Tagged: Japan

January 27, 2013

Universal is Born

The lovely EM Records label in Japan has been busy with more of its characteristically wonderful reissues of scarce, choice and exotic items. All the below were received here 02 May 2012. I happened to visit Honest Jon’s Records in West London yesterday and found they were still stocking a few copies of the label’s older releases, some of which are out of print. I’m personally very excited to receive and hear I Saw The Outer Limits (EM1098CD) by Matsuo Ohno. The work of this exceptional Japanese electronic music composer is not exactly easy to come by. There were three CDs issued on King Records in 2005, but these volumes of The World of Electro-Acoustic Sound and Music are in the process of becoming collector’s items. If known at all, Ohno is probably best known to a Western audience through his soundtracks to the TV anime series Astro Boy, but that’s become something of an astral albatross for him. In fact he has a complex history behind him, working in documentary and nature films since the late 1950s, developing a very personal philosophy, and some details of his fascinating life have been recorded in the very simpatico sleeve notes to this release, written by the label owner Koki Emura. There are other and more obscure anime works, for example the work of Hiroshi Maname, which had an influence on this creator, and he also made his own innovative documentary films in the 1960s, including some highly personal film projects about the treatment of disabled and mentally ill children in Japan. He produced and directed a 1972 documentary following the Taj Mahal Travellers on tour.

In 1977 he scored the soundtrack for The War In Space for Toho, the large Japanese studio that produced the Godzilla movies, and he was commissioned by director Shinji Hinoki to produce an album of purely electronic music. I Saw The Outer Limits is the result, Ohno’s first release of non-soundtrack music, and an art statement in its own right. To emphasise the unique nature of Ohno’s music, Emura gently opines how much electronic music of the 1970s (and a lot of it was quite commercial and even sold well) was not only rather bland and boring to listen to, but also tended to simply recreate the sound of conventional instruments; many times we heard quite ordinary melodies being played on a keyboard, except that the keyboard happened to be a synthesizer. It’s worth bearing this in mind as you delve into the extremely subtle tonal shadings of Ohno’s work, which are the result of pure process – the sounds here can only be created by electronic means, and the only method to arrange them involved tape editing. While this is not wildly different from the techniques used by many classical electro-acoustic composers, the results here are blessedly free from theories of structure and compositional techniques. The music just floats…it makes a lot of electronic music seem clumsy and stilted with its delicacy and weightless grace. One senses that Ohno worked in a very intuitive way, and Emura for one is convinced that Ohno has “broken free from musical genre…also from the very framework of the standard composition process”. The other thing that listeners will notice is how strange and almost impersonal the work is, a quality which is another product of Ohno’s unique personality, his reluctance to preach or express direct messages in his music. Outer space music has rarely sounded so outer-spacey, in short – cold, distant, alien, and forlorn. The release comes with a bonus mini-CD of Animal Noise Music called Choju Gigaku, and the composer himself explains how this oddity came about for the World Expo in Japan in 1970. He himself is charmingly baffled as to why anyone would want to reissue this obscure item which was intended for a very limited audience and sold virtually zero copies at the time. For the rest of us music fanatics, prepare to be delighted for 12 minutes of electronic animals singing their beautiful little tunes. I think the label has also pressed this as a nifty seven-inch vinyl item. Essential purchase!

Portrait of a Prodigy (EM RECORDS EM1099CD / MEDITATIONS MEDI 02CD) collects a number of recordings by the enigmatic Indian flautist T.R. Mahalingham, remastered from 78 rpm discs of the 1940s and 1950s. Indian music is not quite in my line, but it seems this fellow did much to reinvigorate the Carnatic tradition with his attempts to put more voicing and emotion into his playing. In doing this he caused some controversy among the purists, and made matters worse by his slightly disreputable lifestyle; an occasional gambler who was not very reliable or punctual, often arriving late for concerts or storming off the stage in the middle of a performance. These however could be taken as indicators of his perfectionism in music, and signs of a temperamental genius. I’m not at all versed in the traditions here, so have nothing to compare it to, but my ears tell me his playing is clearly detailed, taut, and very meticulous. He may not exactly be the John Coltrane of the Carnatic flute, but his music is beautiful to listen to.

Another record guaranteed to expose my musical chauvinism and ignorance of world music is Diew Sor Isan: The North East Thai Violin of Thonghuad Faited (EM1101CD). This album compiles a number of mid to late 1970s recordings of this exceptional player of the Sor Isan. The Sor Isan is a fairly grating instrument and its keening sound may be an acquired taste to Western ears at first spin, but some will also love its rawness and direct qualities. It’s a very distinctive voicing you don’t hear too often. Thonghuad Faited is notable as one of the few players who managed to bring the instrument to the fore, and achieved notoriety as a soloist – again, going against the grain of tradition. The music is completely beyond my ken, and I’d be lost without the contextual notes provided by Chris Menist and Maft Sai (who also compiled the release) – they achieve an interesting blend of musicology and regional history in their concise essay, and bring the story to life. All of these tunes have something to recommend them, whether it be a syrupy ethnic drone, an intriguing vocal part, or even a lightweight easy-listening “rock” backdrop with drums and guitars. The other thing I like is that while the Thai violin is the “lead” instrument, it’s clearly nothing like the sort of musical excess we would associate with jazz, improv, or rock solos, and rather than relentlessly propelling forwards, the music keeps circling in on itself in a compelling manner.

