When paired with Land Mass, a digital/tape counterpart via Flower Room, Red Resonant Earth exemplifies the grand expanse of LaJoie’s sonic vision. Immaculately looped passages of electric twelve-string wind like nimble tendrils through the opening textures of ‘Born Free’ and ‘Sprout’ before burrowing into the darker hues of ‘Mammoth’ and ‘Taos Hum > Claymaking,’ which spin out like Terry Riley and Roger McGuinn locked in perpetual dervish. The sprawling automatic compositions of Red Resonant Earth spring like mycorrhizae from the groundwork laid by kosimiche forerunners like Gottsching, Fricke, and Rother, reaching simultaneously toward realms both celestial and terrestrial. And we now get to complete our journey on our terms, on the highest note possible,” Kurosawa says."Matt LaJoie has been a wellspring of cosmically attuned guitar explorations under a multitude of monikers since co-founding the uncannily prolific Flower Room label with Ash Brooks in 2017. We poured time and energy into not just making music, but creating art, merchandise and a vision for what Kikagaku Moyo is. We wanted to play psychedelic music festivals and tour the world, which we did. Once the album was complete, the decision to bid goodbye came to the band, like their music, instinctively. On stage, they’re hypnotic and funky, humorous and personable, playing long eardrum-shattering solos without wavering from a smile. Since then, the venues have grown but their willingness to play around, to expand riffs and solos beyond imagination, to lull the audience into a collective psyche, endures. I was present for that performance, standing so close to the younger Kurosawa’s sitar that I could touch it. After playing shows in Japan and Europe, Kikagaku Moyo made their American debut at Berlin, a dimly lit hole in the wall in New York City, where the stage is a small platform only a few inches above the ground. Kumoyo Island “is influenced by the experience of touring, scenes from cars and stages, cultures that we experienced,” Katsurada says. “Adding words to it feels like a limitation to that imagination.” “When I’m making music, I’m first trying to make a playground for the five of us to enjoy playing in,” Kurosawa says. Kumoyo Island feels like a journey in solitude through a vast expanse. Each album is like a movie,” Katsurada says. “We don’t have many lyrics because we want to give people the space to imagine their own journey with the music. On their second record Forest of Lost Children, which goes from the unstudied jam of Semicircle to the bluesy guitar of Kodama, followed by feverish sitar in their cover of Ananda Shankar’s Streets of Calcutta and sombre melancholia in White Moon, a pattern emerged that Kikgaku Moyo would repeat with each subsequent album: Kurosowa’s drums jumpstart a crescendo that builds and then settles into a meditative close. But after the release of their fifth album, Kumoyo Island, Kikagaku Moyo are breaking up, after an international farewell tour: an explicitly un-American choice to avoid continuing, and possibly diluting, what they’ve created.įrontman and drummer Go Kurosawa. Drifting between vintage stores, bars populated by college students, and recording studios open late into the night, the quintet formed, and today, thanks to near-levitating live performances and spellbinding albums, they’re at the forefront of Japanese rock music. The dynamic energy of a Kikagaku Moyo live show – one in which the long-haired members of the band often digress into 10-minute long jams – stems from Takadanobaba, a college neighbourhood in the Shinjuku ward of Tokyo in the early 2010s. Watching people board the train every day? That’s psychedelic.” Our psychedelia doesn’t come from the hippy scene, it’s in nature, it’s in the chants you hear at the temple. “The music, the cinema, the culture, the freedom in not having to be technically perfect or be restricted. Go Kurosawa, the frontman of Kikagaku Moyo, also cites present-day Tokyo. But for Japanese band Kikagaku Moyo, psychedelia is exemplified by their nation’s countercultural heroes Acid Mothers Temple with their cauldron of intense fuzz, and Flower Travellin’ Band. W hen we think of psychedelic music, we think of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the 13th Floor Elevators, blurry images from Woodstock.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |