JapCore, Extreme Noise Madness, Sampling Virus and Ethnic Orientals
Original position in magazine: pages 20-27
Contents: Gyaatees, Musica Transonic, Magical Power Mako, Neu Konservativ sampler, Frieze magazine featuring Masonna, Yamada Chisato, Bi Kyo Ran, Mikami Kan
See also: Merzbow, Ground-Zero
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Gyaatees
Gyaatees I
JAPAN CAPTAIN TRIP CTCD 063 CD (1997)
For the first three tracks, this gives the impression of a free-for-all jam session involving much drum-banging and vocal wailings, as though the band were attempting to update The Red Krayola’s ‘free form freakouts’ with The Familiar Ugly. It then segues into an ethnic instrument blurting away over a calming synth figure, which ends this very short CD. All tracks are performed live by a nine-piece combo, playing synths, saxophones, guitars, a Didjeridoo, and lots of percussion instruments. Three of them also wail mysteriously, using their larynxes. Gyaatees are a combination of free style musicians and Sei-sou priests. ‘Sei-sou’ in Japanese means ‘a clean priest who is intellectually handicapped’. (A note to the PC brigade - that’s their chosen phrase; we would probably use ‘intellectually challenged’ in this uptight country). It is undoubtedly the presence of these Sei-sou priests which give Gyaatees their distinctive voice.
The band spent some time developing this music. It began with Tairyu Kakuta and his musician cohorts meeting the Sei-sous in a Koganji Temple to perform ‘ascetic exercises’ on a daily basis. I don’t know if these exercises involved music at this stage; perhaps they were religious ceremonies, or else they simply sat in dark cells eating dried roots. Kakuta, however, saw he could learn. It was clear these intellectually handicapped priests had something important to say, but could express it best through music (rather than through literature or language). Informal rehearsals began; composed songs were tried first, but the Sei-sou, enlightened visionaries though they may be, were unable to memorise their parts for long enough to perform them more than once. From necessity it would seem. the music grew into a different thing, a ‘memory of the original songs’ - the Sei-sous contributed vestigial ghosts of their original learned parts. This result could have been a success, but still something was not quite right; the notes say ‘it was not our wishes and life style’, and I think there is a suggestion that the musicians felt they were exploiting their brother priests: ‘handicapped people were associated with normal’.
Finally, Gyaatees understood that ‘rules are nothing’. They tore up the original plan and decided on go-for-broke free playing, ‘even if it will not be music’. The results are here, a joyous half-hour of simple, colourful fun. Find out for yourself if their risk paid off.
ED PINSENT
Musica Transonic
A Pilgrims Solace
JAPAN PSF RECORDS PSFD 76 CD (1996)
Give yourself a couple of plays to get past the extreme volume and density, then you can start to appreciate what a complicated masterpiece is Musica Transonic’s second LP. A concept has been tacked onto it, in which Asahito Nanjo’s power trio rediscover their roots with the Old Catholic church. A voyager themed LP to outdo anything Yes managed to produce, it offers balm to a weary Pilgrim throughout his life’s journey. All track titles transcribe from Greek script into Latin, each associated with an aspect of the Pilgrim’s journey, including the ‘Officium Defunctorum’ (a prayer for the dead?), ‘Graduale’ and ‘Haec Dies’. A Graduale is a Psalm and response associated with Catholic liturgies; Haec Dies simply means ‘This is the Day’, referring to Judgement Day, the Great Day of God’s wrath. Naturally, our oriental Holy Trinity here are more than equal to the task of performing a suitable soundtrack for that apocalyptic event.
Two outstanding tracks continue the theme, ‘Confessiones’ and ‘Lurea’. In the confessional box of the former, lead guitarist Kawabata Makoto unburdens his soul in a litany of echoed and sustained weeping guitar lines. ‘Lurea’ boasts the weirdest sound the trio have yet managed to record, a numbingly insistent liturgy of power chords with an added electronic Snake in the garden of Eden weaving its way over the top. Each track is too complex to be listened to, a taut and deliberate construction offering maximum information overload. An indelible record you can keep reading forever, like an illuminated manuscript. Their most beautiful CD box to date, every millimetre of space afforded by that cramped design format has been utilised; designed by Kawabata using a variant of the colour-print technique of Tadanoori Yokoo (almost the same as traditional Japanese wood-block printing, just using modern technology) and samples old engravings and symbols, to suggest a new World Religion with pagan, Buddhist, Indian-Mexican and Catholic elements all mixed together with alchemical and magick devices. The cover showcases a more sober, ‘Classical’ labyrinth of Dedalus. Verily, this ‘Contemporary Improvised Heavy Psychedelic Group’ are a titanic combo that virtually demolishes any opposition in sight.
