Japanese Imports [Part II]: Boredom as Energy

by Ari Abramowitz
6 April 2006

[Continued from Part I]

NAKED CITY had their jaw-dropping, 37-styles-of-music-in-52-second thing going on; MR. BUNGLE was able to convert some of the same aesthetic into a rock context. DAVID BOWIE had his chameleonic phases and SYD BARRETT had his various psycho-emotional states. These are obviously some of the all-time greats in musical adventurousness.

Still, their many facets tended to appear side-by-side: Naked City with its discrete classical, funk, jazz, or channel-surfing pieces, Bowie with each album’s conceptual styles, Syd in his childlike naivety that spiral downward into bad-trips. Mr. Bungle was sometimes able to create Zen diagrams where funk, metal, and circus music simultaneously pranced naked around the maypole. But just as turn-of-the-‘90s Japan was one of the hottest crucibles I’ve ever heard, BOREDOMS were—and still are—one of the most intriguing, polymorphous, genre-splattering groups I’ve ever heard.

When you splatter genres, just like splattering colors, you get some areas that are a brownish heap but you also get areas as pure as the paint out of the tube and you even get areas in which a couple of colors get together to form another color that you’ve never seen before. Boredoms cover all of these regions, using their hands, feet, butts, mouths, and whatever else is lying around.

After screwing around for a few years, they inserted themselves into 1986 with the wonderfully titled 7”, Anal by Anal. Tracks included “Anal Eater” and “Born to Anal.” That’s punk—and really funny, too.

More absurdist punk followed (with song titles that cite THE STOOGES and SEX PISTOLS). This was all embryonic: fairly crappy, but showing potential with its energy and enthusiasm. Soon, vocalist YAMATSUKA EYE began his involvement with JOHN ZORN and his avant prog jazz punk noise surf band, Naked City (TATSUYA YOSHIDA also played in an early incarnation of this group). Interestingly, Zorn has credited Boredoms for influencing Naked City, but he clearly also had a strong influence on them by the time of 1990 LP Soul Discharge. This 28-minute suite was as butthole-bonkers as ever, but Zorn and Naked City’s proficiency and multi-genre approach were coming in from the front and behind.

The major difference is that, while tightening up, Boredoms stayed super-loose, which allowed them to stir everything together the way a kid would throw some marshmallows, peanut butter, chocolate chips, and Skittles into the cookie dough, rather than having a 43-course meal. They also used happily screaming hippy-commune-on-Pluto vocals to cut through all the tracks and the spaces in between the tracks, which, oddly, gave it all a measure of cohesiveness. These things make it more organic, less brain-frying and more fun to spin to. Also helping is a distinct emerging funk vibe, amongst a fleeting SLAYER riff, a lava lamp plasma punk beat, and a dazzling, final-segment, psychedelic soar. Any doubts, still? Check out the liner notes on the inner jacket: “This is psychoalphadiscobetaaudioaquadooloop… get off yr dea dass and dance on the bollocks…” This ain’t like any kind of psychedelic/funk/metal/punk music that had been previously played on this planet.

Jaws dropped and all eyes were agog when, soon after, the band was signed to a major label! (thank you, Reprise and NIRVANA). The LP that followed, Pop Tatari, was their most traditionally musical album up to that point and perhaps the most psychotic release ever authorized by a major label. They even toured with Lollapalooza. An overall sense of gleeful, enthusiastic, noisy silliness was still doing head-stands and body-bumps but there were also some jams with heavy, near-metal riffing (and live, the band was seriously heavy around this time, with those riffs and a steaming two-drummer line-up first introduced on Soul Discharge). This heaviness may have been partially due to their close relationship with grind/death metal band, BRUTAL TRUTH).

The funkiness also became more overt, as did a kind of party vibe with two vocalist/MC-types sharing the stage. Hell, they even aped the whistled intro to BILLY JOEL’s “The Stranger” somewhere in the trip. The combination of the silliness, heavy guitars, and funkiness gave this listener the impression of a Bizzaro-land, out-to-lunch, spazoid-brain FUNKADELIC. Again, I have to emphasize over and over again how amazingly (and seemingly without precedent) the band does all of this stuff: metal riffing, funky beats, psychedelic trippiness, tribal insanity, child-like playfulness, and everything else ALL AT ONCE.

But the polymorphously perverse evolution didn’t come close to ending there: several loose, weirder-than-usual EPs and DJ remix albums, a hip hop side project, a psychedelic pop side project, and who-knows-what-else all followed over the next few years. Soon, the band emerged from a sort of creative cocoon as a soaring psychedelic band. Eye had even sprouted dreadlocks, perhaps symbolically. The two-drummer line-up remained, as did the guitars. But rather than being splattered and gleefully spazzed-about they were being channeled into long tracks of propulsive drums pushing shining, clean guitar, twinkling keys, leading to the revelatory trips of certain tracks “Super Ae” and “Vision Creation Newsun.”

This brings us to the present, the Seadrum part of 2005’s split disc, Seadrum/House of Sun, which features no guitars, three drummers, harp-like piano, and Eye as an incantatory shaman with surprisingly beautiful, multi-tracked, high-vocal chants. The group’s percussive musicianship, with its phases, polyrhythm, and super loose-tightness is as good as any in contemporary psychedelic rock. This stuff feels like it approaches pure energy. Eye guides it up, down, around, up, and up. The sky opens and you’re somewhere other than where you started. This is basically what most good music is about, whether a classical symphony, a jazz excursion, a prog epic, a punk set, or a psychedelic trip (pop music is a different story altogether).

Filed under psychedelic punk