On Istikhbars & Improvisations (EM1096CD) we hear the piano music of Mustapaha Skandrani. This is another example of a relatively obscure musician whom Koki Emura clearly regards as a hidden gem and one most worthy of wider exposure. This Algerian musician recorded this music of his piano improvisations in 1965 under the auspices of a French patron, and once again it is something I have never heard the like of. Skandrani was trained in the traditions of Arabic or Andalucian music, but in the late 1930s he came under the influence of a musician named Hadj M’rizek, who was on a mission to modernise and update the traditional forms of hawzi and shaabi music. It seems that the piano, that most European of instruments (the development of the well-tempered clavier, and indeed the entire Western scale, is a fascinating tale in itself, full of competing factions), was considered totally unsuitable for the rendition of the half-tones and microtonal structure found in Andalucian music. On these 18 short and exquisite piano improvisations, Skandrani provides plenty of evidence to the contrary. Admittedly the grand piano in question was tuned especially to accommodate him, but even so it’s hard not to be flabbergasted by the precision and assurance with which he executes complex runs of notes and tricky Middle-Eastern intervals. The dryness of the recording only adds to the husky, spicy flavour of the music. The album upset quite a few musical purists on its release, so perhaps Skandrani is a visionary “outlaw” who appeals to this label for the same reasons as Mahalingham above. Even so, Mustapaha Skandrani was highly respected and successful in his field, and did many great things for Algerian music in his lifetime. It’s surprising that this was his one and only recording.

September 9, 2012

Nazoranai: a gripping and terrifying debut from Dark Overlord Keiji Haino’s new trio

Nazoranai, self-titled, Editions Mego / Ideologic Organ, CD SOMA009 (2012)

No sooner had I heard of Keiji Haino’s revival of Fushitsusha and his Fushitsusha-for-foreigners band featuring Jim O’Rourke and Oren Ambarchi with their album “Imikuzushi” than news loomed ominously on the far distant horizon that the Dark Overlord had yet another Fushitsusha-like project called Nazoranai boasting Stephen O’Malley on bass and Oren Ambarchi on drums! Before we all endanger ourselves running for the fire exits in terror at the thought of the sheer volumes of sonic blackness and heaviness we presume will billow out of the speakers and surely engulf the entire universe in one dark drone blast, I must advise anything where Keiji Haino headlines is completely under his dominance and all others, even SOMA himself, have to bow to Haino-san’ s austere musical and artistic philosophy, evident in the near-existential titles of the four tracks, the gatefold sleeve layouts and the album artwork. So, no booming bass drones along with Haino’s agonised screams which may be a good thing for the continued existence of the planet – but then, a bad thing in a sense, no?

In truth, this self-titled debut plays like a typical Fushitsusha / Haino album: the dark one sticks to guitaring throughout (so no fiddling with a theremin or DJ-ing which would have provided some variety) and SOMA and Ambarchi are content to be backing men almost interchangeable with other backing men who have served Haino in the past. At least the bass can be heard clearly on this recording and SOMA and Ambarchi have an intuitive understanding of one another’s strengths so they play as a tight unit on their own, allowing Haino to soar high above with the flimsiest of connections to Planet Earth. This makes for a very heavy and intense recording.

The surprise is that the album is not more thunderous than it is – there is plenty of black space and the mood is very deep so the potential is there – but the musicians had other things in mind for this release. The third track can be very repetitive and intense to almost breaking point and the first and fourth pieces have very sparse and quiet introductions. The second track begins very noisily before turning into a slinky mood piece enhanced by SOMA’s bass which at times vies for more attention than Haino’s playing does.

Overall this is a gripping and sometimes quite terrifying album in its deep black silences and its severe artistry. Ambarchi keeps the drumming basic and tense and SOMA demonstrates his skill at low-end melodic understatement while Haino … basically does Haino.

Contact: Editions Mego, Ideologic Organ

August 24, 2012

Shapes of Things

Nice team-up between mystical percussionist and performance artist Z’EV with the Portuguese musician and composer David Maranha on Obsidiana (SONORIS SNS-11). I only really know Maranha from his ensemble pieces such as Circunscrita, but he proves his mettle in the performance pit here and shows he’s got the single-minded brow-furrowing strength to go eight rounds with the powerful and tireless arms of Z’EV. Maranha just oozes heavy black drone-filth and fuzz from his Hammond organ, and as photo shows he leans his whole body into performing that task. Z’EV is credited with playing the “stainless steel discs”, but this doesn’t feel like an especially “metal” album; the resounding skin of his bass drum doesn’t just pummmel us aggressively, it’s little short of a call to nuclear war. From a Lisbon festival June 2010, with a video grab from one of Z’EV’s art movies. Arrived 21 February 2012.

Dislocation is the fab Japanese quartet renowned for mixing crazy free jazz improvisation with demented rock elements, such as wah-wah guitar and loopy speedcore drumming, and there’s electronic shriekment also thrown into that tub of snakes. You can hear them doing it live on Mud Layer Cake (EH?59), with recordings made in 2010 in Nagoya. If you find most table-noise from Japan unapproachable, you might just manage to digest this material, as it’s notched about two or three steps back from “maximum strength”; but the players are still manic and unstoppable when they get into their hyper-fast, ultra-driven thang, and there’s very little structure or dynamics to get in the way of their interplanetary meltdown groove. The recordings may be a shade rough around the edges, but any caveats are more than amply compensated for the ferocious energy levels throughout, especially on the 20-minute second track, which defies belief. From 6 January 2012.