ED PINSENT
Magical Power Mako
Music from Heaven
USA ATAVISTIC AP97CD CD (1997)
Magical Power Mako
Blue Dot
JAPAN BELLE ANTIQUE BELLE 95131 CD (1995)
Blue Dot is insane continuous guitar and drum music, a world to lose yourself inside…you have never felt so completely disoriented, it’ll send your mind spinning up the Amazon to the darkest depths of the jungle with little hope of return. This powerful hallucinogenic psychedelic trip matches anything that the best musicians of the original psychedelic period could hope for. The Grateful Dead managed something close to it on their second LP Anthem of The Sun, through a combination of ability, ineptitude, knowledge, ignorance…and drugs. They made the studio do things that should not be done. Similarly, Magical Power Mako uses the studio like an isolation chamber. There is an intensity of focus on the inherent properties of amplified electronic musical instruments, and more emphatically on studio effects, which are used for their own sake and not as some decorative enhancement device. The possibilities of reverb and echo are explored and experimented with relentlessly, setting up hypnotic trance mantras in sound. There is such single-mindedness here that Mako becomes a Holy Man, like Robert Crumb’s Mr Natural meditating obliviously through the ages while a civilisation springs up around him, then self-destructs to the powerful vibration of his OM chant. Mako here seems almost unconcerned with results; ‘My Goal’s Beyond’ may well be a phrase he lives by, intent on the processes of exploring the depths of inner space. There is even a form of personal exorcism involved, witness the last track ‘Ukawa Miming’, a free-form vocal rant filled with images of corruption, worms, anal penetration, and Satanism; these chants of craziness are dribbled out in the hermetic echo chamber, like some ritual form of confessional box or primal therapy exercise. Mind you, this track is also fucking hilarious to listen to…’Japanese…Penis…like…worm!’, he declares, the very inverse of a Rap artiste bragging about his ‘penis dimension’.
Music From Heaven is nowhere near as intense as Blue Dot; if Blue Dot is a bad trip on STP, this one is probably more like a weekend at home on ecstasy. Yet it offers the same singularity of vision, like a fortnight spent on retreat in a monastery with some Tibetan High Priest. (The imagery on the sleeve art however is more of an Indian / Buddhist nature). By the end of it you begin to share Mako’s world view, start to dream the same dreams. There’s also the playful side of Mako here, the child-like side of him that treats all musical instruments like playthings; he has fun with speeded-up tapes on ‘Bells and Guitars’, soars upwards in the richness of multitracked psych epics, and even allows himself the indulgence of a John Lennon demo pastiche. The fact that this was ‘Recorded at his Private Studio’ suggests that like Bevis Frond he can afford the luxury of working on these sometimes inconsequential sketches; that said, nobody else on earth sounds anything like this.
Mako is a bewitching and mysterious figure, not prone to self-mythologising, or even accruing unwanted mythology as Keiji Haino has done; he boasts of no ‘concept’ like Asahito Nanjo, nor opts for the shocking malarkey of Boredoms. He is an important figure in the Japanese undergound scene, active since the early 1970s. He went his own way from the start; there was a concious decision to break away from the many bands who were at that time making derivative versions of UK and European progressive rock, and Mako exiled himself to concentrate on acquiring skills with as many musical instruments as he could get his hands on. Byron Coley thought highly enough of Mako to reproduce a fine picture of him surrounded by stringed instruments, and playing a sitar, on the Forced Exposure Mail Order List #10 in 1994. Magical Power was a 1973 LP recorded for Polydor in Japan, aided by friend Keiji Haino; a further 6 or 7 LPs for the label followed. Original vinyl issues of these are probably what record collectors have delirious nightmares about, although the Mom’n Dad label in Japan has been hard at work bringing out CD reissues, including five CDs of Mako private tapes (from 1972-75) issued as Harmonium Volumes I-V. As even these are limited, you have to be pretty sharp if you ever see them. ‘Curious collections of events, songs, styles…in the reaches of the off-the-map’, says the ReR catalogue, where both these items can be purchased. Like I said…prepare to be disoriented.
