Rising Sons

Why I have been moving away from electronic dance music in general, you will be able to read in - hopefully - the near future in an essay on the state of techno in 2007 that I am currently working on. But it is an outright fact that since more than a year now I am much more interested in all music that contains at least a certain portion of noise and a free element. From the doom of Sunn 0))) and the early industrial works of Kluster, through the unholy noisefests of Wolf Eyes and Hair Police, via the free jazz of Takayanagi, Abe or Borbetomagus onto the dreadful noisehell of Hijokaidan and Naked City, I have become seriously addicted to free music in general.

And then you can do no wrong whatsoever by going delving into Japanse music. There is enough to last a lifetime and that alone makes it interesting. If you were interested in the 150+ releases of the absolutely brilliant Keiji Haino alone, then you would be busy day and night for at least two years or so.

The list of interesting names is nearly endless: Acid Mothers Temple, Masayuki Takayanagi, Aube, Sachiko M, Fushitsusha, High Rise, Tokyo Kid Brothers, Tetuzi Akiyama, KK Null, Boris, Ruins, Corrupted, Les Rallizes Dénudés, Otomo Yoshihide, Food Brain, Toshimaru Nakamura, Boredoms, Ghost, The Jacks, Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Overhang Party, Musica Transonic, Taj Mahal Travellers, Magical Power Mako, Mono... I could go on forever. And the finest thing of all: all these artists do have an enormous amount of releases to investigate, a lot like the free and freakfolkers from the USA or those crazy Fins, but on a much more enormous scale.

It is like a neverending ocean you can dive in and not knowing when you are going to be able to quit swimming. More important is of course the fact that these people are always pushing boundaries, destroying artificial walls set up between genres, in other words, doing exactly what the fuck they want, mostly because they look at life and this universe in general in an entirely different way compared to us.

And then I am not even talking about the fertile collaborations they have set up with Western artists. Derek Bailey, Peter Brötzmann, John Zorn, Fred Frith, Bill Laswell, Peter Rehberg, Fennesz, David Sylvian, Stephen O'Malley, Alan Licht, Oren Ambarchi... the list is again pretty endless.

I fear that I have become addicted for life. I need to go there urgently. Fuck the fact that - as they always say - you will as a Western person never be really able to understand these people. Fuck that! You can at least try.

Anyway, I am thinking of starting up a new blog that would then be exclusively dedicated to Japanese music. Do not know for sure though, because keeping two blogs concurrently is eating up your time and I am in dire need of that already. Most probably it will end up with a compromise, where I will from time to time present you with my findings about these rising sons and daughters. En avant!