Image of the Week #5: Noise in Osaka

With the jet lag finally faded, Adam recalls the NWN and Hospital Productions Festival in Osaka

I’ve returned home from Japan. Technically, I’ve been home since Thursday, but that jet lag is a motherfucker. I went to Japan for all the reasons you’d typically go there: beauty, ancient monuments, general sightseeing, obscene levels of fashion victimizing and record shopping, romantic renewal with my beloved, and otherwise.

But the impetus for the two week trek was of course the Hospital Productions and Nuclear War Now! festival in Osaka. As stated before, Dominick Fernow, the man of Prurient fame and the proprietor of Hospital Productions, is a beloved friend and a coveted ally of the Safety Propaganda network. I would have trekked across the world to support him regardless of the festival’s promise, merely because he’s a stalwart man, a silent samurai who does not break and does not capitulate, and a most supportive friend. That the festival did in fact offer the mind blowing lineup of acts like Sabbat, Departure Chandelier and the mighty Beherit’s first show since 1994 on its NWN night and underground legends like Masonna, Genocide Organ and of course Prurient himself on its Hospital night only secured my support further.

The event didn’t disappoint. For one, traveling across the world to an exotic (albeit, highly developed) Southeast Asian country and meeting up with friends and acquaintances is already rather thrilling – familiar faces in an unfamiliar locale, and so on. The conditions were already optimal for a unique and even enlightening experience. The venue, Osaka’s Gorilla Hall, is located in Osaka’s sports village and boat race suminoe – the clash of hipsters and metalheads with Japaenese locals hitting the batting cages or driving ranges was one to behold. The Japanese also, it seemed to me anyways, play live music at volumes that is simply earth shattering and perhaps even shocking to Western music fans. I’d perhaps heard similar volumes played by the likes of My Bloody Valentine or Merzbow in New York, but that’s their thing. EVERY act in Osaka sounded that fucking loud if not louder.

I didn’t see the entire festival, of course – I was balancing seeing as many shows as I possibly could while also being able to see as much of Osaka, Kyoto, Tokyo, and Nara as I could while I was there (surely not going back anytime soon.) But I saw a lot. I’ll briefly recount that which I saw and heard.

The first night of the festival was dedicated to Yosuke Konishi’s label Nuclear War Now vaunted roster of A-list extreme metal bands. I was disappointed to have just missed the OG Japanese black metal unit Abigail by mere minutes, but thankfully walked in to the stadium area as the even more original and more gangsta Japanese thrash/black metal band Sabbat, which formed in Kuwana in the early ‘80s, took the stage. They were fantastic.

In opposition to the often overly severe and self seriousness of the European black metal bands, Sabbat is joyous, raucous, and funny. It’s simplistic head banging music that you can thrash about to. The band’s bass player and now de facto frontman Gezol performed completely nude, save for the obligatory black metal combat belt wrapped around his waist, covering his junk. The band seemed intent on freaking people out only as much as they showed them a good time. A good time it was.

Departure Chandelier played next. I don’t know how much I’m supposed to say about who is in this band, because they don’t reveal their identities in press clips and most of its members are famous for other extreme music acts. As far as I know, they haven’t played live much. They were fucking amazing. Blisteringly loud. Intense. Surreal. But also, still very rocking. The band opened with its new album Satan Soldier of Fortune’s most anthemic track “Hard as a Coffin Nail.” I had told the band’s guitar player before that I wanted the track to soundtrack the credits to my theoretical Ronnie Coleman/Dorian Yates style VHS bodybuilding training video, and in a live setting the track got my dick harder than a coffin nail, so to speak. It was fun. It was unique, even. The Vancouver war metal pioneers Blasphemy followed, and it was indeed extreme. Blasphemy is a bit of an endurance test, though, and you have to be quite a committed metal head to be in love with the guttural nastiness of the band’s sound. I had to watch half of it from behind the protection of a monitor screen. I will say this: backstage they are the first metal band whose members absolutely seemed frightening and intimidating. All of them are massive and show the weathers of decades of hard living and touring. In case they are reading this I hope they know I mean it complimentarily (I might seem tough to you guys but in metal world I’m a hipster poser faggot.)

The mighty Finish black metal institution Beherit, my personal favorite black metal band of all time, headlined the first night. Oh my god, it was fucking INSANE! It was simply unbelievable that they had not played live in decades. Beherit also has those war metal guttural vocals, but the textures and atmosphere they yield are ritualistic and bizarrely psychedelic. The music was frightening, to be sure, but the band takes you places. You can watch them on the stage shrouded in mist just before you find yourself zoning out into some hellish dimension of the mind. It’s war metal, but also contemplative, a rumination on conquest.

Night two was dedicated to Hospital and I felt more comfortable for several reasons. One, a friend of mine had organized the night. Two, many of my friends were playing. And three, many of the absolutely empty headed and retarded metalheads present the night prior had disappeared. Thank fucking god.