ED PINSENT
Various Artists
Neu Konservativ
FRANCE GOD MOUNTAIN EUROPE DSA/GM 54046 CD
Hoppy Kamiyama sounds like one scary guy, a bona fide fin-de-siecle transvestite decadent leaping across the stage dragged up to the armpits, before cracking your skull open with his fiendish violin or keyboard live performances. He also oversees this insane record label God Mountain (Kamiyama translates roughly as God Mountain) in Tokyo, of which this essential compilation is a European release.The epicurean mix of musical styles herein further reinforces his decadent status - he’s like the Huysmans character Des Esseintes, stimulating his jaded senses with his collection of exotic perfumes and unguents. If you’re seriously into Japanese noise by this point, but today it so happens you’re not in the mood for the high art-seriousness of the PSF label, or the harshness of the Merzbow-Masonna extreme noise axis, then whack on this sampler for another slant on the riches of the Oriental Underground from the early to mid-1990s. Sure, there’s noise, madness and excess aplenty, but also melodies, songs and musical craft, an interest in actually playing the guitar in a new way, exploring impossible time signatures and weird dynamics. Altered States embody this approach to the max, executing acrobatic feats of musicianship yet never once degenerating into self-indulgent flashy technique, and P.O.N. feature a ‘Super complicated and illogical sound that seems to jump over the human’s ability’. They more than live up to that sleevenote boast! Optical*8 give us Hoppy playing keyboards with that exceptionally fine drummer Masafumi Minato and sampler virus king / guitarist Otomo Yoshihide, who’s also here in an early-ish Ground-Zero incarnation, a section from the CD Null and Void with several big name guests- that band has evolved into auto-destruct extinction so fast this cut is almost like ancient history now, yet only recorded in 1993. Hideki Kato’s Bass Army - two bassists plus drummer - take no prisoners with the hardcore ‘Sneak Attack’. Plus there’s the ‘barbaric, unstoppable’ God Mountain house band, all heavy bass and drums with monster-movie paranoia in the panic attack synths and breathless vocal. Other cuts here feature the ‘Hoppy’ genre-hopping that our Japanese friends do so well: I’ve quoted some of Hoppy’s enthusiastic, pithy one-liners from the sleevenotes. 6-piece Tipographica are very like a 1960s varispeeded Mothers of Invention cut from Uncle Meat, but played in real time - ‘unique humourous music and is like a jointless body!’ E-Trance come out of the NYC club scene, and boast a characteristically eccentric Kramer Noise New York production. Emi Eleonola performs a ’sensual erotic voice improvisation’ with Demi Semi Quaver, evoking a weird inversion of a Serge Gainsbourg sleazoid 45 rpm special. Ichiro Tsuji ‘combines shout and noise’ as Dissecting Table, and his name and mid-80s origins confirm the Nurse With Wound influence. While we can’t claim that every track’s a timeless gem (Denis Gunn’s ‘Porky’s Out to Lunch’ is a bit of a clinker) this comp is redolent with the human sweaty excitement generated by that great paradox - making possible what is impossible. In a way Hoppy K achieves this himself, earning most of his money as a well-paid pop producer in Japan (eg for corporate monsters Epic-Sony, the real ‘Konservativs’) yet finding expression in his extreme cross-dressing improvising lifestyle and sinking oodles of Yen into poor-selling avant-garde music projects like this. I’d suggest you buy this CD and participate; forget Blair’s New Labour, join the ‘Neu Konservativs’.
ED PINSENT
Frieze magazine Issue 36, September-October 1997
+ Three inch compact disc BFFP143CD (p)
I just scared myself out my own skin by having the volume way too loud for the opener of this 3″ CD, a truly terrifying Masonna aural assault. Also here are Merzbow and yet another track from the Manchester performance of Otomo and Eye as MC Hellshit and DJ Carhouse (some already out as BFFP 126CD and a Resonance single.) Masonna’s cut is ‘Ejaculation Generater 2 (remix and edit version)’ and his violent shock attack makes Merzbow seem approachable; Masonna plays for keeps, he’s after your blood and the very marrow of your being. Don’t let him into your life! Frieze is a fine arts magazine based in Denmark Street, so lavishly produced you can’t really tell the articles from the adverts. That hard-working Blast First paragon of virtue and Disobey co-host Russell Haswell compiled a brief survey of the ‘Japanese Noise’ scene, secured some very colourful photos and sleeve art reproes, and managed to get this CD secured to the cover with cow gum. He situates the noise explosion within certain perameters, which effectively means the usual suspects from the history of recorded noise are rounded up. The appeal of noise, reckons Haswell, is due to ‘a fascination with the exotic and the unexperienceable’. Edwin Pouncey bought his copy at a certain art bookshop in London; the proprietor (who knew about fine art but Jap Noise was a bit out of his line) warned him, ‘Don’t bother playing that free CD…it’s rubbish!’
