The Primer – Japanese Psychedelia

By Alan Cummings

The Wire, August 1999, pp.30-35.

In the late 80s and early 90s it seemed as though some seismic fault deep beneath Japan had finally cracked, unleashing a tsunami of new and confusing groups onto an unsuspecting Western world. From the toxic multi-genre pile-ups of The Boredoms and the Magma-inspired operatic hardcore of bass and drums duo Ruins, to the technological meltdown of Merzbow, here, it seemed, was postmodernism run riot. The presumed exoticism and reductive unknowability that has long informed Western perceptions of Japan, from the Victorian travellers with their rhapsodies of a miniature fairyland to the modern dystopian vision of William Gibson and Ridley Scott, was just the icing on the cake for many Westerners. Would anyone really have been so interested if these groups had come from, say, Belgium?

But within the glut of new Japanese discoveries were a handful of groups that references along neglected and unfashionable seam of Western culture – psychedelia. Primarily from Tokyo, groups like White Heaven, High Rise, Kosokuya, Ghost and Fushitsusha (and more recently, Acid Mothers Temple and the pop-psych groups of Osaka’s Org label) appeared as a weirdly refracted amalgam of 20 years on underground psychedelic music, spanning San Francisco hippydom, Düsseldorf Krautrock and England’s early Prog scene. The fact that many of them were formed in the mid-80s out of the fallout from Japanese punk and New Wave might seem ironic to Western observers, confused by an apparent reconciliation of punk and its hippie enemy. But such a view doesn’t account for the subtle changes that occur in the cultural assimilation process. Like the seemingly ‘wrong’ English slogans seen everywhere in Japan, assimilated imports primarily address Japanese needs. Despite any lingering similarities, they don’t necessarily reflect their original meaning anymore. So with psychedelia after its absorption into the Japanese underground.

The Japanese fascination with Western music goes back a little further, to 1853, when Commodore Perry’s US warships forcibly opened Japan to international trade. ‘Civilization and enlightenment’ was the slogan of the day, as Japan embarked on a radical modernisation programme based on the mass importing of Western models, from military strategy and systems of law, to ice cream and the three piece suit. Education too was reformed along Western lines, and Western musical theory was introduced in schools. Japanese popular music, it was decided, was too tainted with the immorality of the pleasure quarters. Besides, Westerners complained that it sounded like cats wailing.

Over the next century, Japan studiously imported almost every musical craze that swept Europe or the United States. Imported musics created new Japanese heroines such as Junichiro Tanizaki’s Naomi, who, as a typical 20s ‘mo-ga’, or modern girl, loves louche men, Mary Pickford and dancing to jazz. The post-war US military presence restored traffic in Western music after 15 years of Militarist disapproval. 1958 ushered in a rockabilly boom; 1963 was dominated by the twist. But a new, indigenous youth culture only really took root with the arrival of The Beatles and, oddly enough, The Ventures. The latter’s January 1965 tour with the Astronauts triggered a boom in homegrown Ventures-like instrumental combos, and when the novelty of instrumental music wore off, more conventional, vocal-led groups. Sniffing a quick yen, record companies scrambled to sign any group of young men with guitars. Professional rockabilly outfits traded their quiffs for moptops. A desire to ape Western role models in every detail resulted in bizarre notions of authenticity. For many groups, getting the right-sounding English name was essential; prefixing it with the definitive article even more so. Big cats (The Tigers, The Cougars, The Lions) and insects (The Termites, The Scorpions, The Spiders) were popular choices; other groups were more ‘inventive’, for instance, The Kippers, The Terrys and The Carnabeats. Eventually, the music acquired a generic description, Group Sounds (GS), to distinguish it from earlier forms of Japanese pop, which were dominated by solo singers.

As in Europe and the US, the late 60s were also a time of growing political and social dissatisfaction in Japan. Issues such as Vietnam and Japan’s increasingly strained relationship with the US, as well as questions of cultural identity, and the incipient nihilism of a newly affluent society no longer bound to the single, clear purpose of the immediate post-war years, helped form the backdrop to a vibrant avant garde arts scene that encompassed film, theatre, dance, music and graphics. The first flourish of Japanese psychedelic emerged when the avant garde collided with popular culture.

