Japanese noise: where the sound screams (pt. 2)

In the first part we talked about representatives of the old school Japanese noise scene. And modern Japanoise lives on and continues the path of its predecessors. The variety of new artists in the genre never ceases to amaze, but there are still some bands that particularly stand out from the rest of the noise scene - today we're talking about Boris and Melt-Banana.

"Japanese Melvins" - this is what they say in an ironic way about the group Boris⁠⁠, one of the most famous representatives of the Japanese music genre, which originated in the mid-90s in Tokyo. Boris once started out as imitators of the famous sludge metal band Melvins, but over the course of more than 20 years they have found their own sound, becoming one of the most iconic Japanese noise bands.

Debut album, Absolutego (1996), was recorded during a time of radical change in the Japanese metal scene. Innovators like Boris were replacing the old school Japanese heavy and thrash metal bands.

Another important band for Boris was Earth. According to the band's vocalist Atsuo, in the 90s almost no one in Japan had heard of Melvins and Earth, which gave the band the opportunity to become one of the first sludge metal bands in Japan.

However, over the years they have dabbled in different genres. In 1998, Boris recorded their second album, Amplifier Worship, which mixed elements of trip rock with sludge metal. The albums Heavy Rocks (2002, 2011) absorbed the mood of early heavy metal. In Pink (2005), Boris tried their hand at shoegaze, in Vein (2006), crust punk was actively used, and the recent release Love&Evol (2019) included elements of drone (they even split with Merzbow and DAMAGED on it).

Boris's openness to new genres attracts other artists. Among them are Sunn O))) and Merzbow, also known for their love of experimentation.

Boris are creating a lasting legacy that surpasses almost every other group currently working in their field. They haven't exhausted their creative energy in 26 years, and there's no reason to expect that to happen anytime soon.

Another representative of the Tokyo scene, Melt-Banana, burst into noise back in 1992. Compared to the rest of the musicians, the trio sounds the most familiar and light, and although they can hardly be called noise in its pure form, they perform extremely original, very fast, hard and aggressive music with high-pitched female vocals, reminiscent of the voice of an anime heroine beating in a cruel hysteria . The name of the group, according to the musicians themselves, goes back to one of the varieties of ice cream common in Australia.

Despite their Western orientation and popularity in the United States, Melt-Banana is a very Japanese group, with a purely Japanese attitude to music. Take, for example, their famous minimalism - the duration of songs rarely exceeds a minute and a half, and is often limited to 20-30 seconds (four- or five-minute compositions for Melt-Banana are a real opus magnum). Or Yasuko Onuki's vocals, reminiscent of a Gatling gun loaded with needles and often turning into an inarticulate screech. Purely Japanese radicalism, which knows no barriers.

Of particular interest are the lyrics of Melt-Banana's songs (even though it is often impossible to understand them by ear). This is a kind of mental stream, a set of words that are in no way connected with each other. Scraps of songs from popular anime in Japan, some crazy rhymes about bunnies and bear cubs, slogans from advertisements for various lollipops, political slogans, quotes from movies, etc.

“I just sing about what’s in my head,” admits Yasuko Onuki.

The Japanese trio's latest album, Melt-Banana Lite Live Ver 0.0 (2009), was released on the group's own label and features recordings of their live performances. It's half an hour of wild, anti-system music, flavored with Onuka's signature vocals. Hurricane-fast guitars and mercilessly ear-piercing synthesizer noises – Melt-Banana creates music that is not afraid to look into the abyss of mass consciousness.

Distorted, abrasive sounds, intense and chaotic live performances, and an endlessly experimental quest for self-expression, Japanoise is often seen as a form of protest music through which political and social issues are expressed. Initially something small and abnormal, created by rebellious youth who showed how rebellious and different they were, noise eventually grew to such proportions that people outside the Japanese scene, discovering it, wanted to make it their own.

Nowadays Japanoise is truly diverse and at the same time similar to itself - such duality is inherent in the Japanese genre. The only thing that is stable here is diversity: harsh noise, power electronics, ritual noise, radio noise, industrial noise and many others - the Japanese scene never ceases to amaze.

It is difficult to predict whether music will undergo a more radical reinvention and whether noise will become as “familiar” music for everyone as jazz or rock. But over the past thirty years, noise has not gone beyond the underground (with the exception of individual artists). What awaits us in the future - a complete rejection of classical musical forms or, ultimately, a rejection of noisy music - we will find out in an equally noisy and near future.