London
17 March 2026
Keiji Haino has a pretty ridiculous back catalogue at this point and he’s been documented playing all sorts of instruments. He’s probably best-known for the excruciating guitar and vocals of Fushitsusha, but we’ve had all sorts of things over the years — theremin things, drum loops, flute-adjacent instruments… I think I have three hurdy-gurdy records of his.
I’d argue that one of the things that keeps him away from being ‘noise’, when he’s amplified, is that he’s always keen to keep a sense of rhythm. It’s not necessarily groovy and you’d struggle to dance, but there’s always a very idiomatic sense that he’s keeping his own rhythms. And despite the austerity of his solo percussion works, I’d probably put his percussion work just second to his electric guitar excoriations. Tonight’s show at the fancy-pants fancy London fancy gallery is a solo percussion works largely based around the polygonola, an instrument that’s “based on the second dimensional vibration theory” according to blurbs. I’ve not found anything succinct to explain second dimensional vibration theory, but to my mind they’re wee hammered tuned metal percussion things that produce a really interesting sound — seemingly responding with loads of overtones, especially high ones, and incredibly expressive.Haino starts the gig clattering around on the floor, scraping metal percussion to create whispy white noise. The venue being such as it is I can’t see much of what he’s doing, which means that when he turns on a heater to warm up some tambourine skins, I thought he was playing a hoover. In a sense, he wasn’t not playing a hoover. I’ve seen him a few times and one of his favourite tricks with tuned percussion is to attack the note and then fling the object around — the sound from the object then altering with the velocity of his swinging. The polygonolas respond in kind when he does this, forming this otherworldly dance ritual.
There’s quite a few references that sprung to mind while I was watching — the likes of Iannis Xenakis‘s Pleiades, where it was punishing and asymetric; Alvin Lucier‘s Silver Streetcar when a steady pulse has all its overtones dragged out; some improvised gamelan when the velocity ascends and the notes are all clear. Possibly also something like Z’ev where the textures take over. But the thing with Haino is that ideas rarely take hold for too long. He’s never as discontinuous as free improvisation, but there’s rarely a sense that an idea is allowed to outstay its welcome. Sometimes the contrasts are wild, and the audience respond with careful attention (or they at least shut up while he was playing). You’ve probably gathered by now that Haino is ‘a bit of a thing’ for me, but I have to say that this is probably his strongest showing since Fushitsusha in St John at Hackney church in 2012; it’s certainly singular and perhaps dry, but it’s equally a showing of some breathtaking capacity for keeping the listener on their toes. He closes with some leaping and clattering that belie his seventy-three years — Keiji Haino’s not ready to stop hitting shit really fucking hard and long may he continue.-Words: Kev Nickells-
-Pictures: Agata Urbaniak-