The Mops

Psychedelic Sounds In Japan

(Victor Japan VICL 18212 CD)

The Golden Cups

The Golden Cups Album

(Toshiba-EMI Japan TOCT10130 CD)

The GS boom reached its fevered peak in the spring of 1968, causing groups to search desperately for any gimmick or new sound that might give them an edge. That sound turned out to be psychedelic rock, and The Mops, hitherto undistinguished purveyors of beat music, became the first Japanese group to play it. Fortunately for The Mops, their manger had been holidaying in San Francisco in the summer of 1967. He returned to Japan dreaming that his young protégés could hitch a ride on the flower power bandwagon, even though it had yet to start rolling in Japan. It took just a few plays of the new Jefferson Airplane record which he had bought with him from America to convince The Mops he was right.

Their first album, released I April 1968, had the psychedelic thing down pat – a suitably colourful cover, ethnic clothing, extended fuzzed-out jams, a dash of angst, even a sitar on “Kienai Omoi” (“Unforgettable Memories”). Much of the record was given over to cover version that signalled the group’s new psychedelic allegiances, among them The Doors’ “Light My Fire”, Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and “Someone To Love”, as well as “San Franciscan Nights”, The Animals’ heartfelt paean to the joys of the Haight. The Mops’ engagingly cartoon-like take on psychedelia is all tumbling drums, frenzied guitar breaks and sincere (though mispronounced) vocals courtesy of singer Hiromitsu Suzuki. Noting how well a theme tune worked for The Monkees, The Mops devised one for themselves, complete with catchy chorus: “But I don’t care of them/So I’m just a Mops”. Their enthusiasm, in the absence of the right chemicals, is utterly commendable.

The lack of psychedelic drugs was only really felt when The Mops couldn’t supply the ‘LSD party’ set up to promote the album. Instead, they handed out dried banana skins to the assembled journalists, in the hope that smoking them would produce an appropriate levitational effect. But it was not all gloom on the promotion front – The Mops’ frantic modernism impressed Toru Takemitsu and fellow avant garde composer Toshi Ichiyanagi sufficiently for them to be invited to participate in Orchestral Space, a major contemporary music festival. Ichiyanagi composed a special festival piece for The Mops, prepared tapes and The Japan Philharmonic Orchestra. Sadly, there is no documentation of the quintessential 60s event, but by the end of the year The Mops had shed their kaftans and returned to the simple rock’n’roll of their roots.

The Golden Cups’ debut album beat The Mops to the shops by less than a month. It also bore the unmistakeable stamp of exposure to California’s Summer of Love. Formerly a house band at a Tokyo ‘go-go’ coffee shop, The Cups emerged from the engagement with a more assured technique and a broader repertoire, including hits like “Whiter Shade OF Pale” and “Got My Mojo Workin’”, James Brown’s “I Feel Good” and Bobby Moore’s “Searchin’ For My Love”. The album’s psychedelic high point is an inspired cover of “Hey Joe”, which begins with a double-time bass riff and skittering drums. The somewhat perfunctory chorus is scant preparation for the jawdropping freeform passage that follows, in which the drums drop out to leave bass and guitar feeding back against each other, before the guitarist scales a vicious solo. It was a unprecedented moment in the history of Japanese rock. Strangely, the group declined to pursuer any of the new directions they opened up. Instead, they spent two albums metamorphosing into Japan’s first and most popular blues outfit.

Jacks

Karappo No Sekai: Takt Days

(Nippon Columbia COCA15258 CD)

Jacks

Vacant World

(Toshiba-EMI TOCT6604 CD)

While most GS groups struggled to keep abreast of fashions on the US West Coast, others, notably The Jacks, pioneered their own routes. Yoshio Hayakawa, a student at Tokyo’s Wako University, founded the group in 1966 as a folk trio called Nightingale. After several line-up and name changes, they coalesced into a stable quartet by the summer of 1967. After providing the music for an avant garde theatre group, they spent the rest of the summer negotiating round after round of the All Japan Lite Music Contest, only to be beaten into second place by The Frogees (who were never heard of again).

