For many people the term ‘psychedelic music’ is synonymous with drugs. Lots and lots of drugs. Psychedelic folk equals folk music plus drugs. Psychedelic soul equals soul music plus drugs. Psychedelic acid rock equals drugs plus drugs plus a few more drugs after that.
For many people the term ‘psychedelic music’ is synonymous with drugs. Lots and lots of drugs. Psychedelic folk equals folk music plus drugs. Psychedelic soul equals soul music plus drugs. Psychedelic acid rock equals drugs plus drugs plus a few more drugs after that. It’s an unavoidable association considering how directly related the use of LSD and other hallucinogens was to the creative flourishing of so many artists in the mid to late 60s. But while drugs played an essential role in the psychedelic culture of the United States and the UK (its initial incubators), they cannot entirely account for the various ways in which it manifested internationally.
The sense of freedom and disregard for tradition that psychedelic music embodied was a catalyst for progressive-minded musicians in other countries to craft new forms of expression that they felt spoke more directly to their nations’ collective consciousness. In Japan—-a country that nearly implemented martial law when the Beatles came to visit in 1966, fearing the Fab Four’s influence on its conservative culture—-psychedelic music provided skeptical and disenfranchised youth with the proof they were looking for that life had more to offer than the tedium and conformity that were the hallmarks of their heavily industrialized society.
Cue Acid Mothers Temple (also known as Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O., and about a thousand other equally baffling, phenomenal names), a Japanese music collective that in its own way is doing more to preserve the spirit of psychedelia than any band that comes to mind. Like Boredoms, their homeland contemporaries, and even Western counterparts like Secret Chiefs 3 and The Fall, the Acid Mothers are not so much genre hoppers as genre jugglers, in whose music one can hear simultaneous gestures toward free jazz, folk, arena rock, noise rock, and any other category you might find on a Wikipedia list of modern music. Some listeners are turned off by such exuberance, suspecting that beneath the endless guitar solos, the atonal keyboard bleats, and the sudden shifts of tempo and time signature is nothing more than a hollow core of musical masturbation—-a reckless abandon that is all breadth and no depth. Frank Zappa, an equally unpredictable composer who faced similar criticism, defended his work by coining the term “creative continuity.” Yes, he wrote rock songs, country songs, tin-pan alley songs, and novelty songs, but they were all coming from a single mind, and if sometimes his music seemed puerile or shallow, it was nourished by the same river as the great stuff, and so why get picky?
In its lifespan, Acid Mothers Temple has been host to a revolving court of musical talent, featuring everyone from classically trained harpist Magic Aum Gigi to drummer Yatsuda Yoshida of Ruins fame. While each past and present member has made distinct contributions to the band’s sound over the years, it is undoubtedly guitarist Kawabata Makoto who provides the group’s creative continuity. Though it wasn’t until 1995 that Kawabata formed Acid Mothers, as an alienated youth in Okinawa his consciousness was deeply informed by the Western psychedelic movement. When pressed in interviews for details regarding his approach to music, he uses words like “aura” and “animism” to an almost laughable degree. But what at first seems like regurgitated psychobabble lifted wholesale from a Timothy Leary book is soon revealed as an almost stubborn allegiance to an outlook on life he’s clearly cultivated independently. From a 2010 interview:
Q: When do you usually start working on a new piece?
A: When I can hear music from the cosmos.
Q: How do you see the relationship between sound, space and composition?
A: Same answer again. My cosmos tells me everything what and how I should play. That’s all.
And so on. At no point does he make any attempt to extrapolate or pander. He makes the music he makes simply because this is the music he makes, and if we’re not in tune with it, that’s okay–we’re in different cosmos.
A confession: going into the Acid Mothers show at Strange Matter last Saturday, I was not a fan of this band. I’m still not a fan. I’m not sure it’s possible to be a fan. Like Kawabata himself, the music is not interested in your personal experience of it. A typical song begins with a simple guitar line of five or six notes. After a minute (or sometimes a few minutes) one half of the band begins to play a groove that compliments the initial riff while the other half plays one that seems in direct opposition to it. The musicians become gradually more aggressive in their playing style until it becomes clear that there is some sort of bizarre battle taking place. The drummer dukes it out with the bass player, the guitars duke it out with each other, and keyboardist Tsuyama Atsushi goes rogue and creates sounds with his instrument that would be more at home in some Lovecraftian fifth dimension than a moderately sized club in Richmond, Virginia.
Then, at a point that’s difficult to pinpoint, an olive branch is extended and the opposing waves of noise join forces to create… well, a bigger wave of noise. Hellish, chest-bursting noise, the prevailing element of which is Kawabata’s guitar soloing, which seems as in debt to Edgar Winter as it is to Thurston Moore. The noise eventually exhausts itself of its own momentum, and after it (very slowly) peters out, is replaced by another guitar line of five or six notes that will set us up for the next piece.
There is a biological quality to the music, a sense of it being birthed, nurtured and put to sleep before your very eyes. Despite the numerous valiant efforts at head-bobbing I observed around me, your responsibility to this music is not so much to be moved but to watch it move. We are not listeners but witnesses. And sometimes it’s difficult to witness—-boring, repetitive, seemingly endless—-but during those moments when the music lives up to its greatest potential, you’re so glad to have experienced the struggle it took to get there.
As the band’s final tidal wave of noise began to crest and dissipate, Kawabata raised his guitar above his head and hung it from the rafters like a severed head, where it remained long after the show had ended and the various members had taken to the bar for a quick drink before moving on to the next city. Outside I asked a woman if she had liked the music. “I don’t know if I liked it,” she said, “but I definitely feel something.” So did I, and it was far from bad. Arigato.
