Japan is a particular place to live in
and to make art. One of the most conservative countries in the world,
is also inhabited by some of the most hard working men in the world.
They quite often use the so-called 'performative drugs' (like
cocaine) to stay on business, but they don't talk that much about it
since it's 'improper'.
On the other hand, Japan had met the
powerful energy of the atomic bomb at the end of WWII, in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. A scar still vivid in the collective consciousness of
the entire country. This combination of psychological repression and
surviving a mass destruction created the conditions for developing
some form of arts completely different from that of the other
industrialised countries.
As an example, Japan didn't have
post-modernity, that peculiar condition of having the right words but
not the feelings, the remaining of the structures of speech without
the subject that is typical of a Thomas Pynchon, but instead Japan
had the interpenetration of life and death, as you can read in Yukio
Mishima and see in Nobuyoshi Araki.
While the subject is fading in the
Western world, it becomes hypertrophic in Japan. You can observe this
phenomenon in music, particularly in free jazz during the 1960s:
Yosuke Yamashita, Kaoru Abe, Masahiko Satoh, it's as all of them were
screaming for coming out of the pain for living. And it's obviously
the same for guitarist and singer Keiji Haino.
Haino was the frontman of the
impronoise trio Lost Aaraff during the 1970s, but it was in 1981 that
he became a true legend with the album Watashi Dake?, the japanese
answer to Trout Mask Replica. During the decades, he refined his
style coming to a sort of elaboration of the blues he called
'ahyhiyo'. You can listen to the result in the beautiful Black Blues
from 2004.
Early this year, Haino joined the metal
combo SUMAC, lead by guitarist and vocalist Aaron Turner to give life
to this project called American Dollar Bill, which contains some of
the best extreme music you'll listen to this year. The music is as
abstract and destructured as hypnotic, nervous and anxious. There are
some quieter parts here and there – but it's fire smoldering
beneath the ashes – and full blasts of pure willingness of power.
In 1972 photographer Daido Moriyama
gave life to his most uncompromising and experimental book, “Farewell
Photography”, full of shots taken as trials to the setting of the
camera, wrong framings, as the 'self' of the photographer was
dyonisiacally going to pieces testifying his drift into the world,
and this music is the perfect companion to those images.
More than simply extreme noise, this
album is a good photography of our egos, repressed by the rules of
society but still alive and ready to roar for a last call to our
humanity. Is Japan the future for all of us? Maybe, it's still the
present time, and it's our goal to say 'no' to repression. Music can
be an act of resistance.
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