The vanquished Jacks fared better, impressing one competition judge, Japanese jazzman Sadao Watanabe, who helped secure them a deal with a minor jazz label, Takt. Their first two singles were released in March and June 1968. Recently reissued together on a Nippon Columbia EP, these first four Jacks tracks still sound staggering. The music floats in a hushed and meditative trance state around Hayakawa’s bleak vocals. Their signature track is “Marianne”, which was later covered by john Zorn’s Painkiller (with Keiji Haino on guitar and vocalist Koichi Makigami; the track is included on the Tzadik 4CD set, Collected Works) and Haino’s Fushitsusha (on Tokyo Flashback 2). On a formal level, it is a perfect study in ominous shading, featuring shimmering non-linear percussion and Haruo Mizuhashi’s deeply echoed guitar lines that tangle and stretch in a downpour of fuzz and vibrato, in tandem with Hayakawa’s pained vocal, singing about raging storms on dark nights. The song concludes with the unsettling image of someone embracing Marianne’s drowned corpse. Once heard, it’s not easily forgotten.

Takt folded shortly after the singles came out, but Toshiba picked up the group almost immediately, releasing their debut album, Vacant World, in September 1968. Again, the album is a paragon of economy, with not a single wasteful gesture. As personally realised psychedelic universe go, there is little to touch it. However, the album received little acclaim, and ground down by the group’s lack of success, guitarist Mizuhashi quit. The remaining members attempted to soldier on; drummer Takatsuke Kida switched to playing flute, vibraphone and sax, and the group recruited a new drummer, Hiro Tsunoda (who would later lead some of Japan’s better Prog-psych units, including Sadistic Mika Band, Strawberry Path, Flied Egg and the highly recommended Food Brain). The group carried on long enough to record a second Toshiba album, Jacks Super Session, but it was obvious that the fire has mostly gone out.

Kan Mikami

BANG!

(URC TOCT9322 CD)

Kazuki Tomokawa

Hitori Bonodori

(PSF PSFD59 CD)

In the late 60s, Japan experienced its worst period of social unrest since the end of World War Two. The issues that brought people out onto the street included anxiety over Japan’s position on the Vietnam War, the continuing US occupation of Okinawa, and attempts by the government to renew the Us-Japan Joint Security Treaty, which allowed for a massive US military presence in Japan. Matters were brought to a head when radical student seized the central lecture hall at the elite Tokyo University in July 1968 and held it until they were ousted by riot police in January 1969. Massive demonstrations occurred all over the country, but the focus was the vibrant Shinjuku area of Tokyo.

Because Japan’s early psychedelic rock failed to make much connection with the political counterculture, the soundtrack for Japan’s own Paris Spring was provided by legions of protest folk singers. The format was simple: anti-authority lyrics set to simple acoustic guitar strumming; but this form of personal and political expression was new to Japan. Illegal concerts by ‘folk guerrillas’ were staged weekly during the spring and summer of 1969 at the west exit of Shinjuku Station, attracting crowds of up to 7000. In July, thousands of riot police, armed with batons and tear gas, stormed the area and crushed the movement.

The independent URC (Underground Record Club) label was set up to release albums by the leading figures of this burgeoning folk movement. Solo singers Nobuyasu Okabayashi (the Japanese Bob Dylan, who attempted an unpopular turn to rock with the group Happy End), Wataru Takada and Tomoya Takaishi, and groups such as Itsutsu No Akai Fusen (Five Red Balloons), The Folk Crusaders and Yasumi No Kuni (Land Of Rest), were all immensely popular live acts. If the 60s were relatively innocent, the tone of the early 70s was set by fanatical episodes like leading novelist Yukio Mishima’s failed attempt to spur an ultra-nationalist coup d’etat and his subsequent suicide, and the bloodletting of Japan’s Red Army terrorist group (which culminated in their 1972 attack on Tel Aviv airport, in which 26 died). Realising that self-righteous anger and simplistic idealism were no longer enough, a new breed of ‘acid’ folk singer began to emerge. The lyrics became more personal and intensely introspective, and the music made a corresponding shift towards the dark and hallucinatory. Singers like Kenji Endo (who is still one of Japan’s most revered alternative singers) and Masato Minami were the more publicly acceptable faces of this new tendency.

