March 8, 2012: Ed Pinsent - Jap Mix - for Radio Boredcast

ED PINSENT: JAP MIX – FOR RADIO BOREDCAST

Almost all of these Japanese rock bands come from the late 1990s - early 2000s and were labelled as part of a "psych-garage" movement of some sort; some of them were represented on a compilation called The Night Gallery in Japan, and Chris Moon did much to represent their work on his Last Visible Dog label in America. Unlike their immediate predecessors (the speed-freak psychedelic bands like High Rise, Marble Sheep, White Heaven and others who appeared on the Tokyo Flashback compilations), these bands sang dirge-like songs and had incredibly slow drumming along with their twangy reverbed guitars. As such they seemed to me to have a lot in common with Les Rallizes Denudes, a much earlier band who had formed in 1967 and continued playing until 1996, so I have included here a 1977 song by this band which surfaced on a French bootleg CD set. Tsurubami don't quite fit the theme, being benign psychedelic hippie types and an offshoot project from Acid Mothers Temple.

Much as I love this music, I also find a lot of it incredibly slow and boring to listen to, and often wonder how the musicians managed to maintain the rigid discipline needed to keep each song at the correct pitch of inertness. I think Les Rallizes Denudes excelled at doing this, and although they are held in high regard by many listeners, I find their interminable music mostly miserable and insufferable. I thought it would be interesting to compress as much as possible of these mixed emotions into the required hour-long slot, and aimed to deliver a sublimely tedious listening experience. Each song was selected with that aesthetic in mind, and accordingly the Doodles track was edited slightly to remove the upbeat ending segment to their song.

The nine tracks are played more or less in the following order, but with overlaps; at any one time in the piece there will be at least two simultaneous playbacks. English translations of some titles are supplied in square brackets.

Ed Pinsent is an artist, writer and broadcaster living in London. He is the creator of The Sound Projector, an annual music magazine which he edits and publishes himself, and a radio show of the same name for Resonance 104.4 FM.

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