Japanese noise: where the sound screams (pt. 1)

— How many Japs do you need to create a wild noise?

— One is enough. But completely crackpot.

What if we told you about the music scene where bands were excavating a whole scenes for their live performances? Or were recording about 30 minutes of sounds from adult films for an album and then releasing it as a record in honor of the deceased Japanese emperor? Or were live-performing with just two participants, where one screams and the other masturbates? This music scene is real and it's Japanese.

In the beginning there was not a word but a noise. And the noise had a name — ジャパノイズ aka japanoise aka japanese noise. And this is the craziest musical genre in the world (which many people, however, are not able to call such). This genre got its origin in the late 70s (you can guess where) in the wake of the rise of the Japanese punk movement and absorbed the "best" features of it. Among the pioneers of the genre are Ultra Bidé, represented by Hide and Jojo Hiroshige who became a pioneers of the Japanese noise scene.

Ultra Bide had a style that could be called free-form punk: the band experimented with genre orientation, their concerts were more like theatrical performances and there was something chaotic in their sound.

Nevertheless, they determined the course of the noise scene in the Kansai region and more importantly, influenced another group of Hiroshige - Rasenkaidan (螺旋階段, "Spiral Staircase").

Hiroshige wanted to diversify his music and make it sound really aggressive and breakthrough. One day he invited a couple of friends to his studio where all of them played a really explosive session, and then one of those guys said: "This is not a spiral staircase but, damn it, an emergency staircase" This is the story of how Hijokaidan (非常階段, "Emergency Staircase") appeared to the world in 1979, and Japanese noise took root.

During their first performances Hijokaidan led her listeners along the path of improvisation full of background noise, dissonant playing and chaotic vocals, so their shows could be called performances rather than concerts. At first there was no question of recording because improvisation is not worth it. As one of the band members later explained: "Noise is a momentary music, it is a live sound, and that's its charm."

Nevertheless, in 1982, Hijokaidan released the first record Zōroku no Kibyō — the same name of the infamous manga by Hideshi Hino, who drew the cover for the album, by the way. The record included excerpts of the band's concert recordings that consisted of expression of the full power of their live performances, and it sounded quite unpredictable and fresh. Listening to this album is the best way to understand how brutal, absurd and harsh the sounds of the japanese noise is. After an opening track (the sounds of a person vomiting before applause) the record turns into an inexorable cacophony of sharp noise from beginning to end that shows what real noise music is.

Hiroshige tried to characterize this music in the book "Hijokaidan: A Story, describing it as "human power": "This is the spirit of abstract music embodied in life, sounds that cannot be conveyed by simple notes. This makes each listening deeply intimate when the perception is sharpened to the limit".

If the band's studio albums were extreme, then their live performances were completely apocalyptic. The seed of punk, which Hijokaidan transferred into an extremely rough form, blew up the doors of the japanese music scene. And over time Hijokaidan's performances reached a real limit: broken lighting equipment, emptied fire extinguishers, garbage and fish scattered around, and band members who urinated right on a stage. In a word, that was a punk as it is. Their existence was excessively noisy and they only raised the stakes with each performance, becoming more and more wild.

"We bought earthworms in a fishing tackle store and mixed them with eggs, milk, squid, salmon roe and raw fish in buckets. During the performance we overturned these buckets on our own heads”, the guitarist of the band told about a particularly memorable concert in 1982. - "There was also a case when one of our dedicated fan (who was a pyromaniac at the same time) was so excited for the performance that he threw a firecracker on our stage".

It is also interesting that the band was featured on the pages of Fool's Mate zine dedicated to Euro-rock and avant-garde music and published by Masami Akita, who will soon become known around the world as Merzbow.

"At that time, I just wanted to write something about industrial for a magazine," Akita recalled in an interview. — "And Hijokaidan, in my opinion, were the most disgusting band in the Kansai rock scene."

However, musicians thought of it only with a smile later.

With their bacchanalia Hijokaidan set the standards of Japanese noise and inspired other cult groups created in the 80s.