Again, I missed something I was truly looking forward to seeing in Osakan noise icon Thirdorgan, which had always stood out in Japanoise for its more strict adherence to a European leaning industrial sound, but I fucking missed it. Fuck. Ok, I walked in about half way through the beautiful couple and personal friends of mine Tara and Mike Connelly’s Yellow Gas Flames project and was ecstatic to hear how pulsating and vibrational their sound was in a bigger arena than the last time that I saw them. Mike and Tara also refuse to sit back behind the desk and stand there, opting to PERFORM and do so with a libidinal and pornographic gusto.

The mighty Japanese industrial act Linekraft played next, and ranked among my favorite sets of the weekend. The man performs shirtless, exposing his full body suit tattoos that are rendered in the traditional Japanese style. The tattoos lead many a viewer to associate Linekraft with the Yakuza – he’s not a Yakuza, but the tattoos are undoubtedly a provocation. The entirety of the time that I was in Japan I wore long sleeves to hide my tattoos – you are treated poorly by the Japanese if they see them. Linekraft’s shiftlessness then is an act of courage and rebellion at once. The sound of his performance was a slow builder, developing slowly towards an epic climax. He used a unique percussion set-up, occasionally moving over to it to hammer it with the full strength of his body. His video presentation rendered images of Imperial Japan, Mishima, and other signifiers of his country’s national independence and legacy of conquest. At the set’s dizzying and transcendental noise overload climax, Linekraft contorted and twisted his body into a style of dance movement similar to Kazuo Ohno’s Butoh style, demonstrating an agile athleticism. Was kewl.

Hungry, I temporarily left the venue to stuff myself full of more Japanese curry and tonkatsu, missing Agonal Lust in the process. I got back in time for Dominick’s solo set as Prurient. Incredible. I got to watch him from about four feet away from where he performed. The music transitioned seamlessly from the Prurient name sake ear destroying noise to a more beat oriented sound reminiscent of Dom’s Vatican Shadow work. I found myself dancing, and I assume that if the show was at Berghain, others would have done so as well. But it’s noise. Noise kids stand there and nod their heads. It is what it is. The beats subsided and one final blast of overloaded noise filled the venue. The vocals were subdued, like Dominick calmly delivering an ominous sermon. Prurient’s visual presentation collaged recognizable images from his oeuvre with references to the Son of Sam. After his set, Dominick expressed disappointment with how it all went over.

”Are you kidding me?” I responded. “You had those kids eating off of the palm of your dick.” I wasn’t exaggerating.

All right. Genocide Organ was next. Lots of anticipation for the German power electronics pioneers – I had never seen them before and, clearly, a potent reputation precedes them. I joined the other VIPs in the rafters to watch this one. From moment one, it was perhaps the tensest live music experience that I’ve ever had. It’s hard to describe such a thing as enjoyable, unless your idea of enjoyment is being pinned to the ground by Chael Sonnen and relentlessly punched in the nose, jaw and head. Genocide Organ is an auditory and visual exploration of hatred. That is what it is. The group screams violent sermons through distorted microphones to waves of repetitive blasts of intense synthetic sound. Images of death, genocide, warfare, and general human ugliness illustrate the background. I’ll admit, even for me — as detached as anyone could be in the face of extreme culture — the 70-minute set proved something of an extreme endurance test. Whence joined by the other legends of European power electronics Grey Wolves — a surprise appearance — as well as Prurient, who collaborated with GO on an album in 2023, only intensified the brutality of it all. Perhaps this is the best explanation of the brutality witnessed during this set: my wife, who does not like industrial music at all, was an absolute trooper during the festival and did her best to enjoy the experience of it all. There was only one act that truly upset and triggered her in a visceral manner: Genocide Organ.

What I saw last was what I was most excited for: the mighty Japanese noise icon Masonna. Throughout the weekend, the artist, also known as Maso Yamazaki, had a decoy out in the crowd dressed as him – a signal of the postmodern knowing and conceptual intrigue of the artist’s approach. So, I was surprised to finally catch the man sound checking and realized, to my humor, that I had already met Masonna backstage the night prior. He is a feminine Japanese man with a bob cut in his late fifties and an absolute genius. Masonna was the first noise artist I ever developed interest in due to his usage of references to psychedelia and acid rock, so I was stoked to hear him sound checking for what seemed like a half an hour – small blasts of noise so loud that each tinker of his set board likely damaged my already damaged hearing. The set itself was everything I could have hoped it to be: the loudest thing you’ve ever heard while Masonna rolled around on the floor to a nauseating and epileptic seizure inducing strobe light show. It was over in three minutes. So absurd. Funny, and a brilliant and fitting end.

Beherit ended the show with an electronic set, but by that point I was exhausted. I said my good byes and vanished into the busy center of Osaka’s Dotobourri neighborhood to decompress.

Again, thank you to Dominick for putting on such an incredible event, and for giving us the King and Queen treatment. This is something I can do to pay it forward.

All images and videos by Adam Lehrer

1. Prurient
2. Sabbat
3. Departure Chandelier
4. Blasphemy
5. Sabbat
6. Beherit
7. Yellow Gas Flames
8. Linekraft
9. Linekraft
10. Prurient
11. Genocide Organ
12. Masonna
13. Dom, Adam and Brett Wag
14. Mike and Tara Connelly
15. Sam Franklin watches Genocide Organ