However, the real meat was brought to the table by two young sisters from the bleak north of Japan, Kan Mikami and Kazuki Tomokawa. Their musical roots lay not in the imported protest folk of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, but in the indigenous, oppositional music of northern Japan, and the popular, melancholic enka (most often described as a Japanese Country & Western).

Mikami, who had links with Japanese avant garde theatre theorists such as Shuji Terayama (of whom more later) and Juro Kara, and the radical dance form butoh, got his first real break at the 1971 All Japan Folk Jamboree. The crowd of 25,000 had turned against many of the mainstream folk singers, booing them offstage or bombarding them with political rhetoric. However, Mikami’s typically intense songs, riddled with vividly earthly references to death, mass murderers, gangsters, lakes of piss and masturbation, seemed to match the mood of the unsettled and unruly audience, who responded with wild applause. His controversial lyrics and abrasive personality didn’t go down so well with the authorities; his 1971 debut album Mikami Kan No Sekai (The World Of Kan Mikami), was ‘voluntarily’ withdrawn from sale, after objections from the music industry’s salf-censoring Ethics Committee. But the most adventurous of his URC albums is BANG! (1794), which featured pianist Yosuke Yamashita’s quartet and other jazz musicians. The title track is a bewildering psychedelic collage of free jazz blasts, musique concrete, tapes and Mikami’s unique voice, silky and caressing one moment, soaring and screaming in agony the next. The record also contained maudlin ballads, an epic tribute to a convicted murderer, and ended with a rough and rousing samba. With the collapse of the student movement, Mikami entered his wilderness years, which lasted until his career was revived by the PSF label in the late 80s. Since then his position as one of the most perceptive voices in the Japanese underground has been strengthened by his musical collaborations, such as Vajra, the trio he shares with Keiji Haino.

Like Mikami, Kazuki Tomokawa is also an actor and poet. But his songs tackle angst in a more lyrical fashion, with delicate colourings and deceptively natural imagery. Though he also appeared at the 1971 Folk Jamboree, he didn’t get to release his first album until 1975. However, the best introduction to Tomokawa’s world is his 1995 album Hitori Bonodori (A Solo Dance Of The Dead), which provides him with a wonderful backing group, including Japan’s late giant of free music, Motoharu Yoshizawa, on homemade electronic bass. The multiplexed sound of Yoshizawa’s bass provides an eerie background to Tomokawa’s viciously strummed guitar, as his voice rises, screaming and splintering, over a flailing rhythm. Fans of intense Prog-folk should also check out Tomokawa’s Sakura No Kuni No Chiru Naka O (Within The Country Of Falling Cherry Blossoms) (King Records KICKS 8115 CD, 1980), which was arranged by the legendary JA Seazer (see below). The final track is a 15 minute masterpiece that explodes from a wind-blown beginning into a maelstrom of chanting choirs, full-on guitar and Tomokawa’s deranged howling.

JA Seazer Recital

Kokkyo Junreika

(Belle Antique BELLE95 168 CD)

Tenjo Sajiki

Aho Bune

(P-Vine PCD1466 CD)

One of the special characteristics of Tokyo’s avant garde counterculture in the 60s and 70s was the close links connecting its most important theatre practitioners and the underground rock scene. The two most famous companies were Shuji Terayama’s Tenjo Sajiki (The Gallery), and Juro Kara’s Jokyo Gekijo (Situation Theatre). The latter were notorious for their guerrilla performances in unusual locations around Tokyo. Both companies acted as artistic centre of heavy gravity, drawing in musicians (Kan Mikami), film makers (Nagisa Oshima, Koji Wakamatsu) and visual artists (Tadanori Yokoo). The links forged at that time sustain to this day. Mikami had appeared with Kara’s group on several occasions. The singer introduced Kara to Oshima, one of Japan’s most radical film directors, who subsequently cast him as the main character in Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief, and later gave him a part in Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence.

