Acid Mothers Temple, Zagreb 2010. © Carl A
Sometimes you find yourself in luck. I had barely landed in Zagreb, Croatia, before I found out that there would be a ”Japanese New Music Festival” in town that very same evening. The pleasantness of this event turned into a more genuine sense of joy when I realised that it wasn’t actually going to be yet another Embassy endorsed noise gala for Merzbowites. No, this was going to be something completely different: an evening staged at a small club by the legendary band Acid Mothers Temple. All the support acts were in fact the members of AMT solo and/or various interbred combos. To be eventually topped by a sensory overload from this planet’s most charming psych samurais in union, Acid Mothers Temple.
First on stage was singer and guitarist Kawabata Makoto, who played his electric guitar with a bow in hypnotic fashion. It did remind me a bit about Jimmy Page from time to time, mid 70s Zeppelin era, but the sonoric atmosphere was added to by some Tibetan singing bowls and various strange vocals. ”My music will make you very sleepy. I’m sorry…”, Makoto said in broken English before he even began playing. The audience cheered loudly in Croatian and Makoto nodded back at them. A mutual understanding of minds (or should I say ”heads”?).
After that came Ruins, which is drummer Shimura Koji’s solo show. He treated the drums as a dearly beloved punching bag – sometimes with a frenetic brutality and sometimes with whipping caresses. Quite interesting to see someone go against the grain too… Where a lot of people use pre-recorded drums and percussive sounds to play against or over, Shimura did it the other way around. Pre-recorded instruments, fragments of songs, strange arrangements and pieces of music history were all assembled in a tape reorder and hammered to the ground by his energetic live drumming. And he sang at the same time. It looked crazy. It sounded crazy. And it probably was just that: crazy.
After this drumfest followed Akaten, which is the very same Shimura together with bass player Tabata Mitsuru. They began by playing carefully on their trousers’ flies (the word ”contact microphone” acquired a new meaning this evening), after which they played mineral water bottles, grate irons, toy guitars and even a miked up camera. Some inarticulately absurdistic theater was woven into this overall weirdness, and the young Croatian audience probably didn’t know exactly what had hit them. But there was no mistaking the fact that they enjoyed it immensely.
To make everything somewhat equal, Kawabata entered the stage again and played together with Tabata, this time under the moniker ”The Zombies from Hell”. Deep Purple’s ”Smoke on the water” was turned into a Down’s Syndromed school of rock-rehearsal, Led Zeppelin’s ”Immigrant Song” to a choir of frenzied retards backed up by distorted guitars and some seriously insane growling. Finally these Japanese zombies performed a wonderful and quite striking charicature of Miles Davis.
Then followed a moment of vocal jazz starring all three of them together, again backed up by inexplicable theater antics. Incomprehensible? Totally. And, as if all this wasn’t enough, it was soon time for Acid Mothers Temple proper. The three middle aged rock heroes grabbed their instruments and revved up the circus engines as if their lives depended on it.
The word ”freakout” is probably the most fitting one to describe what actually happened – or at least how I perceived it to be. Short song structures rolled by, often interrupted or interspersed by improvisations. It was often quite hard to know what was what (probably a conscious manoeuvre on their side and, also, what did it matter?) but I can almost guarantee that noone in the packed club cared one little bit.
One moment, you were swept away in a psychedelic rock’n’roll-blast whereupon you caught yourself laughing loudly at the sheer absurdity of it all, and yet another moment you were startled by violent sonoric twists, and yet another you noted that someone in the audience either had an orgasm or an epileptic fit (or both). It was generally a Gesamt overload of the very finest brand – the brand of the Acid Mothers Temple.
This specific evening AMT were far removed from the somewhat more accessible (strange term in their case) acid rock they’ve entertained us with over the years, like ”Children of the drab” or ”Stone woman & record”. The live sound and the performance in itself was much more avant garde and reminded me more of material from the ”Are we experimental?” album. But I find that it’s hard to describe a totality composed of so many parts. The music in itself is just one part, albeit instrumental (pardon the pun!), of AMT’s stage show. To see these three manic Japanese gentlemen explode with energy is, to put it simply, something else.
It was very interesting to be there at the ”Japanese New Music Festival” in Zagreb on that chilly evening in November 2010. I thought back at a concert with Nissenenmondai that I had seen/heard recently then, the three wonderful Japanese girls who, with a similar kind of Geist, take on a post-punk-new-wave approach in an equally (?) far out manner. I would be sursprised if the Nissenenmondai girls haven’t taught themselves the basics by listening to Acid Mothers Temple.
I don’t really know if it’s the atomic bomb or Godzilla or Hello Kitty or whatever that’s actually causing these things to happen. There is something so delightfully disturbed in just about everything that the Japanese do, and I don’t think I’m alone in feeling sincerely grateful for that.
Acid Mothers Temple, et al
KZET Club, Zagreb, Croatia, November 2nd, 2010
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