Eek, here’s this very interesting Iain Sinclair record which has been buried in a bag since 21 February 2012. Stone Tape Shuffle (TEST CENTRE) is a limited vinyl album (400 copies) of which I was sent a promo CDR. It’s spoken word, as you’d expect from this unique English writer who has championed the marginal poetry of Stewart Home and the art of psycho-geography in his writings, and spun mind-boggling portraits of London life in his books. But it’s a spoken-word record with a twist; the compiler, Will Shute, wrote to tell me the content is taken from an assortment of Sinclair’s books, and that “the recordings were made in the places corresponding to the fiction, and have been edited together with material from Iain’s archives and with field recordings.” Now while this is not as radical as Mark E. Smith’s The Post-Nearly Man (and what is?), there are glorious moments of overlapping voices from mixed recordings, and some subtle narrative consonances provided by the field recordings of traffic and river from that most noble of cities. For me Side Two is the more compelling of the two suites, with more distorted sounds arising from what I take to be cassette recordings, and there’s also more of a cut-up feel, and more foreign elements from random sounds leaking in. Impenetrable, vivid, disturbing. It’s here that the compilers live up to their aspirations of emulating the strategies of certain William Burroughs recordings and items from the Giorno Poetry Systems records. Sinclair’s writings are quite dense, layered and opaque, an acquired taste for the most part. I know that Private Eye magazine for one regard him and all his works with disdain, and this LP may not be the best place to start if a complete novice; for that, I would recommend Lights Out For The Territory. Nonetheless this is a compelling and very unusual art LP from an English original. We look forward to the promised Chris Petit release from this label.

More murderous electronic music from Ben Vida on esstends-esstends-esstends (PAN LP 23). Extreme electronic music will be the death of me, or I’ll be content, sir, to eat my own head. On this item, Vida is attempting to destroy the illusion of the stereo image and make a record where you have no idea where the source material is emanating from. Further disorientation can be enjoyed by simply moving your head around as you sit wedged between the immovable blocks of electric sound munching out of your speakers like giant poisoned slugs, and full volume playback is indicated. Actually it’s not like slugs at all. Nothing so organic. Instead, we have to visualise vast geometrical shapes, in three dimensions, made of hard material that yields beneath nothing short of a diamond torch cutter, and formed in outrageous configurations that are not known to exist in the Euclidean canon. Through his art, Vida plays hob with “expanded spatialization”, “sound localization”, and our perception of same, like a very refined form of optical art of the sort that reduces your eyelids to quivering bowls of mayonnaise. Fortunately it’s not completely a non-stop ordeal once you get used to the high degree of abstraction in this music, and the purity and simplicity of Vida’s unblemished tones is truly something to savour as they ring forth with shocking clarity; a shot of Lagavulin for the ears. Rashad Becker once again proves he’s the robo-surgeon of the audio mastering world. Ben Vida used to be with Town And Country and had a solo act called Bird Show. More recently he’s been doing “cross control voltage integrated improvisation and real time group automatic composition” with Keith Fullerton Whitman, an activity which sounds like it oughtta to get the pair of them banned in Boston.

July 24, 2012

Don’t even go to the Fat Stars

Another item from the Attenuation Circuit envelope of January 2012 is by the Finnish musician Esa Ruoho. As Lackluster, he’s been working in the area of avant-garde Techno music for a long time, but Riversmouth (ACM 1009) is not modern disco hoppery – it’s twenty minutes of ambiguous and exploratory drone work produced by digital means. We’re invited to savour its minimalist leanings, but Ruoho’s work here seems to me just a shade too cluttered to qualify as pure digital glitch, that near-inhuman genre of electronic music which constantly celebrates its characteristic steely glint and diamond claw. Ruoho prefers soft edges and undefined contours to the geometric Raster-Noton grid. He cannot resist introducing harmonies, textures, washes, and additional tones on top of the basic calm undercurrents he generates, almost adding elements at random until a certain pleasing unpredictability is achieved. The path is far from clear and the original aims are being steadily forgotten. The short piece feels like a journey across the surface of a huge lake that’s been half-filled with blue jelly.

Machinefabriek is the ever-popular Rutger Zuydervelt. If anyone knows about crossing lakes filled with gelatin, he’s your man. He could probably do it while wearing a pair of stilts. On Veldwerk (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR156CD) we get a very nice sampling of some recent-ish field recording work and slow droney music from this Netherlandish sound artist, representing a variety of approaches; some are aural portraits of places and events, others have been self-consciously edited together into a narrative structure to represent a diary of a trip overseas. There’s also audio from an art gallery installation, and a film soundtrack. At all times the aim of Machinefabriek is to steadily contemplate the world from a centre of incredible stillness, neither casting judgement on his surroundings nor excluding anything that might be of potential import. Nothing escapes his all-seeing eye or his all-hearing ears. I would imagine it’s taken him many years to achieve this Zen-like state and if there were marks of distinction for being a “perfect master” in the high arts of field recording and phonography (or even just taking the time to simply listen), Zuydervelt ought to have achieved a black belt or the honorary title of the Akond of Sennheiser. Of particular interest: the “rough editing” techniques used to create a great sense of urgency and naturalism on ‘Slovensko’, where the artist is deliberately emulating techniques he learned from Yan Jun; and the 21-minute ‘Apollo’, a soundtrack work that’s a collaboration with Makino Takashi. The films of this Japanese cineaste reveal a preoccupation with galaxies and outer space, always a popular theme for avant-garde dronery of all stripes. Machinefabriek was torn between his natural inclination for uneventful minimalism and Takashi’s requirements for more layers and action. The results aren’t exactly the same as standing next to a Saturn V lift-off, but this subtle and mystical piece can easily hold its own with the incredible music of Matsuo Ohno. A lot of this was released on small editions of CDRs and singles, probably quite hard to find now, so this could be a useful comp. From 16 January 2012.

