So far we’ve seen a lot of hard-hitting names — Keiji Haino with Peter Brötzmann, Masayuki Takayanagi, High Rise (and associated side projects of Asahito Nanjo). We’ve also seen the pitifully overlooked — I’m mildly put out that no one told me about Shizuka until the reissue a year or two ago. Probably my favourite re-issue of the last however long.
Hopefully having garnered some interest from the Japanese psych-ly inclined hordes, Black Editions are here probably more about the business of shedding light on the weirder and less legendary pieces. A lot to get through so, if you’ll excuse my brusqueness.Bibliotecha Hermetica – One
This was originally released with no real details about who played on it — and it looks like not much has changed on that front; Asahito gets a producer’s credit, but the music is a cloud of mystery.
There’s a lot about this that has the smell of those cultic releases from improvisatory weirdos — a soupçon of No-Neck Blues Band, a dollop of percussion-botherers like Metgumbnerbone. Nominally you could point to something like Art Ensemble Of Chicago, but that doesn’t quite sit right — I wouldn’t say this is un-musical, but it’s certainly got an opaque textural drift that doesn’t suggest its players are of the jazz ilk.
Instruments prick the bubble of clattering and percussion episodically — there’s definitely a violin wheezing in there and some flute-like tones manifest into the mist. Tape is probably the ideal format for this though — those blurry fidelities keep the somewhat magic(k)al impression that this could be a séance as much as a musical event. The second track (“Magic Squares”), with some low-end gurgling that never quite resolves into clarity, brings to mind a CD of Buddhist chants; much more fuzzy and bleak than that, more like found sound in some agonised bardo. It’s unfortunate that the only ‘name’ on this is Asahito, because it’d be a shame if this fell by the wayside. There are, of course, a load of ’80s and ’90s tape releases of this nature, but there’s a sense of restraint and bleakness about this that pushes it to the uppermore reaches of the enigmatic world of weird collective improvisations.Go Hirano – The Habit
A new name on me, but apparently a relatively known figure in the Japanese underground / PSF records realm. If the previous was opaque in its musicality, this is a lot clearer.
Go Hirano centres his pieces around a piano — finely recorded, often with a sustain pedal down, and such that little details of the room eke in, creaks and the thuds of pedals moving. For a few tracks these are accentuated with other instruments — the reedy pianica (something a bit like a mouth organ, as I hear it) doing some lovely work.
By and large these are pretty simple pianistic melodies and chords. But there’s a gentleness and a care to these pieces — unhurried, in their own time, and often sounding close to the composed side of improvisatory. Go has a lovely touch on the piano — second track “Dawning” illustrates some very deftly gentle touches that allow for the piano sound like multiple voices.
I think this maybe easier to place in genre than the previous also — something like “Ripplemark” here reminds me of the kind of ‘neo-classical’ pianism of someone like Ludovico Einaudi. Though I’m uncomfortable with that — Go’s simplicity isn’t of the order of paralysingly so, and there’s enough actual deftness and harmonic turns, not to mention the intimacy of the recordings, to keep this at a distance from minimalism-by-numbers. It’s pleasant music, and it deserves to have a wider audience, but it’s by no means lacking in subtlety and touch. I think also, contra-minimalism, these are fully-realised experiments — “It Will Be Filled With Birds Singing Someday” is like some lost acoustic Kraftwerk number (with a wee synth, n’est pas). A simple melody and plenty of sustain, but enough of a variegated approach to keep this in the realm of gentle but never facile.I guess the oddity of this record is that you’d imagine it’d appeal to fans of minimalism or ’90s AFX ambient. And yet I don’t think people are jumping up and down for it. A shame, as The Habit deserves to be better-known.
Rotting Telepathies – Rotting Tapes II
If there was such a thing as a typical PSF band, it might be this. Nanjo Asahito features on bass, of course. It follows, perhaps, the Les Rallizes Dénudés formula of persistent rhythm section and guitar / vocals left to make a lot of space elsewhere. Though also it’s not a million miles away from a lot of post-Velvet Underground rock groups like Plastic People Of The Universe or UK post-punk rackets like Swell Maps.
Unlike a lot of the kind of post-punk that one might compare this to, it goes on for a long time — this is a live performance apparently, which means two grinding songs of cirxca twenty minutes apiece. Not an inch of krautrock about it. Actually, having mentioned HIM Mark E Smith, perhaps I might draw comparison with Slags, Slates, Etc. by The Fall — abrasive and long outstaying its welcome, in the best possible way. Only a year between them (Slates was ’81), so it seems unlikely that they’d have got The Fall in Japan by then (especially as Les Rallizes Dénudés are much closer geographically).
It’s an odd one inasmuch as there’s plenty here that turned into careers for other bands — the wave of (non-German) krautrock which decided to be rock bands repeating a riff a lot, the grind of Swans, the riff repetition of post-Earth drone, bits of industrial metal. I don’t think this has the appeal of any of that — it’s too spindly and unhewn — but it feels like it’s a decent enough draft to claim that they intuited a thread in experimental music that made money for other people. It’s definitely groovy but more in the sense of a buckling nauseous vomiting train than what we might usually mean by groovy. Definitely want to stress the interest to Slates-era Fall fans though.White Heaven – Next To Nothing
So White Heaven are, I think, on the better-known side of Black Editions’ reissue bonanza, but I don’t think I’ve ever listened to them properly. A mistake clearly. This is probably the one I wouldn’t have pinned down as particularly related to what I think of as 90s Japanese underground music — there’s a Burt Bacharach cover and the music sounds somewhat like a decent ’90s indie band. Say, if Tindersticks were a mite more lively.
The guitar tone maybe touches on Japanese stylings but also not — “Midsummer Stroll” definitely has repeated lines on all instruments. Apparently Go Hirano also joins us on piano for this record too, a great deal more conventionally than the record above.
There’s something of a volte-face by the time we get to the second side — while the first is something like a lo-ish-fi indie band, with more commercial arrangements, singing in English and clear separation of instrumentation, the second side starts off with a very PSF-friendly version of “The Look Of Love” (Bacharach), with a five-plus-minute overloaded acidic guitar intro into a conventional take, interjected with another big psych-y solo. I guess like a lot of underground bands, this is anomalous inasmuch as there’s no reason this wouldn’t be popular if it could’ve been released a bit later. It feels like something that’d appeal to fans on the weirder borders of indie and there’s plenty here (“Wednesday”) that sounds a lot like Western psych-pop from the ’60s and ’70s. I’m not sure it’s my bag, but it definitely feels like it’s well up a lot of people’s streets in the psych / indie / song world.Nean – Doo Dah Nean
But fret ye not Freqians, we’re back right in the bosom of “what the shit is that?” with this somewhat legendarily obscure and weird release from Nean. Do you like it when women chant and drums don’t seem to stick to a tempo and some weird stuff happens in the background? Then this is the record for you, friend.
The relationship between the two most prominent elements — voice and drums — is not entirely clear. But it equally doesn’t sound like an experiment into what happens if two things are juxtaposed. There’s some relationship; it’s just not clear what it is.
Just to emphasise the madness of the vocals there’s a couple of a capella versions of two songs here. Which show some of the subtlety of the vocal delivery but also sound disconcerting as fuck. Do you need this record? Yes. Because you like weird shit. I don’t know how often I’ll listen to it, but I suspect it’ll sit next to The Shaggs and The Conet Project in the vaults, ready to slip out when someone’s over for food so I can say “Oh listen to this weird shit”. I don’t think recommendations come higher.-Kev Nickells-