And Gerogerigegege is one of such groups. Although they created more traditional noise music in the Hijokaidan style, they are best known for their incredible "covers" of popular Western music. All these covers have the same format, when the frontman shouted out the name of the song with a strong Japanese accent, counting "one, two, three, four!" and the everyone in the band started to make as much noise as they could for 30 seconds or so. The end.

By the way, the name of the project is a combination of the verb ゲロ (gero, "puke"), the noun 下 (gary, "diarrhea"), and the three—fold repetition of the syllable ゲ, which probably means the sound of diarrhea and vomiting occurring simultaneously. Sometimes the band's name was translated by the frontman as "Japanese Ultra Shit Band" ("Japanese super shit band").

A highlight in the extensive Gerogerigegege discography is their record Showa (1989) created as a tribute to the Japanese emperor Showa Hirohito who passed away in January of the same year. The album begins with a minute of orchestral music and then...  turns into 36 minutes of unedited sounds from pornographic films and finally ends with another minute of orchestral music that completed all this buffoonery.

But the wildest thing was a moment, when the band released this record to stores without any warnings about its contents, so there is a very real chance that a few unfortunate grieving monarchists bought it only to find out later what the album really was.

Well, Gerogerigegege had no other way.

So, the golden era of the Japanese had hundreds of collectives and individuals actively making noise in space. The wild, uncut, pulsating cacophony of instruments and mechanisms has become a national treasure of Japan in response to Western sleek music. But he became the symbol of this genre.

Merzbow is the art of chaos and noise. The project, which Masami Akita started in his bedroom, drawing inspiration from the pre-Surrealists poetry of the XIX century and the works of Dadaists and avant-gardists. It is no coincidence that the name of the project refers to the conceptual work of the German avant-gardist Kurt Schwitters "Merzbau" where carefully thought-out interiors deconstructed the buildings in which they were located. Here merz means "art from waste", and merzbau is "a certain room in the process of becoming". It is noteworthy that Akita turned his home into a performance too, filling it with junk art objects.

"I got tired of playing musical instruments, and that's why I went to noise. During my studies at the art school, I read a Marcel Duchamp’s book. It told a lot about Dadaism and Surrealism. Thanks to her, I realized why the Dadaists destroyed all the usual art forms. I decided to destroy all ordinary music. I wanted to compose really surreal music using non-musical methods", - musician recalled.

Despite the fact that Akita was well acquainted with the European avant-garde art history and philosophy, later he tried to consciously separate himself and his work from Dadaism and Surrealism, as well as to abstract himself as much as possible from Western influences spreaded among Japanese musicians of the 80s. And to say that he succeeded is to say nothing because Akita has become one of the most influential figures in the history of japanoise and the underground industry as a whole.

Starting from Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music (by the way, one of the first noise records in pop music) and taking the ideas of dada and surrealism, the young Akita created a new sound. He published it on his own label Lowest Music & Arts and revealed a noisy cassette called Metal Acoustic Music (1981) to the world.

Merzbow sounds like an agonizing industrial building site, convulsing and waltzing, distorted looped record enhanced by non-standard rhythm and electronic samples. In the beginning, Merzbow was less aggressive and more melodic but in the 80s Akita moved away from using standard instruments, and in the late 90s he began to write music on a laptop at all.

There is a question from the audience: "Why should I listen to this?"

The beauty of Merzbow (and all of the noise) is an impossibility of reproducing this music live the same way it sounded the first time. It is only possible to capture it, record it on a recorder and drive it on repeat. That is why noise has become so popular in Japan with its contemplation of passing moments and eternal movement.

In early work, Akita's techniques were quite simple, for example, the method of "material impact" is to receive feedback from the speaker in the form of noise and screeching when the microphone is brought close to the speaker. In this position, any additional sound uttered into the microphone becomes a new wave of noise. Also, like the Dadaists who used the method of "newspaper cuts" in their self-expression, Akita cutted the finished records and glued them together in a new, sometimes chaotic, order.

"Unconscious" is an important concept for understanding Merzbow's music. Akita sees noise as music, freed from symbols and stuck social stereotypes: it is unconscious, archetypal and hidden within us.

Akita performed successfully on his native stage for a long time. But a breakthrough to the West became possible thanks to the first album released outside Japan - Batztoutai with Memorial Gadgets (1993). At the same time, Akita began to actively tour around the world. The Merzbow concert setup from a lot of effects pedals, oscillators, synths and tone generators eventually replaced a laptop with software for sampling and granular synthesis.

In general, talking about live music concerts is like explaining David Lynch films. It's better to see it once.

Each of Merzbow's albums represents a certain milestone in the musician's work. Akita's most monumental work, Pulse Demon (1996), epitomizes noise itself. A vortex of high frequencies falls into the abyss of hum, psychedelia and entropy grow and then pass. Just as abruptly as it started.

The album Venereology (1994) is the musician’s most brutal work, which even fans of grindcore, death metal and other hard genres were hooked on (to master it = eat nails for breakfast).

Aqua Necromancer (1998) is different in that the sound is noticeably influenced by the prog rock that Akita was into in his youth: King Crimson, Gentle Giant, sampled drums wrapped in loops. Extremely interesting work.

And (suddenly) the purest and most weightless work, Door Open at 8 a.m. (1998), (suddenly) reminds us of jazz. Yes, it’s still noise, but in the hubbub of which you can hear absolutely everything.

The pioneers of Japanese noise were extremely provocative and innovative in many ways. Having appeared in Japan almost at the same time, Hijokaidan and Merzbow created two completely different types of noise, not similar to each other. However, it was primarily thanks to them that Japanoise acquired its household name and became recognizable throughout the world; a basis began to appear in it, strikingly distinguishing it from its Western “noisy” colleagues, whose music seemed less expressive and simply boring against the backdrop of the crazy antics of the Japanese. Having set a new bar for the entire experimental Japanese scene, they brought it to an unprecedented level: loud, hard and unprecedentedly difficult to perceive.

The second generation of Japanese noise was represented by another native of the Kansai noise scene, Hanatarash, whose path dates back to 1983. They have earned a reputation as one of the most scandalous bands with their extreme live performances and experiments in the genre of so-called “dangerous music”, which they themselves created.

The group was so insane and rebellious that before entering a 1985 concert at Tokyo's Superloft club, spectators were given waiver forms in case the audience got hurt during the performance. No one was allowed in without a signed waiver. And this was not surprising for the Hanatarash show, since their main calling card was complete ultra-violence on stage: the band’s frontman Yamantaka Ai threw equipment, broken glass and dead cats half-cut at the audience, at one of the concerts he tied a circular saw to his back, because which almost left him without a leg, and once he even rode across the stage on an excavator right during the performance, after which he flew into the wall of a neighboring house, destroying everything in his path.

By the way, that same concert in 1985 was ended prematurely: the club administration decided that there was enough violence from this place because it got to the point where Ai began indiscriminately aiming a lit Molotov cocktail at the distraught crowd

After several years of intense live performances, Hanatarash were banned from most concert halls in Japan and subsequently ceased operations in the 1990s.

Hanatarash are probably the most extreme Japanese band to ever exist, if not the most extreme band to ever exist. She had a simple mission: to push music and the performing arts as far as possible.

Hanatarash's music was a turn towards art noise punk, but at the same time it is quite difficult to define their genre: it is so experimental and unusual. For example, the 1985 album, Hanatarash, was musical noise, but in the sequel, Hanatarash 2 (1988), they completely turned into a mass of destructive acoustics. There was also a collab with him - Merzbow \ The Hanatarashi, recorded in 1984 (is there anyone else left with whom Merzbow did not collab?)

In 1986, Yamantaka Ai began to form a project called Boredoms - a mixture of punk, jazz and new wave from Osaka. As a member of the group, Ai discarded its harsh noise origins in favor of long psychedelic runs, which perhaps makes it the most musical of all noise groups.

Boredoms used much more traditional instruments when creating their music, giving most of their tracks a steady beat and melodic quality. The result is a sound closer to an extreme version of funk and rock than to noise, so it is debatable whether they can truly be considered Japanese noise in the classical sense. While other Japanese-language bands specialized in creating a sound that made listeners lose their minds, Boredoms' music sounds more like the band going crazy themselves. The main themes in the group's lyrics were scatology and nihilism. The title of their debut album, Anal By Anal (1986), says it all.

