Les Rallizes Dénudés. Tachikawa. December 17, 1976.

Despite LRD's explosive aural and visual assault on their audiences, Takashi Mizutani was never a flashy singer, usually sounding instead like a lost spirit on the verge of revelation, wandering in an existential forest of his own making. This must have been a happier night, as White Waking is positively poppish, and even the trademark, brain-scouring levels of white noise are uplifting. There's still plenty of menace, like the way the bass stalks Mizutani throughout Flames of Ice, but even there the crackling guitar lead eventually outstrips it, swelling with light and enveloping the once dark forest.

I've written before about the nihilism of LRD's music, but my point is that it's a benevolent indifference. They would never do anything so gauche as to rock you like a hurricane. Similies are for chickenshits. They are a hurricane, but not metaphorically, either. The kind that sees you leaving with a mic stand blown through your cranium (OK, that may not be benevolent. But you buys your ticket, you takes your chances). Thy're as close as you can get to safely watching elemental catastrophe as performance art.

Like the vast majority of the Rallizes' output, this is of bootleg quality (although they may be the only band for whom that works in their favor), but whoever recorded it must have been sitting in the auditorium's sweet spot. The separation is great, and you can tell the instruments apart for once. It's almost like listening to them in widescreen. The guitar comes through really well, and you can actually hear the notes Mizutani's picking out (I particularly like the spirited run towards the end of Angel). And whoever was playing bass for them that night really knew how to lay that shit down, which is a whole new dimension for them.

The vertiginous, see-sawing Heat Wave—powered by a surprisingly confident, stomping bass line and some great rock drumming—finds Mizutani leading them all to fantastic new heights, thundering along like a herd of naked biker hippies, straight into the sun. It's one of his all-time best moments—the sort of thing that raises the hair on the back of your neck and makes your heart catch in your throat. You know without a doubt that this was one of those songs that took over a crowd, instantly transforming them into a solid, beastly, interconnected mass of head-banging, transcendent abandon. It'll make your soul explode.

Dream finishes things off by melting back into a tense, worrisome, brittle space. A dream askew with shadows and twigs. The forest closes back in, and the white light streamers slither and shake back into the darkness. It's an inversion of where they started with White Waking and the perfect end to the night.

Tachikawa

Acid Mother's Temple & The Cosmic Inferno. Iao Chant From the Cosmic Inferno.

For some unfathomable reason, iTunes lists this as being Responding to the Treasures of Faith from the album, Staying On the Road to God. That may not be too far off. Kawabata Makoto has often paid tribute to his musical heroes and fellow travelers by adapting their music to his own transcendental wavelengths. He’s built entire albums around Popol Vuh’s Hosianna Mantra and Terry Riley’s In C. Here, he goes a step further, turning Gong's Master Builder into an epic shamanistic journey of heavy-metal astral-projection. It's like the Boredoms' Vision Creation Newsun being possessed by early Hawkwind. Introduced by an unaccompanied chorus of solemn Buddhist chants, the track quickly explodes out of the gate with the furiously head-banging "OM Riff", never stopping to look back for the next fifty-one minutes.

If you're new to the Acids, this might be a relatively safe introduction. Their trademark layering of spacey electronics, rocket powered riffage, and propulsively thunderous drumming is all here, but where they can occasionally wander off into aimless, free-form chaos on record, this comes the closest to capturing their rapturous live sound. On OM, their path to religious ecstasy is pretty well plotted. Although they take the opportunity to travel from space rock through prog, Celtic and Asian folk influences, ambient drone, and full-on psychedelic racket, they never meander. Each section evolves naturally out of the previous one. Oliver Sacks wrote about the way migraines arrive fully formed, but distant. The whole experience is there, but it's like watching it approach from the horizon until it envelopes you. Similarly, the various styles the Acids traverse are all inherent in the preceding sections. They're just drawing them out as they go along.

Recorded in the midst of line-up changes, the band takes the opportunity to sum up their deep history as well as use Gong’s source material to propel them into new territories. Elements of their outer-space freakouts have been stripped down to their essential bits and channeled through the OM Riff’s monster-sized bad-assery, imbuing them with a singular vision and sense of purpose. Kawabata is unquestionably a guitar god, although his usual style has little to do with the specific notes he's playing. It's all about the feel of the song, or more accurately, channeling whatever he's feeling—which is probably something like growing to be 5000 feet tall and reaching through the heavens to grapple with the infinities of atom-smashing, burning star cores of the universe. When he’s really on, he can make you feel it too. By the time the OM Riff crashes in again for the final third of the album, it’s pulled elements of all the preceding movements along in its gravitational wake. This is the true sound of the Cosmic Inferno. Kawabata’s soloing like a maniac, his controls set for the heart of the sun. Higashi Hiroshi’s electronics could be an Aurora Borealis of scintillating scotomas; or just as likely, you’ve gone subterranean, and what you thought were shimmering stars was a wildly writhing mass of glowworms. And Shimura Koji and Okano Futoshi power the entire trip with their dual, hammer-of-the-gods drumming.

