Extreme Noise Terrors
- Issue #129 (November '94) | Essays
- By: David Ilic | Featuring: Boredoms, Otomo Yoshihide
- Printable version
From the smash-and-grab cut-ups of The Boredoms and Otomo Yoshihide to the psychedelic excesses of YBO2 and Ruins, the Japanese underground is a place of strange views and exotic intensities. David Ilic provides a consumer's guide
The idea of handing over a £20 note for one CD and not getting any change used to be unthinkable. But for the last few years it has been my reality. Pursuing the Occidental's Orient via the Japanese import racks at Rough Trade's London shops (which still are the only retailers to give a damn about the more adventurous record buyer) is a bank-breaking business; and unless you're familiar with kanjii, Japan's complex form of script, you might not even be sure who or what is on some of the records you're buying. So why do it? And why this burning fascination?
Maybe it comes down to a sense of alien wonder. In the years following the end of the Second World War, Japan marginalised itself, then, as its economy grew, began greedily sucking up all manner of influences from outside like it had just broken a long fast. This apparent dichotomy gives a strange perspective to music which sandwiches old and new in a way that is uniquely provocative. Never mind that our own current crop of homegrown rock music is shored up by predictability; poke around in the psychedelic portals of the PSF label's series of Tokyo Flashback compilations (Volumes 2 and 3, PSFD 24 and 34 respectively, are still in print) and the sense of familiarity will floor you.
Take White Heaven, a group who could pass for a cross between Buffalo Springfield with transistors and The Grateful Dead; or the elegant psych-into-Progressive workouts of Ghost. And yet there's also room for Keiji Haino's magnificent Fushitsusha whose searing yet sublime forays into atonal hard rock push feedback into free space in a way that US and UK psychedelics never dreamt of.
*
The developing interest here in the music of Japan is a world away from the continuing appetite for World Musics. Today's generation of technocrats may have rekindled interest in the formerly celebrated Yellow Magic Orchestra, but the rest of the Electro underground spearheaded by Sakamoto and co was already past its sell-by date when World Music campaigners were spiriting far flung beats on to British dancefloors.
In the UK, World Music, in spite of ethnomusicologists' best intentions, is most often served up as aural fodder, pre-washed and packed with its cultural husks removed. In contrast, the modernity of Japan, together with the country's First world credentials, feed our fascination with a culture we don't understand, even if the number of Japanese products in our homes make us think otherwise.
Maybe it comes down to a sense of alien wonder. In the years following the end of the Second World War, Japan marginalised itself, then, as its economy grew, began greedily sucking up all manner of influences from outside like it had just broken a long fast. This apparent dichotomy gives a strange perspective to music which sandwiches old and new in a way that is uniquely provocative. Never mind that our own current crop of homegrown rock music is shored up by predictability; poke around in the psychedelic portals of the PSF label's series of Tokyo Flashback compilations (Volumes 2 and 3, PSFD 24 and 34 respectively, are still in print) and the sense of familiarity will floor you.
Take White Heaven, a group who could pass for a cross between Buffalo Springfield with transistors and The Grateful Dead; or the elegant psych-into-Progressive workouts of Ghost. And yet there's also room for Keiji Haino's magnificent Fushitsusha whose searing yet sublime forays into atonal hard rock push feedback into free space in a way that US and UK psychedelics never dreamt of.
*
The developing interest here in the music of Japan is a world away from the continuing appetite for World Musics. Today's generation of technocrats may have rekindled interest in the formerly celebrated Yellow Magic Orchestra, but the rest of the Electro underground spearheaded by Sakamoto and co was already past its sell-by date when World Music campaigners were spiriting far flung beats on to British dancefloors.
In the UK, World Music, in spite of ethnomusicologists' best intentions, is most often served up as aural fodder, pre-washed and packed with its cultural husks removed. In contrast, the modernity of Japan, together with the country's First world credentials, feed our fascination with a culture we don't understand, even if the number of Japanese products in our homes make us think otherwise.