[This review was originally published in Badaboom Gramaphone #3 and appears here with permission.]
Japan’s High Rise is most likely the world’s most accomplished practitioner of loud, fast and noisy music that is still recognizably “rock,” distanced from other contenders by a degree of freedom and intensity shared by few others of any genre. The physical impact of the sound is, unsurprisingly, what hits most listeners first. One would probably have to go back to Blue Cheer to find a Western predecessor with a comparable dedication to the visceral glories of psychedelic sound. After a brief acquaintance, the fuzzed-out guitar becomes instantly recognizable; with the bass, it forms a “wall” behind which the drums are sometimes lost. Which isn’t to say that percussion isn’t integral to the High Rise experience — dependably furious and fill-laden, but free of “funky” touches and other temptations to flash. The band’s concept is pure.
High Rise grew out of a band called Conformist, which included bassist Asahito Nanjo and original High Rise drummer Ikuro Takahashi. They became the Psychedelic Speed Freaks when guitarist Munehiro Narita joined and recorded an album under that name. Before it was released, however, the members were persuaded that the name was a bit too on the nose and became High Rise (after a J.G. Ballard novel), saving Psychedelic Speed Freaks for the album title. (The man who did the persuading was the proprietor of the Modern Music record shop in Tokyo, who formed a label to put out High Rise’s debut. Thus was PSF born.) Active as High Rise since 1982, there have been a number of cassette-only releases and compilation appearances in addition to the listed albums.
First released in an edition of 300, Psychedelic Speed Freaks ’84-’85 finds the band still developing its art (but already far above the many). The album opens with “Make a Motion,” a fast punk blowout whose sole purpose is a celebration of free-form guitar, a sort of declaration of intent. It’s followed by “Acid Song,” which is classic High Rise, namely a high-speed song with lines that continually threaten to fall apart and no longer exist as riffs, and with drums, bass, and guitar each free to solo or fill at any time. “Induced Depression” (also classic High Rise in style) is the album’s other high point; elsewhere, there are signs that the band is still purifying its style (e.g., the slower and garage-y “Like Death”). (Drums are credited to Dr. Euro, aka Yuro Ujiie, who was in fact the official drummer by the time the album was released, but it’s Takahashi on the record.
Ujiie makes his album debut on High Rise II, the band’s high-water mark. The sound is less raw but more unique than the first album and all the more satisfying for it. Though there’s definitely abandon in the playing, the energy of the album isn’t achieved through turning up amps and hitting instruments with more violence. High Rise plays more fully within itself here, and it’s the control and mastery of style that account for the impact. Highlights include the Stooge-reminiscent “Cotton Top” and “Pop Sicle.” The first is a rumbling and bouncing showcase of what makes Narita such a talent: there’s the sound (due in part to Narita’s habit of modifying his effects equipment), and there’s the constant fertility of his solos, moving from Vernon Reid-like splatterings to highly lyrical sustained passages. “Pop Sicle” is a different version of a “song” that appeared on the first album (a number of High Rise songs exist only as a single riff that serve as the point of departure for improvised performances). Featuring minutes of guitar soloing and group explorations, it’s anything but self-indulgent. Like the Sun City Girls, High Rise is able to make extreme use of ingredients that normally go to making self-involved pap, recovering what integrity remains at the bottom of a musical form that one might have thought lost to years of navel-gazing.
Dispersion takes on the blues, but rather than embracing any “roots,” the album seems dedicated to the undermining of genre conventions. “Sadducees Faith” is based on an R&B-inflected groove (think “Who Do You Love”), but instead of the expected blues changes, the first chord change is a diatonic one. (It sounds like the start of a Big Star chord progression.) When your ear expects further harmonic development, the chord progression evaporates. “Nuit,” “Eucharist” and “Mainliner” are experiments in resisting resolution and chorus-based song structures, an aim that, though a feature on earlier High Rise material, is more explicit here. The songs progress only through what is done with a simple riff, and the means of development — the placement of solos, the tempo and rhythm changes — are consistently surprising. While that strengthens the album along one dimension, the energy level has come down a bit.
Live is disposable, a studied attempt to return to earlier form after the more conceptually informed Dispersion. Move instead to Disallow, which features new drummer Pill, whose playing is straighter than that of Ujiie or Takahashi. Here the band experiments again, varying the feel more than in the past: “Whirl” is slow and almost groovy, while “Grab” is extremely spare, the High Rise wall of sound giving way to leave tremendous space between each instrument (a bit like a High Rise song viewed sideways). Overall, like Dispersion, the riffs are more categorizable, the tone is less elegiac than High Rise II.
Nanjo’s other high-profile bands are Musica Transonic and Mainliner. (He has a number of active projects, and also runs a label, La Musica.) Joining Nanjo in both are Tatsuya Yoshida (from the Ruins) on drums and Makoto Kawabata (who’s also in Toho Sara with Nanjo) on guitar. These two trios depart from High Rise in opposite directions: Musica Transonic is more improvised, jazzier, experimental and consciously difficult, while Mainliner is straighter than High Rise, playing more fully composed songs and dedicated more simply to the excesses of volume and distortion.
