Is it possible that the greatest psychedelic noise rock group in the history of the world is an obscure Japanese band with a difficult name whose former members include a plane hijacker? And who couldn’t be bothered to release much of what they recorded? And whose singer/guitarist/resident genius, Takashi Mizutani, whose one-time association with members of Japan’s outlawed Red Army Faction led him to become a bona fide recluse out of fear he’d end up in prison?
It’s more than possible—it’s a fact. At their best, such as on the live recording YaneUra Sept. ’80—which wasn’t released until 2024, some five years or so after Mizutani’s death, the actual date of which is sketchy and didn’t become public knowledge until some two years after he passed away—delivered on some of the most ferocious guitar workouts ever to be committed to vinyl.
They weren’t exactly prolific songwriters—most of their many releases feature the same maybe dozen or so songs, which they would play completely differently on any given night. And the sound quality varies from recording to recording—one of the many advantages of the live YaneUra Sept. ’80 is that it sounds clear as a bell.
The band’s early sound from the late sixties to early seventies was truly chaotic, and so cranked-up in volume that someone said, “It was so loud, it hurt my skin.” They would cover songs like “Twist and Shout” (a must-hear) to “Tobacco Road” and played mostly at the destined-to-be-razed OZ club, hence the seminal OZ Tapes, which wasn’t released until 2022 by the frequent LRD chroniclers at the Temporal Drift label. There’s also OZ Days Live, a twofer released in 1973.
Mizutani was a fan of the Velvet Underground, Albert Ayler, the Stooges (and somewhat surprisingly the Grateful Dead), but performed alchemy-inspired freekdrones that led someone else to say, “It’s almost like people were brainwashed by his vibrations.”
Mizutani was a guitar wizard who played lots of barre chords and used “8 to 10″ effects pedals. And two chords were often all the band needed to blow you straight out of the club “European Son” style. They could slow things down—never my preferred mode, although they generate raw-boned, shambolic beauty at times.
Me, I prefer it when they kick out the jams Nippon style, which they do in spades on YaneUra Sept. ’80. They also had the tendency of stretching things out, as they do on “The Last One,” a ubiquitous show closer you’ll find on the September 1980 release, which should not be confused with the following month’s YaneUra Oct. ’ 80 LP, both of which were released by Temporal Drift in 2024.
The band on the September 1980 release was a quartet—in addition to Mizutani, there was second guitarist Fujio Yamaguchi, drummer Kodo Noma, and bassist Takada “Doronco” Kyohiro. The album includes four songs, lots of feedback and fuzz, and Noma drumbeats that spell d-r-o-n-e.
Sixteen-minute opener “Flame Of Ice” features echoing vocals by Mizutani, who at louder moments sounds like he’s singing into the face of a super-sized electric fan, and a simple drumbeat that will hypnotize you. Still, its real attraction is as a guitar rave-up that’s all fuzz, feedback, and noise. And just when you think they’ve gone as far as a band can go, they literally explode, making a jet engine din that will kill your houseplants.
It has its haunting moments—could this be demonic possession?—and Mizutani comes in and out on vocals, but what you’ll take away is a beyond-raucous guitar kamikaze charge that gives the Velvet Underground’s “I Heard Her Call My Name” a run for its money. It just keeps going and going, the Energizer Bunny on acid and frenzied reverberation.
“Reapers of the Night” is short by Les Rallizes Dénudés standards, coming in at seven minutes and change, and is punk fast and furious and all controlled axe caterwaul. Muritani sings like he has a lot to say but not enough time to say it in, probably because his guitar has gotten away from him and is galloping towards the apocalypse.
And that’s what this sounds like—music for the End of the World. Feedback that goes on and on, razor-sharp guitars that will cut you to the bone—it’s all there in this End Times whirlwind of ecstatic six-string electricity. This is literally one of the greatest guitar songs I’ve ever heard—unrelenting, remorseless, a nonstop, rumbling wall of guitar pandemonium.
“The Night, Assassin’s Night” opens on a relatively sane note—Noma lays down a nifty drum beat, the guitars are—by LRD standards—pure rock and roll, and Muritani’s voice is eighty-five percent (exactly) echo. It’s a guitar jam you could almost, despite the searing fuzz and feedback, play for your friends without sending them straight to therapy with bad cases of PTSD. That said, it just gets wilder and wilder, as if it’s trying to not just part the veil of Maya, but set it alight.
“Assassin’s Night” indeed—this song is a killer, and while so far as I know the band never played the US—or even left Japan—I would have loved to see them open for Sonic Youth in overrated NYC and blow those posers away. The song ends by crashing into a wall—it’s all twisted metal, death, and searing feedback.
Closer “The Last One_1980” (which is short by the song’s usual standards, clocking in at only eleven minutes and change) opens with heavy metal power chords, and does a very menacing march while Muritani sings staccato. And then, of course, the guitars take over, one laying down the power chords while the other one sails above it, filling the club with a caterwaul of feedback. Then the lead plays an actual melody, and you can almost understand why Muritani was so fond of the Dead.
But it doesn’t last, instead dissolving into a mind-bending clamor before returning to the Bataan Death March that opened the song. Then there’s more anarchy, with Muritani occasionally singing through the clash and clangor. What a show closer—it’s impossibly loud and heavy as a mountain, but a mountain populated by howling wolves.
Les Rallizes Dénudés were a truly underground phenomenon. Unlike Lou and Iggy, they weren’t looking for the main chance—they didn’t want to be stars. They didn’t even seem to care whether anyone—outside of the lucky souls who saw them live—heard their music. Hell, they couldn’t even be bothered to release it, and there are likely more live shows sitting in vaults somewhere. As for Muritani, you have to look to No Trend’s Jeff Mentges—or J.D. Salinger—to find a soul who so wanted to disappear from public view.
And yet they played some of the very best psychedelic noise guitar ever recorded. It’s a pity that some of their live recordings are muddy at best, but that could be remedied by remastering. If a narrowly reined-in maelstrom of guitar is your thing, YaneUra Sept. ’80 is a near-perfect LP, and Les Rallizes Dénudés are the Holy Grail.
They make Lou Reed sound like a Greenwich Village folkie, the Stooges’ Fun House sound like a traditional rock album, and Neil Young, in extended guitar-jam mode, sound like anything but a hurricane.
Only at the most far-flung outposts of free jazz skronk will you hear anything wilder. The late German saxophonist, clarinetist, and tárogató player Peter Brötzmann comes to mind. But there’s noise, and then there’s torture music, and the difference between YaneUra Sept. ’80 and Brötzmann’s Machine Gun is that I can actually listen to the former with pleasure, rather than feeling like I’m being flayed alive.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