Japanese pop singer Tujiko Noriko makes a return to the Mego label with GYU (EDITIONS MEGO 239), and I had to rack my memory banks to recall that she released Make Me Hard for this label ten years ago. She’s been busy enough in the interim with records for Nature Bliss and Room40, including a collaboration on that label with Lawrence English. Here on this album of electro-pop beat songs, she’s assisted by the technical and writing skills of Tatsuya Yamada, masquerading as Tyme. The sleeve drawings by Toshiko Kimura promise wonderful vistas of birds and human escaping the confines of city life to rise reborn into organic bliss, but the music is 100% synthetic; not a sound slips by but has been processed into little shards of slippery pink candy. I’m not saying the production has been overcooked, but a lot of the soul has been drained from Noriko’s singing, and even the meticulously constructed stacks of Beach Boys harmonies don’t liven things up a whole lot. The preponderance of synths, drum machines and sequencers used for the backing music gives the whole album a sealed-off, unreal sensation. Six years to cpomplete it took, but this is because of the creative processes involved in the collaborative writing, rather than the making of the album; disposable pop this ain’t, even at its most elevator-friendly moments. It has a kind of artificial sheen of exquisiteness, even when the unwavering 4/4 time signatures and monotonous melodies become wearying. The titles are poetic though, if the translation provided is anything to go by: it’s a world of Tropic Penguins, Golden Hearts, Vacation of God, Slow Motion and an Unforgettable Lightworld.

July 11, 2012

Shanghai Heat and Radioactive Food

Creative Destruction (HYPNAGOGIA GIA07) is a two-disc set of Japanese harsh noise which slipped into the collecting sack on 23 December 2011. It certainly ruined my Christmas. It was compiled I assume by Paul Coates, seemingly with the intention of simultaneously punishing and disorienting the listener with impenetrable, bizarre, and unapproachable sounds. A lot of it seemed at first sight to be drawn from the “classic” 1990s period of Japanese noise, when giants stalked the earth and also saw fit to tear your head off with ferocious electronic bursts from their volcano-like heads. Not everyone here fits that profile, though. Kazuma Kubota is a relative “new boy”, seems to have been active in in the last five-six years, and with his ‘Beginning of the End’ (Parts 1-3) he delineates a mechanised apocalypse by dabbling in the junkyard with metallic parts, alternating his actions with shrill feedback explosions. A puzzling, weary and resigned air already sets in; a depressing way to open the compilation.

Government Alpha restores more sizzle to that steak as he dips his wriggling tentacles in the long trough of acidic despair. Some eight minutes of ‘Writhe in Agony’ are followed by over ten minutes of ‘Ovum of Foresight’, both cuts reeking of delicious mad electronic music where any control units which may have once existed are being willingly sacrificed on the altar of brain-meltdown. This solo act is a bona-fide 1990s god of Japnoise, but is regarded by some as an upstart aiming to kick greater gods like Merzbow and Masonna off the top of the pedestal.

Two tracks by Incapacitants (Toshiji Mikawa, sometimes joined by Fumio Kosakai) are enjoyable slabs of tabletop mayhem, still chaotic in the extreme but somehow bound in by the multiple looping effects that seem to be whirling before us like imaginary dervishes. Where Government Alpha wants to scald off your skin with boiling lashes, Incapacitants are content to grind our bodies down into pepper, the slow way. At least, that’s the case on Part 1 of ‘Fall Of Olympus’; the second part is much wilder, an unmanaged explosion of dangerous fireworks, space rockets, and ICBM missiles. I hesitated before ordering Box Is Stupid from Pica Disk in 2009, and never got one in the end; I’m still not sure I would ever play 10 CDs of their “work”.

Ahh, here’s Defektro closing out disc one. Three relatively short tracks in the 5-6 minute area and with interesting science-fiction / violent / psychedelic titles too. A new name to me; sometimes calling themselves a “Noise Army”, this is a trio of fun-loving tykes who have been twiddling their knobs since about 1998. They veer from unvarying feedback in the “HNW” style to somewhat more textured industrial rumble-n-loop exercises, ending their segment with a bleak utterance on a more minimal and menacing tone.

As we pause for a cuppa we can also admire the astonishing artworks by Yasutoshi Yoshida. The colour front covers are strong, but the inside collage is a real dazzler, collaging Indian deities with insects, bones, and machinery. I kind of regret having all that typography superimposed on this masterpiece. Imagine if it had been a double LP gatefold. I don’t think the world would ever recover from it.

On disc two we have Thirdorgan, a solo act of early 1990s vintage to be sure. His three segments of ‘Die Disziplin Für Die Kreative Zerstörung’ are perfect examples of sub-Merzbow powerhouse malarkey, with barely a breathing space to be had in the relentless explosive energy, except for a lovely interlude of UFO-interior effects for two minutes in the middle. K2 is another destructo-merchant with 15 minutes of ‘Reactors of Raging Goddess’” which has a shade more interest in dynamics than Thirdorgan, but is still as dangerous as a power cable flailing about in your living room with three rhinoceroses. Like many of the names here he has a huge back catalogue, in his case going back to 1993, but the most recent thing I heard from him was a split with Maaaa. The three tracks by Astro are a high spot for me; his all-white vinyl M.S.G. Of Electronics Wave from 1997 is a personal fave. Old Hiroshi Hasegawa certainly has the violence of all the loons named above, but he also manages to produce noise that somehow has more weight and density. Maybe it’s simply that he uses a bit more bottom end to round out the harsh feedback attacks. There’s more incident to Astro too, internal loops and crazy layers and absurd yelps of electronic absurdity, to mellow out the effects of being passed eight dozen times through an industrial-sized buzzsaw.

Lastly, there’s our good friend Guilty C. also called The Guilty Connector, another relative “youngster” on the noise scene who’s been doing it for maybe 12 years now. At one stage I wanted to try and “collect” his music, so interesting did the many hats he wore seem to me; within this genre, he’s one of the harder names to pigeon-hole or describe adequately. I soon gave up my dream of collecting his CDRs and tapes, but one day a mad collector somewhere in the world will leave me his full set as an inheritance when he writes his will. As to Guilty C.’s ‘Black Nights, Muddy Confusions’, it’s one of the few quiet moments on this mostly boisterous set, but no less menacing. In fact it develops into the familiar harsh noise assault eventually, but does so at a very slow pace. Imagine being eaten by large snakes in slow motion to savour the feelings engendered by this ghastly music.