Mikami and Shuji Terayama both came from the Aomori region of northern Japan, and inevitably, Mikami was taken under Terayama’s wing. Terayama had first gained notice as a radical poet working in the ancient tanka form. But his uniqye vision soon expanded to encompass film, theatre, novels and general agitation. His experimental theatre company, Tenjo Sajiki, was idolised by disaffected youth, and its base of operation in Tokyo’s Shibuya district became the destination of choice for so many young runaways.

A young student of graphic design, who had adopted the name of JA (Julius Arnold) Seazer, also made his way to Terayama’s Shibuya HQ. In a country that likes to categorise, Seazer had already secured a name for himself as one of the Four Shinjuku Hippies, and as Japan’s Long Hair Brother Number One. Although at that point he had never picked up a musical instrument in his life, he was given the job of the company’s musical director at his first meeting with Terayama in 1969. For the next dozen years, he was Terayama’s right hand, composing and playing the music for almost all of his films and plays, as well as giving his own recitals. The music that he developed to match Terayama’s hallucinatory blend of freakshow imagery, discarded popular culture, European radical thought and twisted psychological hang-ups was an equally fascinating blend. Traditional festival percussion and sekkyobushi narrative music collides with Carl Orff and Pierre Henry, its various elements linked by the pulsating throb of contemporary ‘art rock’ – the Japanese blend of heavy rock and Progressive psych, as practised by groups like The Flower Traveling Band, whose guitarist Hideki Ishima had worked on the soundtrack to the best known of Terayama’s early works, Throw Away Your Books And Go Out In The Streets (Victor VICL-23056 CD).

Aho Bune (The Ship Of Fools) best illustrates how music is an integral part of Terayama’s work. Sponsored by the Shah’s daughter, it was premiered in 1976 at the 10^th Persepolis Arts Festival in Shiraz, Iran, where it was programmed alongside works from the cream of the Western avant garde: Peter Brook, Robert Wilson, Merce Cunningham, Xenakis, Stockhausen. The work alternates between spoken sections, which build seamlessly into almost operatic workouts on a Magma-like scale, and more visual instrumental sections. Seazer’s Prog organ features heavily throughout, and the work is ripe with the scent of decadence and insanity. Less dependant on the visual element, 1973’s, Kokkyo Junreika (Border Pilgramage Song) is an easier way into Seazer’s musical world. Typical of the recitals he frequently gave in the mid-70s, the recording features many of Tenjo Sajiki’s leading actors, providing a hyped-up choir to pieces. It also features the fine guitar soloing of Takashi Mori throughout.

Les Rallizes Denudes

Les Rallizes Denudes 77 Live

(SIXE 0400 CD)

Les Rallizes Denudes

Les Rallizes Denudes 67-69 Studio Et Live

(SIXE 0101 CD)

Les Rallizes Denudes

Les Rallizes Denudes

(Ethan Mousike Co Ltd VHS)

Without a doubt the most mysterious of all Japanese psych groups is Les Rallizes Denudes, who are sometimes also know by their Japanese title, Hadaka No Rallizes. Rumours abound of their violence, their connections with Japanese biker gangs, and even their current whereabouts. What is or was a rallize, and why it should be naked remains unknown. A large part of their mystery lies in their reluctance to make ‘product’ available. Although they have existed since 1967, until 1991 their only recordings were on an obscure compilation (recently bootlegged on LP). Then suddenly, three CDs and a video of live and studio recordings spanning 1967-77 appeared simultaneously. Released by the group themselves in editions of several hundred copies, these recordings rapidly sold out and now command astronomical prices.

The mystery that veils everything they have done extends also to their origins. It is said, however, that they formed at a university in Kyoto in 1967, at the height of the Group Sounds boom. Soon after their first gig the following year, Rallizes became involved with the only avant garde theatre group Kyoto, Gendai Gekijo (The Modern Theatre), but their insistence on using massive volume on stage led to a revolt by the actors and the subsequent dissolution of the theatre group. During this period, Rallizes began to use mirror balls and strobe lighting to further disorientate audiences already dazed by the noise assault. Popular history also has them appearing at the ‘Barricades A-Go-Go’ concert in 1969, organised by the student revolutionaries occupying Kyoto University at the time. In late 1970 they moved their base of operations to Tokyo.

