or Stitch
SKIN GRAFT GR34 CD (1996)
These have one track on Cosmic K as above, which is probably quite adequate for anybody; I find an entire CD of this stuff is good fun for the first 10 minutes, then pretty annoying thereafter. It’s that singer’s voice, finally - the range of noises she squeezes out is just too limited, a straightjacket for your ears. She spits out dumb monosyllabic phrases in English, squealing away at top speed and mostly on one note. This is done over an equally hyperspeeded backing band, like a toy version of Napalm Death. Either that or of the Truman’s Water school of unintelligibly fast musical gibberish. Steve Albini produced, but this is apparently the best he could get out of them - an unvaryingly shrill exercise that caterwauls like a hyperactive kid ODed on chocolate and cola. Fine if you like your pop music to be dumb and meaningless.
ED PINSENT
Ché-SHIZU
Nazareth
JAPAN PSFD-35 CD (1993)
Astonishing, a record that remains palpably alien to Western ears throughout all of its hour-long duration, and grows stranger with each replay. Never more so than on the frighteningly intense last track ‘Requiem’, an extended improvisation that develops into the most exquisite controlled musical gibberish; an electronic sound so attenuated it can barely squeeze itself along the wires and out of the tiny amplifier. This is joined by keening and wailing sounds (sax? violin?) as despairing as the cries of the mourners carrying the funeral bier. The opening cuts are no less solemn and austere, huge bass drum and squeaky unbalanced violin sawings that suggest unknown liturgies. However, there’s an approachable side too - Ché-SHIZU also try their hand at a garage-band beat combo impersonation; at least one track could almost be an undiscovered Pere Ubu live tape. In fact throughout there’s an undeniable ghost of the Velvets here - with John Cale on viola and Nico on vox. These are all live recordings, mostly from 1987-1988, although the earliest was 1983. Retaining the lo-fi sound throughout was presumably a concious decision - there is an aesthetic charm to rough edged recording and this CD exploits it successfully (in a way that the short-lived Riot Grrl phenomenon did not). Marc Baines immediately responded to the palpable atmosphere and tension captured here. If High-Rise have taken (for example) Black Sabbath as a starting point, perhaps Ché-SHIZU’s project involves the careful recreation of the vinyl bootleg sound. One is reminded of The Residents’ rendering of James Brown Live at the Apollo, where they copied the original source with such excessively ironic perfection that the shrieks of the audience were carefully orchestrated, as if part of a musical score. A similarly effective homage is the photo here of Masami Shinoda playing his sax dressed in a raincoat, in a near-perfect emulation of a Charlie Parker stance!
ED PINSENT
Cinorama
Three Lie and a Ding-a-Ling Five
JAPAN PSFD-39 CD (1994)
Bewitching, beguiling, a spiritual minimalist jewel in the crown of PSF. If nothing else, investigate to assure yourself that the Japan scene is not exclusively male-centred energy noisy rock derivatives: the leader here is Sakata Sachiyo, a female vocalist with a wiry vox, backed by two sensitive male performers Sakamoto Hiromichi and Ishizuka Toshiaki, and it’s one of the quieter records in the PSF catalogue to have reached us. Stunning musical effects are achieved by spare instrumentation: ‘A Moon Cat’ is simply echoed cello plucks, scrapey percussion and whistling. ‘Manteau of a Shadow’ whispers ‘Bible, Bible, Bible Black’ over a poignant synth. There’s even a musical saw on ‘After the Night Dream’. Everything’s recorded with astonishing clarity so that each note slices into you like a frosty day in the mountains. The meaning of the songs however refuses that clarity - albeit lyrics sung in English, with Japanese titles sometimes translated - they remain allusive, mysterious, distant lights shrouded in fog. No introspection to be found here though - Cinorama are not woolly navel-gazing anchorites retreating from the world, rather I find a steely assurance in the delivery that is disconcerting, a stern corrective to one’s excess and materialism. Not that the record lacks humour; for example, ‘The Night and the Owl’ is a nursery rhyme of a song which delivers the enchanting invitation, ‘Everyone Everyone, join our magic lantern, Ho Ho Ho’. A beautiful package, an image of the musicians photographed so as to appear as if they’re made of freshly cast plaster of paris like a George Segal sculpture, or as delicate as porcelain. Even the cliché of the three wise monkeys they can get away with. And some delightful miniature watercolours reproed in the booklet. They deserve to sell as many copies as Hugo Largo.