May 14, 2012

Hitoyogiri: almost easy-listening Japanese noisy psych-guitar rock with a blues touch

Miminokoto, Hitoyogiri, Important Records, CD IMPREC338 (2011)

Featuring the kind of bleak, dark noisy psychedelic blues that I usually expect from the PSF Records guy, Miminokoto’s “Hitoyogiri” maintains Japanese psych-guitar rock’s strangle-hold on my fragile psyche. Generally the music on this CD is melancholy and wistful, or at the very least has a dark, inward ambience with steady low-key vocals that rarely become very emotional plus a blues-tinged guitar that may have a darkly sparkling tone and drumming that starts off quiet and steady and eventually erupts into virtuosic playing. A couple of tracks feature cloudbursts of searing distorted lead guitar and these songs will be the highlights of the album for many listeners including me.

The title track sets the pattern or template if you like for the songs to follow: the start of the song is just barely there and what develops is a repetitive rhythm that more or less continues for the duration of the track with some variations, usually those that turn on a change of key. Vocals begin quietly and are almost inaudible but become louder, a bit more emphatic, as the music progresses. The song becomes more free-form and near the end, it’s become chaotic with blurry, distorted lead guitar tones and quite complex, improvised drumming. “Midsummer’s End” follows the pattern but with a sparkling blues guitar melody.

The next couple of tracks see the Miminokoto men hit their stride: “Hands of the Night” features some really wistful, beautiful romantic melodies with the bassline following a different inspiration from the rest of the music. There’s a flubby wah-wah sound inter-twined with the pleasant bass-guitar melody. Rhythm guitar tones can be very resonant. “For Garbanzo” has a plodding riff but the lead guitar breaks are what really make this album stand out: streams and streams of fuzzed-up guitar noise pour out of the speakers and fill up the space in your head until your eyes see colourful bright day-glo pin-pricks twinkling and dancing up and down in revolving concentric circles that themselves perform their own little square dance routines and form all kinds of strange geometric optical illusions that are usually featured only on Japanese psychologist and optical illusions buff Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s website.

“Milky Light” is a faithful cover of the Kousokuya song, right down to the anguished vocals. Only the blurry lead guitar break-outs indicate that this is Miminokoto and not that doomy band whose leader Jutok Kaneko is, alas, no longer on this sad plane of existence. After this song, Miminokoto return to their familiar territory of minimal-sounding, bluesy psych-rock for a final hurrah but “Trembling Tongue” seems strangely inadequate after what we’ve just heard – proof if needed that nothing, not even the M guys, can quite match Kousokuya in the Department of Dark Despair.

Good if perhaps not very inspired with strong blues influences, some fired-up noise guitar and a great sparkling, bewitching sound, Miminokoto serves up almost (but not quite) easy-listening psych-rock. I can certainly recommend this album as a beginner’s guide to this particular Japanese-owned genre.

May 4, 2012

Music from Japan V

Standard Podcast Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The Sound Projector Radio Show
Friday 4th May 2012

Optical*8, ‘Penetration’
From Bug, FRANCE LES DISQUES DU SOLEIL ET DE L’ACIER DSA 54048 CD (1997)
High Rise, ‘Ikon’
From Live, JAPAN PSF RECORDS PSFD-48 CD (1994)
Omoide Hatoba, ‘Mirage’
From Vuoy, JAPAN TRATTORIA POLYSTAR MENU 117 PSCR-5592 (1997)
Boredoms, ‘Fuanteidai’
From USA PUBLIC BATH PB3 7″ (1990)
Sympathy Nervous, ‘Lace Master’
From No More Expo, JAPAN NEGATIVE EMISSION NE-1002T CASETTE (ND, early 1980s)
Ground Zero, ‘Null & Void: TV-Q Missile’
From Null & Void, USA TZADIK TZ 7204 CD (1995)
Brush!?, ‘Day Break (Bridge Is Drumming) / Tears of Child’ (1971)
From Brush!?, GERMAN SHADOKS MUSIC SHADOKS 047 CD (2006)
Gaseneta, ‘The Ballad of After The Rain (Live)’
From Sooner Or Later, JAPAN PSF RECORDS PSFD-17 CD (1991)
Yuji Takahashi, ‘Time’ (1963)
From Early Dedicated Japan, J-TONE J1250
Marble Sheep and the Run-Down Sun’s Children, ‘I’m Just Staring at the Upside’
From Big Deal, JAPAN CAPTAIN TRIP RECORDS CTCD-001 CD (1992)
UFO or Die, ‘Rader Eyes (Gods)’
From Cassettetape Superstar, JAPAN TIME BOMB BombCD-02 / PUBLIC BATH PB CD4 (1996)
Guilty Connector Und Tabata, ‘Tempus Est Quaedam Pars Aeternitatis’
From Guilty Connector Und Tabata, FRANCE EVEN STILTE RECORDS ES101 CD (2003)
Matsuo Ohno, ‘Yamatoji A’ (1982)
From The World of Electro-Acoustic Sound and Music 1, JAPAN KING RECORDS KICP 2636 CD (2005)
Hasegawa-Shizu, ‘Direct Tube Rider’
From I Know A Chord Buried Into The Ground…JAPAN HAANG NIAP HAANG-001 CD (2008)
Over Hang Party, ‘Now Emerges’
From Tokyo Flashback 2, JAPAN PSF RECORDS PSFD-24 CD (1992)