This is pure, glorious, brain-melting exhilaration all the way, and easily one of the top five albums in the Acid’s sprawling Temple.


Here's the original version by Gong. Now imagine that stretched out for nearly an hour and played by Dr. Manhattan on an LSD freakout.


Iao Chant

Les Rallizes Dénudés. Heavier Than a Death In the Family.

Haters might say they only know one song, but Jesus Fucking Christ, what a song. They certainly play it like it's the only one anyone will ever need to know. Mizutani discovered how to mainline a migraine and make it a mystical experience. For a band that primarily exists as legend, it's a relief (and a wonder) to discover that they might be the only group that live up to (and exceed) the rumors.

The guitar is a thunderhead of coruscating, liquid white light; loud like nature. Mizutani's cool, detached vocals are so drenched and buried in reverb, they sound like they're being reflected off a thousand smashed mirrorballs. The bass and drums keep everything locked down by playing sub-genius to the guitar's solarized brilliance. Like—if a bass made only one noise that signified itself, if it were its own symbol on a one to one scale and whacking it with your hand made it say its own name; or hitting a drum made it say "drum" in its own hammer-stupid simplicity (not even like having found the primal groove or universal beat; just a satisfyingly, idiot simple thump). It's the Louie Louie oversoul.

Heavy

V/A. Oz Days Live.

The second disk is really the only reason anybody ever looks for this album, as it houses both The Taj Mahal Travellers and Les Rallizes Denudes in what must have been one massive mind-fuck of an evening. But I’ve written about them elsewhere, so I’ll tell you about the real reason you need this: Dr. Acid Seven.

Side one is clogged with otherwise completely forgettable folk singers and Group Sounds bands that may have known how to dress like rock ’n’ rollers, but didn’t have the first clue how to play it. Dr. Acid Seven easily bests them all on Track 4, a thick slab of biker rock that singlehandedly makes the case for the importance of hard drugs in music. This guy makes the whole record worthwhile. Especially on Track 5’s sublimely good-natured drunken sing along. It’s a lanky, strutting song (with kazoo solo!) that happily ambles on down the road feelin’ great, while Dr. Acid Seven (who I imagine as a stilt-legged version of R. Crumb’s “keep on truckin’” guy) gets progressively wilder and sillier with his vocal acrobatics. It would be worth learning Japanese just to be able to properly sing along with this. Proving he can do “pretty” just as well as anybody else, he gets serious on track seven, going back to his futen days with a beautiful, delicate Japanese folk number. This is apparently his only legitimate appearance on record. Unlike the tidal wave of Les Rallizes Denudes releases, I haven’t been able to find any other bootlegs of him in action, which is a crying shame.

This doesn't sound anything like his set on the record, but it's still a pretty bad-ass clip of Acid Seven, Keiji Haino, Kenny Inoue, Masato Minami, Shime Takahashi, and Takashi Mizutani at Hibiya Yagai Ongakudo, Tokyo, May 1974.

Part 1:


Part 2:


Oz Disc 1
Oz Disc 2

Masahiko Satoh & Soundbreakers. Amalgamation (Kokotsu no Showa Genroku).

As the revolutionary, but already stagnant rock spirit of the 60’s Group Sounds began to fade, The Japanese turned onto the 70’s by reconnecting with its already well established and well respected experimental underground and jazz scenes. The New Rock had emerged—wilder and hairier than ever before—with bands like Foodbrain, Flower Travellin’ Band, and of course Les Rallizes Denudes. Now the stars of that movement joined more avant garde composers for a slew of wildly disparate releases known popularly as “Super Sessions”. Inspired in equal measures by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Frank Zappa, the Super Sessions bands aimed for the ultimate freak-out territory like only hard-core college-educated music-theory nerds can do.

