My problem with concerts in Japan is that I (having never dutifully studied the language) am only ever slightly aware of what’s going on. Not that I’d know what to expect from an Acid Mothers Temple show anyway. It’s easier to track sleeper cells in Toronto than the revolving-door roster of Japan’s most famous psych monsters. To paraphrase Mark E. Smith’s brutal self-branding, if it’s Kawabata Makoto and your granny on Bongos, it’s an AMT gig. Fine. Even an octagenarian on bongos kickin’ it alone with Kawabata would raise the biggest ruckus on the Pacific Rim.
I squeezed (squoze?) into the subterranean shoebox of the UFO House to find two gentlemen with acoustic guitars, lit melodramatically by ‘60s-style oil projections (apparently made with dishwashing soap and food colouring). The men onstage (including sometime-AMT member Tsuyama Atsushi) skipped dextrously between Fahey-style folk, Derek Bailey-esque skronk, and what sounded like Chicago blues by way of an ogre drinking song. More impressive than anything tugged from the guitars was Tsuyama’s singing voice. His voice swooped and tumbled between sparrow-throated warble and troglodytic grunting, back up into ox-lunged opera before crashing into a Yoko Ono-class freakout. It would’ve been showboating if it hadn’t provided a completely appropriate musical counterpoint to what was going on.
This set the tone for the evening’s exploratory self-indulgence. Minding that this was a warm-up date for AMT’s European tour, every act kept their set playfully mercurial without bulldozing any particular musical conventions. This isn’t to say the playing was slack. Chewing through genres with caffeinated agility, the performers exhibited a level of telepathy superior to even the ‘60s canon of jam-bands.
Case in point: when Kawabata joined Tsuyama onstage for their joke-folk duo Zoffy, they gleefully butchered “Smoke on the Water” for almost twenty minutes, twisting the riff like Silly Putty™. This certainly didn’t squeegee my Third Eye, but it was damned entertaining.
AMT’s set was similarly light in tone. Forgoing their shattering stoner-rock marathons, this female-fronted line-up (billed as AMT & the Incredible Strange Band) sounded more like a dark-matter mirror of Jefferson Airplane—acid blues shellacked in extra feedback. I know the ‘60s psychedelia simile sounds lazy, but it was unavoidable: the encore (featuring ex-Boredom Yamamoto Seiichi on guitar) was a roaring cover of “House of the Rising Sun.”
Of course, there’s only so much time Kawabata can spend onstage without smashing some eardrums. Between their Zoffy and AMT sets, Tsuyama and Kawabata were joined by a drummer for a full-throttle forty-five minutes as O-Jazz. Here was the volcanic squall, the speaker-cone-blowing solos, the Raw Power-worshipping guitar butcher from Nagoya that I know and love. And not a moment too soon. Hell, after two hours of waiting, I was wondering what the point of having four fuzzboxes onstage was if they weren’t going to use ‘em.
European Tour Dates
June 13 – Rostock, Germany – Stubnitz
June 14 – Berlin, Germany – Bastard Club
June 15 – Bern, Switzerland – Reitschule
June 17 – Paris, France – Cite de la Musique
June 18 – Castellon, Spain – Sala Ricoamor
June 19 – Madrid, Spain – Sala Siroco
June 20 – Lisbon, Portugal – Galeria Ze Dos Bois
June 22 – Wroclaw, Poland – Oda Firlej
June 23 – Bydgoszcz, Poland – Klub Mozg
June 24 – Lodz, Poland – Jazzga
June 28 – Zagreb, Croatia - TBA