March 4, 2012

Bound Forms and Dead Pianos

Fossil Fuel

MV Carbon of Brooklyn has sent a promo CD version of her new LP Dislodged Perihelion (ECSTATIC PEACE! E#1106), which has come out on Thurston Moore’s label as a limited press vinyl item. I didn’t twig at the time when this arrived (around November 2011) but I’m now convinced this must be the same gal I saw live in 2006, when she performed as Carbon with a number of other obscure NYC noise acts on board a disused boat ¹. Sure enough, six years later…she has an album out, and it’s a groovy slice of angsty distorted chaos, where the idea of conventional song-form is turned inside-out. She snarls and spits out her twisted T-bone steaks of disjointed poetry in her best alienated No Wave voice, further fed through the telephone-distortion effect from Hades, while her instrumental other self is working like a deranged many-armed Hindu deity. Matter of fact when first spun I was impressed by the near-formless layers of detritus Ms Carbon was accumulating on the grooves through imaginative use of analogue synths, the amplified cello, oscillators, cut-up field recordings and samplers, each added element pulling the project down its own particular sewer gateway like a very determined rodent or similar crawling vermin. Far from arriving as just another obnoxious table-noise slew-merchant, MV Carbon is rebuilding herself as a multi-tasking cyborg, acting as her own New Wave punk band, graffiti artist in sound, and generally ramshackle modernist composer using bric-a-brac, bricks, brickbats and bricolage. What’s most intriguing is her use of highly unconventional methods to trigger her synth and electronic signals – the press notes speak of electromagnets, heat and photo sensitive devices, and even colour recognition performing as active agents in this elaborate process. Would like to learn more about this dimension, but it might account for the very distinct and unusual sound of this LP – just teetering on the random. On today’s spin though, the dominant factor is sheer attitude – suggests strongly La Carbon has been taking night classes for a Master’s Degree in Sass, and she uses this brazen front to help fling her nihilistic, death-strewn and gory violent lyrics in your face like so much undigested pizza. Added to this, she points out her work has a “conceptual and spatially oriented” bent and she performs in art galleries, and has a long list of big-name musician collaborations to feel justly proud of. Real nice. I’ve been waiting for a vinyl copy to make it into a UK shop, but I have a feeling I’d better not hold my breath…snap one up today if you can.

I Turn Dead Keys

Here’s another American improviser and noise genius, not unknown in NYC I trust though he comes from Cincinnati. On his new album 1975 (INTRANSITIVE RECORDINGS INT037), C. Spencer Yeh forsakes his high-energy violin attack and large-scale noise assault and offers 11 experiments in simple process-based sound. Some are basic drones, some of them stutter out random electronic gibberish like a robot frog with hiccups. Two of the tracks are made with electric guitars and create a steady magnetic hum fraught with static and white noise interruptions. So far it may sound like I’m blathering about another nondescript and inessential release of droney noise, but 1975 feels freighted with a lot more import and emotion, its solemn and serious tone indicating Yeh’s often-overlooked deep knowledge of the history of experimental music and composition. A great sadness is imparted by these forlorn, starvation-victim pieces, often resembling the ghosts or memories of music, as if the carcass of dead weight had been systematically boiled away from a symphony and left just these dry bones steaming in the cauldron. In effect, Yeh is quietly creating his own brand of “spectral” composition. His choice of photographs, showing the ruined guts of a piano in an abandoned urban area, are most apt in this context. In fact these photos show you more than you want to see, exposed keys, broken hammers, missing layers, distressed surfaces, decaying wood…if there’s such a thing as “dead piano porn”, these photos are primo material for a pervy website of that nature.

Darkness Visible

Melancholy of another sort is instilled instantly by listening to a few seconds of Outside Darkness (P.S.F. RECORDS PSFD-198), a terrific CD of performed / improvised music by Michel Henritzi and Fukuoka Rinji. The French player Henritzi has his guitars and effects, while his Japanese compadre lifts a violin to his chin in a manner fit to summon the end of the world. Together, they create music of such drama and import that most listeners will soon be reaching for new ways of saying “apocalyptic”. My favourite pieces are the two parts of ‘The Eclipse of the Sun’, the first one creating an agitated commotion at the imminent solar disaster, the second breathing a resigned sigh at the inevitably of darkness, cold and the onset of winter. In between, we have the blackened folky wail of ‘Falling Angels’ where Rinji’s odd, half-gulped vocals tell a depressing tale alongside his incessant, minor-key violin figures (John Cale fans need to check in here), and the slightly more uptempo ‘Fukushima Ghosts’ with its jangling bells and syncopated beat almost creating a tune you could dance to, if you still had some corporeal form and two crutches for your shattered legs. There’s also the layered and managed drone-noise continuum of the title track, where the duo are joined by Thierry Delles (member of extreme noise band Dustbreeders with Henritzi) and create something even conventional rock fans could dig; it’s as if all the most harrowing violin scrape and guitar swoop moments from the first Velvet Underground LP had been extracted and strung together into a harrowing eight-minute nerve-shredderfest. Michel Henritzi has worked tirelessly to promote modern Japanese music since about 2000 and though his label A Bruit Secret has ceased publishing long ago, intrigued listeners should check out what he’s doing with the Dyin’ Ghost label and his own solo guitar records. Rinji appeared on A Bruit Secret with L’Énergie De L’existence (with the great Chie Mukai) and used to be a member of Overhang Party. Right now I’d love to hear his 1996 album of violin music Searchin’ For My Layline, but that’s a £100 rarity…anyway Outside Darkness is a great release and one of the best things P.S.F. have done for a long time, a real return to genuinely disturbing and relentless rock-inflected extemporisation that seems to go on forever.