Actually, the origins of Amalgamation are a little more prosaic. A music magazine asked readers to send in essays about the kind of music jazz pianist Masahiko Satoh should make for his next record. He wasn’t that trilled with any of the suggestions, so he and his mates picked two and decided to fudge something in between. The result was far beyond anything anybody else had produced up to that time.

Assembling Detroit hard-bop drummer Louis Hayes, guitarist Kimio Mizutani, and the Wehnne Strings Consort, Satoh led them all through a complex mix of sizzling guitar noise, brutalist horn bursts, and detuned radio static. Satoh himself played three different ring-modulated Rhodes pianos built specially for this session.

Side one is like a musique concrète mash-up of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother and Nick Mason’s side of Umma Gumma crashing headlong into interludes of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and a caffeine-frazzled horn section.

Side two is more organically built, starting out with traditional Japanese instruments that are gradually overtaken by chopped up jazz drumming and a squonking, froopling horn. Somewhere along the way, the drumming gets more tribal and the horn becomes a flute. Natives are performing a snake charming dance in the dry grass, but it summons an angelic voiced woman pop-scatting a Popal Vuh lullaby to A Whiter Shade of Pale’s pipe organ instead.

As avant garde as the whole proceedings were at the time, it also strikes me as the type of experimentalism that would have gone over well with the upwardly culturally mobile Americans who subscribed to the Harvard Classics’ Twenty-Foot Shelf of Great Books back in the 50’s. I can easily see it having inspired one of the more visually abstract portions of Fantasia—something that today’s elites would think of as solidly middlebrow despite the revolutionary intentions that created it. There’s nothing to be afraid of, but a lot to be gained if you dig it.

Amalgamation

Masahiko Satoh website

Doddodo. Limited Express & Marousa Splits.

She's a dada-core glee-club, here to give your hard drive a new haircut.

Splits

Official site (in Japanese)

Doddodo on myspace

Doddodo. Donomichi.

Like a bag full of overly caffeinated ninja-weasels running riot over a roomfull of broken casios, slicing and splicing thirty years of hip-hop/electro/noise, Doddodo has no use for genres or conventions. Public Enemy, Austrian waltzes, Add N to (x), harpsichords, random sound samples, and cartoon music get gleefully fed into a plunderphonic blender until they come out sounding like the Sound of Music fed through "Willy Wonka's Nightmare Emporium and Pants Shittery".



Only....a lot more fun.

Donomichi

Official site (in Japanese)

Doddodo on myspace

Doddodo. Sample Bitch Story.

I normally don't repost stuff I just found on other blogs (h/t Autofunction), but this was so insanely good, I couldn't resist it. Once again, using nothing but a sampler and a casio keyboard, some Japanese kid manages to make an album so immensely fun that it obliterates everything else. Celtic flutes, calliope music, old-school record scratching, j-pop, rap, and video game music gets spliced and layered overtop a frenzy of stellar break beats that might be what the Boredoms would have sounded like if they'd been around in early 80's New York during the mutant disco/rap/no wave scene.

I've tracked down a couple more albums that I'll be posting in the coming days.

Sample Bitch

Official site (in Japanese)

Doddodo on myspace

Boris. Smile. Live at Wolf Creek.

Back when I was in film school—a thousand years ago—the reigning theory was that Godzilla represented a nuclear-age version of divine punishment. Japan's shame for a "dishonorable" sneak-attack on Pearl Harbor and ultimately for losing the war is paid for through Godzilla—who is both created by the bombs dropped on the island and periodically revisits that destruction upon them. Of course, Godzilla is also seen as a tragic hero by the Japanese, something that doesn't make sense if he is only there to punish them. It's likely that he doubles as a figure for Japan's post-war feelings of powerlessness—feelings that it cannot act out turned inwards towards themselves.

As a band that sounds like they may have been breast-fed by Black Sabbath, Boris have always walked with a dinosaur sized footprint, steadily redefining what it means to be heavy on countless records and eps. Veering from gravity-warping, sludge-tastic drone to their trademark garage-rock, psych-metal sound (all motorcycle chains and black exhaust), Boris have their monster heart set on tearing the knobs off the amplifiers and sonically pummeling you into gooey rapture. Captured live, they tear hell for leather through an album full of hook-laden, riff-shredding, head-banging, devil-horns-hands-in-the-air, rawk. Absolutely brutal takes on Buzz-In and Pink are larded with atmospheric drones and a gorgeous, fragile rendition of Rainbow.

