Friday Playlists: Japanese Psychedelia

For this dreary and meditative November, it's time to tune in, drop out and rock the fuck out to Japanese riff worship

JAPANESE PSYCH PLAYLIST LINK

Gaspar Noé insists that there is a wild drug culture in Tokyo. It was his many trips to japan and “trips” experienced in Japan that of course compelled him to shoot Enter the Void, his psychedelic masterpiece about the out of body and hallucinatory experience at the moment of death, inside that country. When I was in Japan, I didn’t take any drugs, and certainly didn’t find any drug culture. On the contrary, Japan has incredibly strict drug laws. You can be caught with less than a gram of weed and be jailed up to seven years, and foreigners when arrested for possession are often held in jail for 28 days before they are even allowed to reach their embassies. Predictably, the country’s rates of drug addiction are fractional to what they are here.

Nevertheless, Japan is the most psychedelic country on Earth. As soon as you are there, you feel different; enlightened, at peace, everything looks bright and new. It’s hard to define the feeling, but it goes beyond the flashing neon signs of Tokyo and the bountiful temples and the sheer culture shock of it all. You can get to a train station like Shinjuku Station, and find yourself absolutely overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of human beings whizzing past you. But then just a few stations away from that is a neighborhood like Oji, where you’ll find yourself in an environment that almost feels like a hybrid of a forest and a city. There is a lot of nature in Tokyo, despite the city’s industrialization. It’s a massive city. Population 34 million, with a greater metro area that doubles that of New York in size. There’s so much going on, so much to see, so much LIFE. But there are also strange and surreal moments where you will find yourself on a street and realize that you are the only person there. The clash between sensory overload and utter tranquility makes you feel like you’re tripping the whole time you’re there.

Japanese psychedelic rock dates back to the late sixties, to Tokyo and Kyoto specifically, one of its most surreal cities. Perhaps the true origin lies in the story of Flower Travelin Band founder Yuya Uchida, who started performing music globally in the fifties and by 1966 had the opportunity to open for the Beatles. He became friends with John Lennon, who took him to see Jimi Hendrix. Yuya was so blown away by the volume and intensity of Hendrix’s playing, that he immediately went home and started FTB, creating a sound based on what he heard. Les Rallizes Dénudés, the iconic and ever mysterious rock n’ roll band that never officially released a debut album but has been obsessed over in the form of live bootlegs for decades, was founded by Takashi Mizutani in 1967 and defined the Japanese psych aesthetic even a bit deeper. Mizutani discovered The Velvet Underground, Blue Cheer, Captain Beefheart, and Jimi Hendrix, and took the mutant rock cues of those bands and applied the Japanese transcendentalism to it that makes Japanese psych rock distinguishable from similar bands of the West.

The genre has never let up since then, but reached its apex in the eighties around one label, P.S.F. Records. The label released music by legendary acts like improv guitar maestro Keiji Haino’s rock band Fushitsusha, the truly ear scorching over amplified guitar meltdowns of Kawabata Makoto’s Mainliner trio, and High Rise, a band that initially called themselves “Psychedelic Speed Freaks” which describes the sound well enough as it. Japanese psych always blends a worship of loud Western rock with a detectable avant-garde sensibility. Makoto, for instance, said his music collective formed after Mainliner, Acid Mother’s Temple, was a deliberate effort to combine the aesthetics of Hendrix with avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. More than that, however, the music is one that embodies the post-bomb Japanese landscape; the artists seek to maintain a Japanese identity while being avalanched with Western and American culture and products.

I discuss this genre at length on the Agitator podcast here