Japan 2 - High Rise
To listen to the music of Asahito Nanjo, bassist-vocalist with the Japanese band High Rise, is to be reminded of Ian Gillan's famous aside on Deep Purple's live Made In Japan album: "I want everything louder than everything else."
High Rise's sound is the logical extension of the pure-noise potential implicit in the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Blue Cheer, and the Stooges' music, reflective of both the Japanese national propensity for excess (as manifested in their TV game shows, wherein contestants are subjected to treatment far more dangerous and degrading than the most unscrupulous Western producers would ever dream of, and the hotel at the end of the bullet train line, which caters to businessmen who got so shithammered on the train that they fell asleep and missed their stops) and the ability of latter-day bands to take the salient characteristics of older bands' signature sounds much, much farther than the originators ever dreamed of. (Poetry rocker Dan McGuire recently described the band Mammatus' sound to me as "a crushing progressive hard rock, more menacing, pounding, and crushing than anything Sabbath ever did" by way of explaining why he chose to use a track of theirs on his upcoming Phosphene River CD.)
Take Mellow Out, the 1995 debut album by Mainliner, a collaboration between Nanjo and Acid Mother's Temple guitarist Makoto Kawabata. This grouping supposedly came about because Nanjo felt that High Rise guitarist Munehiro Narita's Detroit influences were holding the band back from exploring their full noise potential, and Mellow Out certainly does that. Imagine if the Stooges' epochal Funhouse album _started out_ with its climactic "energy free-form freakout" apocalypse "L.A. Blues" and then got even _more_ intensely out of control for 35 minutes. All of Mellow Out's sounds are so distorted as to become a sonic blur -- even the drums!
The same dynamic is at work on High Rise's Live from 1994, which features a similarly assaultive, all-needles-in-the-red-at-all-times mix (if Gary Kellgren, who engineered the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat, were here, he'd be turning in his grave), but with more recognizable song structures and the added plus of the aforementioned Munehiro Narita's fuzz-and-wah-saturated guitar, which, with all its crazy glisses and hammers-on, sounds for all the world like Jimi Hendrix at the end of his tether, Blue Cheer's Leigh Stephens with a better tone, or the Stooges' Ron Asheton with more ideas. Or maybe a better analogy would be Sonny Sharrock running roughshod over the Hendrix Experience rhythm section. This sucker _smokes_, and you won't believe that three cats could play this hard for this long, but they do. (In some ways, I prefer the less-distorted mix on High Rise's Disallow album, from which a couple of the songs on Live are drawn, plus the drummer on Disallow can rawk like Mitch Mitchell in 6/8!)
This is some of the most intense rock music ever made; next to it, almost anything else sounds weak and thin. You can hear echoes of High Rise's approach in Boris' more uptempo efforts, but the latter band seems relatively restrained in comparison, sonically speaking. Nanjo-san provides in spades what Deep Purple's Gillan asked for only in jest.
To be continued...
High Rise's sound is the logical extension of the pure-noise potential implicit in the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Blue Cheer, and the Stooges' music, reflective of both the Japanese national propensity for excess (as manifested in their TV game shows, wherein contestants are subjected to treatment far more dangerous and degrading than the most unscrupulous Western producers would ever dream of, and the hotel at the end of the bullet train line, which caters to businessmen who got so shithammered on the train that they fell asleep and missed their stops) and the ability of latter-day bands to take the salient characteristics of older bands' signature sounds much, much farther than the originators ever dreamed of. (Poetry rocker Dan McGuire recently described the band Mammatus' sound to me as "a crushing progressive hard rock, more menacing, pounding, and crushing than anything Sabbath ever did" by way of explaining why he chose to use a track of theirs on his upcoming Phosphene River CD.)
Take Mellow Out, the 1995 debut album by Mainliner, a collaboration between Nanjo and Acid Mother's Temple guitarist Makoto Kawabata. This grouping supposedly came about because Nanjo felt that High Rise guitarist Munehiro Narita's Detroit influences were holding the band back from exploring their full noise potential, and Mellow Out certainly does that. Imagine if the Stooges' epochal Funhouse album _started out_ with its climactic "energy free-form freakout" apocalypse "L.A. Blues" and then got even _more_ intensely out of control for 35 minutes. All of Mellow Out's sounds are so distorted as to become a sonic blur -- even the drums!
The same dynamic is at work on High Rise's Live from 1994, which features a similarly assaultive, all-needles-in-the-red-at-all-times mix (if Gary Kellgren, who engineered the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat, were here, he'd be turning in his grave), but with more recognizable song structures and the added plus of the aforementioned Munehiro Narita's fuzz-and-wah-saturated guitar, which, with all its crazy glisses and hammers-on, sounds for all the world like Jimi Hendrix at the end of his tether, Blue Cheer's Leigh Stephens with a better tone, or the Stooges' Ron Asheton with more ideas. Or maybe a better analogy would be Sonny Sharrock running roughshod over the Hendrix Experience rhythm section. This sucker _smokes_, and you won't believe that three cats could play this hard for this long, but they do. (In some ways, I prefer the less-distorted mix on High Rise's Disallow album, from which a couple of the songs on Live are drawn, plus the drummer on Disallow can rawk like Mitch Mitchell in 6/8!)
This is some of the most intense rock music ever made; next to it, almost anything else sounds weak and thin. You can hear echoes of High Rise's approach in Boris' more uptempo efforts, but the latter band seems relatively restrained in comparison, sonically speaking. Nanjo-san provides in spades what Deep Purple's Gillan asked for only in jest.
To be continued...
posted by stashdauber at 1:47 AM
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