But then...oh god...then they got to the final two tracks—a transcendent, near-thirty-minute exploration of [ ] preceded by You Were Holding an Umbrella—that positively crush everything that came before them. I don't know what Umbrella is actually about, but if Godzilla himself had composed a song to capture the interplay between his heartbreaking sorrow at having to destroy his homeland and his radiant pride in restoring its honor by being an agent of divine retribution and national seppuku, he couldn't have done a better job. This song could raze entire cities.

It's a double album, but the second disk was too big to fit into one download, so I had to split it up.

Disc 1
Disc 2.1
Disc 2.2

Boris' official website

Boris on myspace

Leningrad Blues Machine. Leningrad Blues Machine.

I don't know what it is about Japan, but for the last two decades or so they've turned out more atomic-monster sized rawk bands than anywhere else on the planet. Add Leningrad Blues Machine (not from Leningrad, not really playing the blues, probably lying about being machines) to the list. Although lead guitarist and vocalist Tabata Mitsuru has been in Acid Mothers Temple, The Boredoms, and Zeni Geva, Leningrad Blues Machine dabbles in none of their abstract, scribbly freak-outs and instead offers up righteous slabs of "traditional", brain-melting, psychedelic awesomeness.

Roman Castavet makes me think of Red Krayola and Boris covering something from Echo and the Bunnymen's Crocodiles. Woodstock Monster sounds like L7's Pretend We're Dead and Nirvana's Aneurysm holding hands and headbanging at a Hawkwind concert (even weirder, considering this was recorded in '88). And Moon & Milk Bar builds into something resembling one of the Butthole Surfer's old brown-acid instrumentals (In fact, several of their songs display the type of psych-damaged heaviosity that the Flaming Lips burned through on Hear It Is, and both records reference Eddie Cochran's Summertime Blues).

They have at least two more albums, although I haven't had any luck finding anyplace that sells them outside of Japan. If you know where to get them, leave a note in the comments, please.

Leningrad Blues Machine

Leningrad Blues Machine website (in Japanese)

Les Rallizes Dénudés. '77 Live.

When the end of the world comes, it will be a relief. Sister Ray prepared the way, and now Les Rallizes Dénudés have given us a glimpse of the disintegration awaiting us in the universe's sub-atomic foam, and there is nothing to fear. There is no afterlife, and no one is being punished. Creation and destruction are merely different verses of the same song.

Oh holy fuck...Guitars are slowly burning...It is the ecstasy of noise that prevails...

This is the ur-sound; the abyss and pinnacle of rock. It seems like it has been playing forever, but this is undoubtedly their finest moment. Every song on here feels like the GREATEST SONG EVER, and then you hear the next one and it's even better.

Disc one welcomes you gently, building slowly from Enter the Mirror's sparse guitar carefully filling the empty space, gradually joined by a wandering base and minimal drumming as Mizutani ratchets up the tension and squall. it's followed by their most "song-like" moment, Night of the Assassin. This song alone could power all the primordial engines at the Earth's core. Yes, they are playing the bass line from Little Peggy March's 1963 hit, I Will Follow Him. No, I don't know why. It's hypnotic in the extreme, and it will keep you sane when Mizutani rips off the veil of reality with the most painfully exhilarating guitar shriek-out ever recorded.

By disc two, you are subsumed in a massive sea of feedback; an infinity of noise and obliteration. The peace that surpasses understanding is pure annihilation. This is the holy grail of sound.

Disc 1
Disc 2

Yamamoto Seiichi & Acid Mothers Temple. Giant Psychedelia.

Yesterday, the end of two weeks of rain announced the first day of Fall: frisky breezes, cool sunlight, deepening shadows stretching away from our bodies like pulled taffy. All I wanted to do was lay in the grass with my girlfriend and feel the pink, pulsating glow of the sun through closed eyelids. It was this sort of weather—crackling with the energy of possibilities—that, back in high school, always had me throwing open my windows and blissing out to Wish You Were Here; the music and cold air raising goose pimples on my skin.

This album would be suitable for either activity. Hooking up with former Boredoms (and Rovo, and Omoide Hatoba) guitarist, Yamamoto Seiichi, the Acids leave (most) of their usual frenetic scribbling behind and aim instead for pure, gorgeous, stardust, hippie nirvana. And god damn do they hit it. Kawabata and Yamamoto meld the acid drenched DNA of Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Dark Star, and their own Pink Lady Lemonade into spiraling, mutating, transcendent comet tails of sound, forever rising into the stratosphere, pushed upwards on gusts of nimble fretboard runs—the necks of their guitars veritable stairways to the heavens.