One of the most interesting things about Boredoms is the popularity they have gained in the “mainstream”. In the 1990s, Japanoise gained recognition overseas, resulting in the band signing a contract with Warner Records and supporting bands such as Sonic Youth, Beck and Nirvana on US tours. Despite this, the band was not particularly well received by US festival audiences and harsh critics, with the New York Times calling the band's set "incorrigible noise". Nevertheless, Boredoms are still performing and making noise (and Nirvana are not).

Thus, Western influences and international recognition led to a softening of the Japanese noise scene. Yamantaka Ai changed his style: sudden, inarticulate screams were replaced by more meditative compositions, and vulgar names were replaced by socially acceptable ones. On Boredoms' landmark 2000 album, Vision Creation Newsun, Ai completely replaced song titles with symbols like spirals and hearts. This is not to say that Japanoise is "not the same anymore", but here, as with other forms of bohemian, out-of-the-mainstream art, the sound has been toned down simply to make it more marketable.

But still, there was a group in the vast Japanese noise scene that we cannot help but mention, because for them the image of the underground became a necessary measure - Les Rallizes Dénudés - a cult experimental group that began its journey back in 1967.

The group was indeed interesting and, mildly, unusual: all members had radical leftist views, minimized contacts with the press and categorically refused to officially release their own records. And their former bass player tried to hijack a plane. It is not surprising that after this the team had to completely go into the shadows.

True, the seemingly fatal period for the band’s career played into the hands of the artists and created for them a cult image of a mysterious and elusive psychedelic noise group. Until now, this image is most clearly combined in the minds of listeners with the Les Rallizes Dénudés project. Later, the members ironically noted the band's "recipe for success": never record in a studio; play only with players for whom the slightest deviation from the riff will likely be catastrophic; never release records (never); continue for three decades until the world understands.

As mentioned earlier, in all the years of their existence, Les Rallizes Dénudés have not released a single official album: almost all existing releases consist of archival unofficial recordings (mainly lives) and unreleased demo tapes. Particularly noteworthy are Mizutani - measured and calm at the beginning and dynamic and dissonant at the end, with screaming vocals and endless changes of guitar rhythms, and 67-69 Live - noise, with resonating guitar amplifiers, a distinct rhythmic drum and tambourine: a very unusual combination.

But back to the “eighties”: from the middle of this period, even more noise projects emerged across Japan in home recording conditions, far from ideal: KK Null, Keiji Haino, Solmania, K2, MSBR, Aube, Pain Jerk, Violent Onsen Geisha, Contagious Orgasm, Ruins, C.C.C.C., Killer Bug, Government Alpha, Diesel Guitar, Incapacitants and dozens of others worked with homemade instruments in home studios, copying homemade recordings onto cassette tapes. This period was the most noticeable in the development of noise. Each project went its own way, creating its own methodology and injecting new energy and diversity into the Japanese noise scene. It was completely unrelated to what was happening in the mainstream.

Masonna stands out from all this diversity with a wave of harsh noise. The project began in Osaka in 1987. The name Masonna is deciphered by its founder Yamazaki Maso as a Dadaist phrase “Mademoiselle Anne Sanglante Ou Notre Nymphomanie Auréolé” (“Mademoiselle Anne the Bloody, or Our Nymphomaniac in the Areola”). Or it is a mixture of the Japanese words maso ("masochist") and onna (女, "woman"). Or God knows what's in those Japanese heads...

But one thing we know for sure is that Yamazaki Maso is a true punk. The stage and instruments are smashed to pieces (sometimes within a few tens of seconds from the start of the concert), and the sound makes unprepared ears suffer. It's funny, but like Boredoms, the group also began their worldwide career by supporting Sonic Youth.

Characterizing the band’s music is such a pointless task, because all of its music is chaos without any structure. Maximum loud, wild, unpredictable - yes, this is the same classic of harsh noise from the homeland of the wildest noise. Their first release, consisting of two tracks, is called quite predictably - Shinsen Na Clitoris (1990), and one of the most famous records, Spectrum Ripper (1997), can be described in two words - “sonic terror”.

The modern Japanese noise scene is also represented by many bands, among which Boris and Melt-Banana stand out. And we will talk about them in the next part.