This was The Empty Vessel performance space. Not sure if still going today, but see this NY Times article. ↩

January 14, 2012

Rest from Breathing

The News from Neptune

Following in a haphazard American tradition of home-made instruments and objects that are half-sculptures are Neptune, who have been in existence for about 17 years and have over two dozen releases to their credit, yet Silent Partner (NORTHERN SPY NS013) is the first thing I ever heard from this highly inventive combo. What they play is a curious percussion-heavy brand of discombobulated and disjunctive music, decorated with crazy electronic music and held together by strong and stern bass guitar riffs. Sometimes this is done in the service of bizarre songs which are replete with symbolic imagery, such as ‘Canine’ with its obsessive repetitions of “we dogs in cages” painting a bleak portrait of contemporary mankind’s plight, and the image of the wildman running through the forest in ‘Cash Mattress’ is no less alarming. Then you’ve got ‘Collection Plate’ which is a lengthy instrumental allowing them to demonstrate many aspects of their unearthly sound, with demented oscillators, half-functioning circuit-bending devices, choppy rhythms, and multiple percussion effects, all evidence of sentient life crawling slowly out of a huge junkyard, as if a metallic zombie arising from an automobile graveyard. Jason Sandford is the main man behind this distinctive Boston combo, arriving in this musical milieu from a background as a sculptor; he built the chimera instruments, which according to the photographs look like a cross between Keith Rowe’s tabletop guitar, the Simeon, and an industrial sewing machine. Compared to Partch who took an interest in conventional decorative aesthetics for the finished state of his assorted microtonal instruments, Sandford clearly favours a more rugged and rough functional approach to his work, and for his engines and devices all the guts are clearly on display with no attempt to pretty things up with a cowling, a leather case, or a polished surface. The players Pearson, Micka and Ebrahimi lay into their work with a perfect combination of enthused gusto and mysterious poise, and though there have been other lineups of Neptune it’s clear these fellows are highly comfortable and conversant with the ungainly beasts which they must wrestle on a daily basis. In short, if you want an unclassifiable combination of strange gamelan music, post-punk jerky rhythms, experimental electronics with odd dynamics, semi-pagan lyrics and minimal no wave keyboards, all played in real time on unique hand-crafted instruments, this is your next purchase.

Step we gaily, on we go

The Slovakian electronics duo Jamka first came our way with a blistering LP in 2008, and continue to operate the Urbsounds Collective label to showcase their work and that of like-minded noise-punk techno beasts of Eastern Europe. Very encouraging to see they’ve got a release on the high-class Belgian label Sub Rosa as part of that label’s New Series Framework. Pari Passu (SUB ROSA SR333) is eight tracks of new work fashioned using their very intuitive, primitive and enthusiastic approach to working with synths and samplers, and each track occupies a twilight zone between tabletop noise music and whatever species of blackened techno dance music is played in underground nightclubs at 5AM in the seediest part of a pitiless urban zone, for the entertainment of futuristic vacant-eyed outcasts. Jamka have dazzled us before with their speedy and off-kiltre rhythms, but what I like so far about Pari Passu is its general slowness, many tracks emerging as a turgid electronic dirge and stumbling out of the tarpits like a new-born sabretooth tiger with tusks made of lava and whose rear end happens to be that of a young woolly mammoth. The title’s meaning, helpfully translated on the back cover, is “with an equal step”, and although Monika Subrtova and Daniel Korda are totally in step with each other as musicians, successfully anticipating each other’s every thought and move, what emerges is something that you or I would struggle to engage with at a walking pace, let alone when wearing our dancing shoes. One personal favourite here is the six-minute ‘Sland’, a grisly excursion from one end of an oil can to the other, punctuated with a deliciously clunky and racketty metal-drum beat that barely passes muster as a backbeat. You may also enjoy ‘Zyren’ where the dense and thick rhythm tracks form a tasty counterpoint to the more subtle toplines, which veer from wispy atmospheres to the drones of soaring helicopters on the attack. ‘Dashla’ shows the duo have lost none of their élan when it comes to piling up renegade elements on the mixing desk of chaos until the situation is on the verge of teetering out of control, and there’s even some melodic piano patches and synth tones drifting through the final track ‘Elma’, but even with this attempt at a John Carpenter soundtrack the album’s overall caste of gloom and anxiety is not dissipated by one iota. As cover photo demonstrates, this is an album that can induce a howl of anguish while at the same time it delivers a punch as solidly as Monika’s fist.

Poor Cows

Surabhi (HYPNAGOGIA GO02) is a recent release by Merzbow which continues his ongoing animal welfare theme by concentrating on the plight of the hundreds of abandoned cows in Vrindavan. These hapless bovines are subject to disease and famine along with the danger of cattle rustlers intent on leading them to an illegal slaughterhouse, and the organisation Care For Cows (who provided the photos for this album) offer a range of ways for you to contribute financially to their cause, adopting a cow for life or just feeding it for one day, or undertaking a bull scholarship for $30. Is it me or is Merzbow getting more melodic and vaguely “kosmische” these days? The opening track ‘Vanamali and Shravan’ is a positive feast of layered electronic tones which, once you can hear your way through the stampede of digital hooves, is packed with one thousand beautiful melodies all exploding at once like fireworks of multiple colours. ‘Balaram’ is decidedly more subdued, and sumptuous glorpy Theremin-like lines shoot their way through an atmospheric pulsation zone along with the slightly more familiar bursts of Merzbow’s sandpapery rasps. ‘Yamuna Snan’ is even more complex, stereophonic explosions and ultra-processed digital water splashes all colliding in a glorious melange of unstoppable tidal-wave proportions. The merciless pounding rhythms and pulses which used to be one of Merzbow’s signature sounds has evolved into something much more ambiguous and benign, and results in music which is no less powerful but somehow more approachable and easier to listen to.