Disc 1
Disc 2

Taj Mahal Travellers. August 1974.

Completing our troika of Taj Mahal Travellers posts.

August Disc 1
August Disc 2

Taj Mahal Travellers. Live Stockholm July 1971.

It's more avant-garde noise from nature's drone gods. When you have all of eternity, why not spend two hours singing your first note?

I think this was the last of the Traveller's albums to be released, although it was actually the first to be recorded. Paradoxically, they sound more relaxed and assured here then they do on their second album, merging their scrape and rumble to such an extent that no one instrument or member ever takes over, allowing you to float along, caught in their massive undertow.

July Disc 1
July Disc 2

Taj Mahal Travellers. July 15, 1972.

UPDATE: I just discovered the download link was redirecting back to this page. That's been corrected. Sorry about that.

Speaking of the Taj Mahal Travellers, here's their second album. I learned of them through Julian Cope's excellent book, Japrocksampler: How the Post-War Japanese Blew Their Minds on Rock 'n' Roll.I'm always amazed to discover that music like this exists, much less was made so long ago. It's psychedelic in the purest sense of being capable of transporting your mind to a completely new and unknown space. It's more landscape than music (one member's instrument was "tree branch"), complete with its own peculiar, unnerving weather.

I've become more and more attracted to music that disorients me from where I am and what I'm doing. There's nothing to hum along to here, the singer has a voice like a rough-hewn wooden bowl (his few vocals are deep, rumbling throat calls), there's no melody or trajectory to anything they're doing, and most of the music is so heavily treated it's hard to tell (or believe) that a human being has mapped out that noise on a known instrument. This (thankfully) isn't even free jazz. It was something completely unique to these guys at the particular time it was recorded. Despite the processing, it remains purely organic. Despite its amorphousness, it's never anything less than compelling.

July 15

Spoozys. Astral Astronauts.

I'm sure there are lots of genres and traditions in Japanese music that I would never pick up on, not being a native listener. Similarly, I often get the feeling that, to non-western ears, Led Zeppelin, The B-52's, Add N to X, Duane Eddy, and Devo could all be in the same band. That band would be the Spoozys. You'd think that would suck, but it's actually glitter-coated-cotton-candy-disco-balls-in-a-laser-blender glee.

Astral

Spoozys website (in Japanese)

High Rise. Psychedelic Speed Freaks '84-'85.

We were fortunate enough to catch Acid Mothers Temple on their last swing through the States, and they put on what was unquestionably the greatest concert I have ever seen. Like, so good I very nearly quit my job to follow them around on tour, à la the Dead. They came on around midnight and played for two solid hours. I don't know how they have the stamina; I was exhausted just watching them. Most of their albums have a wonderful scribbly quality to them, but live, they laid on a huge slab of monster-sized, head-banging acid rock.

Tsuyama Atsushi functioned as sort of the bandleader, keeping the band grounded with his masterful bass playing while Kawabata Makoto plugged his guitar into a super nova and exploded all over the stage. Tsuyama also has an incredible voice. A lot of what he sang sounded like a cross between throat singing, a human didgeridoo, and maybe Yma Sumac. Songs veered from white-light scrambles, to heavy riffing, to something that I can only describe as medieval doo-wop (the briefly acapella La Li Lo). I could swear that they even played a tiny snatch of Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother.

I don't know if "jamming" even applies to what they do. They finished with Pink Lady Lemonade, which frankly I could have listened to all night. I don't think there's any such thing as too long of a song for these guys. I was utterly blown away, uplifted, and transformed.

High-Rise could be Acid Mothers Temple's grandfathers (Spiritually, at least. Astonishingly, they're barely fifteen years older). I really don't need to say much more than that Psychedelic Speed Freaks is the most succinct, accurate and truthful description a band has ever given itself. Like Kawabata, they reach for zen nirvana through epic geysers of guitar noise played at supersonic speed; flinging out notes like they were using them to smash atoms in a cloud chamber.

Freaks

High-Rise on myspace

Les Rallizes Dénudés. Electric Pure Land.

Be forewarned, Les Rallizes Dénudés are not a band. They're the sound at the end of the world. A real nihilist assault group. Once you hear this, you will become obsessed with tracking down everything you can find, even though feedback shaman Takashi Mizutani has been re-recording the same handful of songs for thirty years. It won't matter. You'll need another fix.

Electric Pure Land

Les Rallizes Dénudés wikipedia entry

Unofficial Les Rallizes Dénudés website (in Japanese)