ED PINSENT
Ground Zero
Revolutionary Pekinese Opera Ver 1.28
UK ReR GZ1 CD (1996)
An unbelievable roller coaster ride for the lugs. So much sprawling chaos is brilliantly orchestrated, constantly veering between organisation (taut, focused control of sources) and chaos (the joyous splurging of spontaneity, accidents and noise and letting the turntables and samplers do what they want). Although each moment offers you a compressed network of startling collisions, edits and impenetrable layers of sound information, there remains a unity to the whole - it runs through a programme, starting from the samples of the actual opera (gongs and cymbals) to a nightmare movie apocalypse of noises and alarming shrieks, into ‘Paraiso 1′ - the most lyrical loops of slowed down female wailing with very romantic chords (this is the excerpt on Kurushi Monsters), into sheer abstract playfulness of the sounds of a stylus being put on records and swiftly removed again, interrupted by white noise and mysterious silences - is it ended or not? and then into the coda, a cheesy organ playing ‘When you Wish Upon A Star’ with toy bugles and birdsong.
Otomo Yoshihide is the dangerous genius mainman behind this project, along with the talents of assorted maniacs of guitar and electronics. Historical layers include an original 1960s recording of the opera and its later manipulation and additions by Alfred 23 Harth and Heiner Goebbels. Also a meticulous name-check of all the musicians and records that have been sampled for this item. It was originally on the Trigram label in Japan and sold out in 1995. Its appellation as Version 1.28 refers to this earlier edition, but also suggests that this item is like an updated computer programme.
I love a record that actually makes me feel like I’m dreaming, and this one does it. Partly achieved by the dense anti-linear anarchic effects, and the snippets of narrative given by tv and movie clips (or whatever source), but the most lovely disorienting feeling arises from hearing a record that you can’t fathom out - it’s impossible to work out how it was done, you can’t believe it was possible. We need more records like this in the world, surely if everyone listened to Pekinese Opera then holes in the fabric of reality may soon start to appear.
ED PINSENT
Marble Sheep
Shinjuku Loft
UK COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR 8 CD (1995)
Early-ish sketches (1988) from the Marble Sheep when they were comprised of members of Zeni Geva, Incapacitants and Hijokaidan, and though not an essential record it’s not unpleasant. Some rather overfamiliar guitar riffs and overloaded Marshall amp sound, but all is played with that conviction that shows they (along with other JapCore bands perhaps) were feeling their way towards doing something amazing and different with this psychedelic rock style. So though it starts in the Velvets / MC5 mode, they occasionally push themselves into fiery solos and ring the changes on those basic hypno-riffs to add dynamics and texture. Licensed from Captain Trip records.
ED PINSENT
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Musica Transonic + Toho Sara + Mainliner
25th September 1996 @ The Powerhaus London
An astounding event, and horrendously ill-attended; two gigs in London, one in Glasgow, and probably less than one hundred people in the audience at any one time. Note that personnel-wise we are dealing with the same trio for all 3 bands, in each case led by Asahito Nanjo; stylistically each is quite different. As Toho Sara the trio were joined by Mineko on Korg synth and played different instruments, including a formidable acoustic bowed device resembling a lute grown wild and strange; they set down to a mesmerising, fragile and unearthly droning improvisation of some 25-30 minutes, and sheer beauty is what they delivered. The Mainliner incarnation is somewhat more recent and produced relatively conventional power punk metal madness. Musica Transonic however remains the killer combination. A conventional power trip line-up for sure, but you have never witnessed such precision, such telepathic compatibility, combined with such extreme speed and volume. Their studio records are impressive, but the live experience beggars belief. Cutting to the chase is what it’s all about - Makoto Kawabata’s blistering guitar solos, that shoot immediately to the heart like a direct injection of a resuscitating drug. If a conventional psych solo needs a runway before take-off, then the Musica Transonic method must be a Harrier Jump Jet! The Powerhaus gig was marred by minor hiccoughs - repeated amplifier failure, dealt with in true stoic fashion by our inscrutable team; and a loud drunken bigmouth who took the view that such volume and mastery amounted to mere empty self-gratification. His ignorant yawps were more then merely annoyingly disruptive; they pointed out a massive gap of understanding and cultural difference, and made me ashamed to be English. No matter - this was one unforgettable experience brothers, powerful enough to drive even Harley R. running to the streets in agony!
ED PINSENT