Musica Transonic’s so-called jazz influence is in part simply the use of jazz idioms, which is hard to miss even on a first run through the eponymous debut. “Versatile Corrupt” actually has a walking bassline, while “Opaque Loll” is based on a syncopated riff reminiscent of classic Monk. But the “jazz” resides more interestingly in the logic of the songs — “Lugubrious” begins with a syncopated metal riff that progressively mutates into more and more harmonically perverse versions of itself, until the structure is tossed away for solos, after which a sort of jam spontaneously emerges out of the chaos — and in Yoshida’s drumming, especially on “Fangle Out,” in which the ’82 hardcore guitar and bass latch onto a riff while the drums let go with constant fills that sound a lot more like Elvin Jones than Jeff Nelson. There are also a number of other ingredients here, including a substantial No Wave influence (the Harry Pussy/Bill Orcutt guitar in “Vassal Sag” and “Versatile Corrupt”), some Fushitsusha (“Conformance Sadness” is about space, dissonance and blocks of sound) and pure psychedelic skree (“Group Besmirch”); Musica Transonic is more vicious than High Rise.
The eclecticism increases on A Pilgrim’s Solace. There’s still the jazz, in both style (the continuously arpeggiated bassline of “Doxologia”) and structure (“Flos Flosum” is, on that level, a be-bop tune), and there’s still the No Wave guitar (“Officium Defunctorum”). Added to the mixture now is the noise of “Doxologia,” which is reminiscent of Stefan Jaworzyn in its dedication to pure guitar noise rather than a noise-making extension of older guitar styles; the spacey psychedelia of “Haec Dies;” the surf feel and Morricone melodies of “Miserere Nostri;” and the combination of martial drums (the drums play a march) and synth-like guitar on “Lurea,” which produces a Silver Apples effect. The most impressive moments here are the title track and “Graduale.” The former is beautifully melodic out-psych. This is like Musica Transonic’s version of “My Favorite Things,” and perhaps the most user-friendly song in the catalogue, which isn’t to say that it’s not as high-energy or punishing as the rest of the album, but it’s lyrical in a way the rest is not. The guitar insanity probably reaches it zenith in “Graduale”, the intro/outro riff a Zeppelin rip-off, in between coming more notes faster in more unexpected ways, generating the least familiar but most instantly recognizable stuff you’ve heard in a guitar “solo” in some time.
Orthodox Jazz sees no drop-off in quality. If there’s a change here in Musica Transonic’s practices, it’s that the relation to their sources is tighter than before. “Just and Deserving” shows a more direct Fushitsusha influence than in the past, and could almost be part of the “magic” cycle from Allegorical Misunderstandings: sweeping guitar strumming dissonant chords off the beat, all the instruments conspiring to create large amounts of tension the release of which is long deferred. The opening track, “Light of Truth,” quotes the riff from “Four Sticks,” while “Holy Western” is the only Musica Transonic song that starts off from a riff that’s meant to be heard as jazz, the point being to take off from a “Moten Swing,” Basie-esque line and see how fast one can launch into the higher realms of noisy and splattering guitar. “Humble Ourselves” nods to Funkadelic, the guitar especially going in for moves reminiscent of Eddie Hazel, starting with a classic wah-drenched sound, and if possible it makes the original look weak.
An orthographic note: the track listings on Musica Transonic albums are in Greek script, as are the titles of A Pilgrim’s Solace and Orthodox Jazz. Thus, you often see those albums referred to as “second album” and “third album.” (Damp Squid is “properly” the third album, I suppose.) The names transliterate pretty directly, though, with some ad hoc adjustments due mainly to the fact that Greek doesn’t have a character for “h” or “j.”
Mainliner, as noted, goes straight where Musica Transonic goes for the hairpin turn. By all accounts, Mellow Out (with a different drummer in place of Yoshida) sounds much like Mainliner Sonic, in which each song is a classic hardcore riff that draws new life from the trio’s instrumental prowess. The sound is the same as Musica Transonic, but gone is the pluralism of style. What’s there instead is minimalism. “Mainliner Sonic” holds to the same groove throughout its length, but with minor variations that don’t really build in the normal sense. Most bands, when they don’t treat a good hardcore riff like a ball to toss around, maybe put it in different places in the song with different things around it. Here, riffs are territory to wander around in and explore a little. “Tsukisasaru” is structurally more conventional, but rocking though it is, the level it ascends to is a peaceful place. It’s not music as a soundtrack to smash things to, or productive of visions of such activity, but instead blissful in its way, making you rethink what necessary connection there has to be between restraint and spirituality in music. Psychedelic Polyhedron (released in an edition of 500) consists of two side-long tracks which take their time in developing, and, with their much slower tempo and wah-wah guitar, are less purely “hardcore” and more psychedelic.
This music is serious in intent, artistic in ambition and lacking avant-garde obsessions. It’s easy to suppose that such aims could only be served by material that was more formally intricate, more overtly intellectual, etc.; to that idea, these bands are a needed corrective. This is music whose motives are intensely and purely musical, and pointy heads everywhere who think they know what that means should have their pates flattened by a few listens. “Heavy” indeed.