January 6, 2012

Up they rise

Born on the Veyou

Last heard from the American sound artist Nick Hoffman in September with a couple of very subdued and inexplicable releases, still amazing the crowned heads of Europe to this day. Here he is again as one half of Swamp Hag, teaming up with Stephen Hilliger to create the half-hour CDR Veyou (PILGRIM TALK PT14). The cover drawing is also by Nick. With its EC Comics styled lettering, and its melted distorted face of a forked-tongued and fanged demon with rheumy eyes, this artwork makes me think I’m going to get a blistering noise assault the second I press the play button. Instead, Veyou turns out to be a beguiling session of what the creators call “Basementronics”, which I assume means a form of live electronic music made in a dark and dank cellar, hopefully by candlelight for added atmospherics. This lumpy non-musical sludge seems to ooze out of the pores of gigantic grey ogres rather than resemble anything produced by mankind, and you almost feel you could take a bath in it (although it would be a very slimy and sticky bathing experience, admittedly). Quite some way from the brutal Wolf Eyes school, this brand of low-key noise dispenses with the rock-music elements such as aggression and loud volume, and it just grumbles away very mysteriously, manufacturing its own peculiar brand of uglification. Photograph of set-up on the inside (if indeed that’s what it is) suggests that the process involves sending and repeating signals through mixing desks and pedals, generating mutations as needed.

Recorded at Ana’s House

Ana Foutel and Federico Barabino are two Argentinian musicians, who made Piano + No-Input Mixer (ILSE 15) in Buenos Aires in 2010. Two long improvisations sees the duo experimenting cautiously with long tones of subdued abstract feedback and some tentative piano trills. Foutel the pianist has a background with playing the “difficult” greats such as Cage and Webern, while Barabino is an improviser and adherent to the “deep listening” method, perhaps bringing intuitive aspects to this work. A few too many lulls in the day’s work for my liking, but when they make the right combinations the music does have quite an “enchanted” feeling, like the music you would hear when captured by elves or other supernatural beings.

Traditional Spirituals

A superb piece of improvisation from the Japanese underground is Swing Low, Sweet Silence (AN’ARCHIVES AN’03), a 2004 live performance by the shrieking genius vocalist Junko (often heard with Hijokaidan) and the saxophonist Masayoshi Urabe, the intense performer whose work is usually described using words like “physical” and “uncompromising”. This document may start off pretty subdued, but after five minutes the duo are worked up into full operational mode and the pressure never lets up thereafter. You have only to listen to this harrowing sound for a few moments to gain a vivid sense of their writhing bodies, twisting themselves into contortions to produce this intensely difficult and challenging noise. Not that it’s particularly loud – after all, it is acoustic music – it’s just very uncomfortable to listen to. This is not the musical meeting of minds you might get from putting Phil Minton with Peter Brötzmann, it’s more like an exorcism, a painful and cathartic event where both these players seem to be turning themselves inside-out to release and confront many fearsome inner demons. The natural acoustics of the venue add a strident echo to the sound, casting all in a lurid light, and the whole thing is like the aural document of a gruesome autopsy or torture session. The longest 28 minutes of your life! It was recorded at the SuperDeluxe venue as part of a 20th anniversary of PSF and Alchemy, two important Japanese record labels who have become significant repositories of the Japan Underground in music, and whose executives must have wondered if they could possibly manage another 20 years at this level of intensity as they sat there enduring this unpleasant screech, reaching for the chequebook with one hand and the aspirin bottle with the other. Michel Henritzi assisted with the release, and his poetic description can be read on the An’Archives blog, his effusive prose charged with phrases such as “the screamer and the whisperer sail away toward the worst, expelling from their bodies shredded songs whereon our senses shatter.” Beautiful silkscreen presentation in pink, black and silver made by Siwa Records using artwork by the label, 300 copies only.

Death of a thousand edits

Also worthy of the epithet “intense” is Death Over China (TOPHETH PROPHET TP024 / SILKEN TOFU STX.19), an ambitious artistic statement realised in sound and images from Anemone Tube. Anemone Tube is a latterday Industrial noise musician active in Germany since 1996, and he has collaborated or performed with Shift, Sudden Infant, Christian Renou, and William Bennett of Whitehouse, among others. This release is packaged in a luxurious fold-out card device decorated with a gallery of the creator’s photographs from his trip to China, along with some archival photo material including the notorious Leng Tch’e photographs from 1905, and verses of grim poetry about “Black Death” also penned by Anemone Tube. I’d be tempted to align this with many other noise records that push the “apocalypse culture” buttons, but Anemone Tube’s distinctive sound-art here is dramatic and powerful and very creative too. Apparently it’s all made up of field recordings from his trips to Nanjing and Shanghai, and synths are only used on a couple of tracks; he builds up suffocating walls by making numerous loops and layers from his materials, piling it on relentlessly until the effect is overwhelming. Yes, the atmospheres he builds can be as menacing as that of any given “transgressive” music made after 1979, but I sense there is also something quite complex and unknowable taking place here, as though he had managed to capture the darker spirit of contemporary China in his tapes like spirit photographs, and is bringing that darkness to the surface through his layering, looping and editing. I’m not advocating that all field recording work ought to emulate this approach, but it is a very unusual and effective method. It works particularly well on tracks 2 and 3 which are spectacularly chaotic, reflecting urban sprawl as a hideous nightmare and depicting a modern Hell worthy of Bosch. But ‘Brooding Haze’ has a terrifying air of menace constructed mainly from sounds of the wind, and ‘The Announcement’ allows some audible English phrases to bubble to the top of its seething cauldron of churning loops; we hear a voice repeating “there is life, there is hope”, a sentiment which is completely at odds with the overall pessimism and uncertainty of this track (and indeed the entire release). An exceptionally strong and unsettling work.

The Sound Projector Radio Show Friday 4th May 2012