From their earliest days, Rallizes’ psychedelic concept was relatively simple. Over a simple repeating bassline and drum pattern, the guitarists (sometimes leader Takashi Mizutani alone, other times with a second guitarist) improvise at extreme length and at massive volume. The way they ploughed through acreages of industrial noise, heavy fuzz and howling feedback, even on their earliest 60s recordings, prefigures much of what was to come out the Japanese underground in the years to come. Mizutani’s interviews were rare, to say the least, but from his few statements it is clear that the darker facets of French symbolism and surrealism, and the theatrical avant garde of Jerzy Grotowski and Julian Beck were influences. Favouring titles like “Reapers Of The Night” and “Flames Of Ice”, you can make a pretty fair guess, at the tone of Mizutani’s lyrics, all sung in a cold and distant drawl. The consistently inventive 1977 live set is the best introduction to the group. Meanwhile, their self-titled video release is a must for connoisseurs of early rock footage, with much rare film of the group in action, though some viewers might be perplexed by its refusal to synchronise visuals with sound. Rallizes have not appeared in public for the past four years. The last reported sighting of the enigmatic Mizutani was accompanying free jazz lunatic Arthur Doyle in Tokyo.

Keiji Haino

Ama No Gawa (Milky Way)

(Mom ‘N’ Dad MOM019 CD)

Fushitsusha

Live

(PSF PSFD15/16 2xCD)

Nijiumu

Era Of Sad Wings

(PSF PSFD31 CD)

If Rallizes represent a black and dangerous magic, the Keiji Haino, who has been an unchanging figure in the Japanese underground for almost as long, is surely white magic. Haino’s fascination with psychedelic pioneers like The Doors (his first break was playing harmonica in a late 60s Doors cover group) and Blue Cheer is well known. Less well known is his enthusiasm for the personal psychedelic spaces of Billie Holliday, Country blues, Marlene Dietrich and 12^th century troubadour songs. All of these form part of Haino’s sustained and intensely serious investigation of the history of recorded sound. Sometimes it seems that Haino’s entire life in music is his attempt to create a personal space where he can finally feel comfortable. Certainly, an overwhelming sense of haunted loneliness sets his music apart from sheets-of-noise merchants like Null and Merzbow, with whom he is often carelessly linked.

With his many different groups, some temporary, others long term, and his vast, ever proliferating discography (currently approaching the hundred mark, with the majority of his records being issued during the past decade), it can be difficult to know where to begin with Haino. But recommended starting points should include his contemplative fusion of electronic washes, ethnic instruments and deeply echoed vocals in the superlative late-night group Nijiumu (which roughly translates as ‘A melding of that which is and that which is not’). His trio Fushitsusha, on the other hand, attempt no less than a total deconstruction/reconstruction of rock. Their unique brand of heaviness is best appreciated live, although their two double CD sets on PSF are a fairly close approximation of the experience. The first (PSF PSF3/4 2xCD) veers closest to San Francisco psychedelia’s blues roots, and features a rare example of Haino’s coruscating harmonica playing, as well as the fuzz-bass of Maki Miura’s second guitar. But their second PSF double live set is even harder to pick, with full-out guitar and vocal works, shamanistic percussion sets, electronic droneworks, and hurdy-gurdy screech-athons to choose from. But the early electronic performance (from 1973) documented on the Milky Way disc is an enduring favourite for its evocative, spiritually charged atmosphere.

Various

Tokyo Flashback 1

(PSF PSFD12 CD)

High Rise

Speed Free Sonic

(Paratactile PLE11042 CD)

White Heaven

Out

(PSF PSFD11 CD)

During the early 80s, interest in psychedelic rock began to grow among a small group of committed Tokyo music fans and musicians. A small independent record shop called Modern Music in Tokyo’s Meidaimae district played a pivotal role in this nascent scene. First, it imported many of the obscure psych rarities that were gradually being reissued or bootlegged in the West. Later, as some of the regular customers and employees formed their own groups, the shop’s owner, Hideo Ikeezumi, started his own label. His first release, in 1985, was the debut album by High Rise, Psychedelic Speed Freaks (PSF 01 LP). The label took its name from the record’s title, and thus PSF was born.