ED PINSENT
Yamada Chisato
Fantasy World
JAPAN PSF RECORDS PSFD-73 (1996)
A total corker of a CD, bristling with tension and stark minimalist beauty. Leaning more towards the ethnic Japanese mode (if I may use so patronizing a term) than the overloaded electric noise atrocities most of you purchasers demand from the Poor Strong Factory, this one showcases acoustic and mostly I think traditional Eastern instruments. No overdubs, no effects, just a sound pure as mountain water; the performances are as hot as a dish of steaming noodles with raw chili. Turn it up as loud as you can to savour the full impact of the bass drum bawoomph resonating in your heart cavity; I genuinely urge you to go for this peak volume strategy, as it will also enable you to pick up on the delicate timbres in the quiter moments, the percussion instruments of various gauges, a xylophone / marimba device, bamboo flute, woodblocks…through Zen-like simplicity, vast imaginary spaces are delineated. The stringed instrument plucking its monotonous way through the LP is, I’ll wager, a koto or samisen; as it’s the star instrument throughout, it’s probably Yamada Chisato tugging those strings for all he’s worth. Virtually everything is printed in Japanese here, so it’s been impossible to draw out much information, but Keiji Haino is certainly a guest on the magnificent ‘Tsu.Ga.Ru’ parts 1 and 2, pitting first his lungs, then an acoustic guitar, and finally a percussion kit against Yamada’s stringed workouts. These cuts document an electrifying performance, avant underground superstar meeting demented ethnic genius. Nothing else like it. I’m sure this music is so steeped in an alien culture that Westerners can only dig about 5% of it, if we’re lucky; some of these passages are redolent with a palpable ancientness and unknowability. Nonetheless, by all means acquire a copy and learn what you can.
ED PINSENT
Bi Kyo Ran
Go-Un
JAPAN BELLE ANTIQUE BELLE 95149 (1995)
Fast-paced, heavy progressive jazz-tinged rock-pop tunes ahoy; Bi Kyo Ran are certainly not of the underground caste, and show how the Japanese interest in UK progressive rock abides. Immediate obvious influences have to be King Crimson - they can’t get enough of that Robert Fripp guitar sustain - followed a close second by Frank Zappa Grand Wazoo period, as the horn charts here are as tightly arranged as anything the Old Moustachioed Daughter himself could have scored. Then there’s the tricky time-signatures, redolent of shuddersome stuff like Camel or Weather Report. Nothing terribly challenging then, but there’s tremendous elan in the performances and a very, very polished studio sound. A small army of musos made it; they’re a pretty ropey looking bunch, dressing young and colourful but with a world-weary glint in their eyes. I hope they’re making lots of money. The nucleus of the band is an 8-piece conducted by Kunio Suma, and features many singers plus percussion players, synths, guitars, piano, marimbas, and recorders. My favourite song is ’21st century Africa’ which despite its syncopated funky bass riff lumbers along like an old elephant, and reminds you of the time in the early 1980s when so many Europeans and Americans were jumping on some kinda African music bandwagon; heaven knows what Bi Kyo Ran’s lyrics have to say about the Dark Continent, but it’s gotta be an improvement on Paul Simon. ‘Famous Japanese symphonic rockers’ says an old ReR catalogue; Madoromi (Belle Antique BA 9466) includes King Crimson cover versions…
ED PINSENT
Mikami Kan, Moto Yoshizawa, Haino Keiji
Live at First Year of Heisei Volume 1
JAPAN PSF RECORDS PSF-D 5 CD (1990)
Mikami Kan strums a semi-acoustic guitar and delivers fragmented, strangely moving songs in his native tongue, accompanied by Moto Yoshiwaza on the double bass and Keiji Haino adding his amazing lead guitar backdrops. Just in case you were expecting an avant-garde version of Neil Young and Crazy Horse or something, I should point out these ’songs’ are barely contained by any melodies to catch hold of - in fact everything meanders with brilliant unpredictability, making it closer to an improv record perhaps. Mikami leads each piece, declaiming and spitting out his lyrics rather than merely singing them, and caressing many choppy licks and near-bluesy chord figures from his guitar. In terms of eccentric delivery he is only just topped here by the great Keiji Haino, who tailors and tones down his familiar all-out guitar attack to add the most appropriate and interpretative effects to each song. The guitar sounds like six different instruments, and Keiji is in masterful control of all his effects throughout. The live venue (an unknown quantity again) clearly isn’t of Wembley arena proportions, rather perhaps an in-house for the knowledgable elite of the Japanese underground, a very avant jazz cabaret setting. In a way the performance also comes over like a warped reverso-version of a folky troubadour trio in a Greenwich Village coffee house, wanting only a string bass and a rubboard to complete the effect. The 4th track kicks in with a burst of astonishing and piquant harmonica playing; whoever’s blowing that harp is a genius, he virtually reinvents the instrument and avoids any pitfalls of familiarity. And there may be even some protest dimension to Mikami’s lyrics for all we know. The muted audience sure seem appreciative, judging by their polite whoops which punctuate a particularly telling phrase. Mikami has a number of releases on the PSF label, among them I’m the only one Around, The Great Man of July, Dune 963 and Merchant in the Pass. This is one of the earlier PSF releases which I found at some record fair ludicrously cheap; dealers are baffled when all the typography appears in non-Western script. Here’s my trick - look on the right hand spine of the jewel case, and chances are you’ll find the names printed in English. I notice it’s on the racks in Tower Records at time of writing.
ED PINSENT