The label quickly developed into the prime documenter of Tokyo’s underground psych scene of the late 80s, and the Tokyo Flashback 1 compilation provides both a vivid snapshot of the time and an excellent one-stop introduction to the PSF catalogue, featuring lengthy cuts by High Rise, White Heaven, Fushitsusha, Ghost and Marble Sheep & The Rundown Sun’s Children (who would mutate into a Japanese version of the late period Grateful Dead).

High Rise play fast, noisy and aggressive psych music, largely improvised but always with a purely rock sense of speed and acceleration. The group’s leader, bassist Asahito Nanjo (whose parallel projects, Musica Transonic and Mainliner, are equally characterised by genre-melding, rock-damaged genius), and its guitarist Munehiro Narita, had both been involved in the Tokyo underground scene of the late 70s and early 80s which centred on a legendary club called Minor. Setting themselves up in opposition to the alternative Tokyo Rockers scene, involving groups such as Friction and Lizard, the musicians associated with Minor were informed by improvisation, noise, contemporary composition and, of course, psychedelic rock. Minor nurtured many major figures, including Keiji Haino, Kosokuya and Tori Kudo (whose euphonium-driven, Christian mystic pop-psych unit Maher Shalal Hash Baz are one of the strangest groups in the Japanese underground). All of these influences would feed into High Rise’s highly volatile brew. Their staggering music filters contemporary rock practices through the speaker damage of prime Blue Cheer. There are few sounds as thrilling in the Japanese underground as that of Narita’s acid guitar burning into a solo. Always best appreciated live, Speed Free Sonic, a recent issue of a 1994 concert, is a great introduction to the High Rise sound.

White Heaven, formed in 1985 by a Modern Music shopworker called Yu Ishihara, were the other main players in the late 80s Tokyo psych scene. Influenced by the looser acid feel of groups such as Quicksilver Messenger Service, White Heaven peaked immediately with its debut release, Out. The record mixes rockers like “My Cold Dimention” (sic), which burn with the interior flame of Michio Kurihara’s hard-edged guitar, with more meditative tracks that seem to be floating in cold and bleak space.

Taj Mahal Travellers

August 1974

(P-Vine PCD1463/4 2xCD)

Ghost

Temple Stone

(PSF PSFD37 CD)

Ché-Shizu

Nazareth

(PSF PSFD35 CD)

These three releases are typical of a strain of Japanese psychedelia which was/is more influenced by he limpid, droning sounds of German groups such as Can, Ash Ra Tempel and Amon Düül than Anglo-American acid rock. In each case, a dash of shamanic Asian consciousness distinguishes the music from that of the European forbears. The music of groups like Ghost and Toho Sara (another of Asahito Nanjo’s projects) can be looked upon as a rare reintegration of insular and normally Western-looking Japanese music with that of the Asian mainland. Their use of traditional instruments (interestingly, rarely Japanese in origin), and their references to the more esoteric elements of continental religion and philosophy perhaps indicate a late flowering of hippy consciousness. However, both the instrumental profile and the pan-=Asian bias of such groups were prefigured in the early 70s by avant-composer and violinist Takehisa Kosugi’s drone-improvisors, Taj Mahal Travellers. Like Ghost, whose Temple Stone documents meditative performances at temples and other sacred spaces, Taj Mahal Travellers had a predilection for playing on beaches and hilltops, integrating their stoned rhythms with natural sounds.

The dream-pop psych unit Ché-Shizu are one of the rare examples of a traditional Japanese instrument (in this case, the three-stringed kokyu bowed fiddle) being used in a psychedelic context. Nazareth is a sometimes shambling compilation of their live recordings and features the fascinatingly atonal sound of Chie Mukai’s kokyu drifting through the cracks of conventional melody. The group’s interest in traditional English folk music is just one more indication of the breadth and complexity of underground Japan’s continuing interaction with the West.