Satanic Abandoned Rock & Roll Society
Akiyama / Miyamoto / Kawasaki / Ito
Bloody Imagination
CD + DIGITAL — CATALOG MIKROTON 12 — RELEASED NOVEMBER 2012
Ten years ago, a week before Christmas in 2002, Teruto Soejima, a Japanese experimental/avant-garde music critic, organized a festival at a small live venue called Knuttel House, located in the east side of Tokyo. Named as “Independent Underground Music Festival”, it was held with the following message by Mr. Soejima:
“Today in the advanced improvised music scene, new artists keep coming up one after another. In there, free jazz, contemporary music, techno, prog, traditional music, experimental J-pop etc, are jumbled and sometimes mixed, so that we are in a chaos state where a variety of musicality is overviewed, from an explosive sonic attack against bodies to infinitesimal sounds permeating brains. However, I believe that chaos is a hotbed to form tomorrow. It is the aim of this festival to give an opportunity all together to the music that has little chance to be evaluated because of its novelty. I would like you to thoroughly enjoy the resplendence of all sorts of flowers full of wild vitality.”
I myself, as a longtime acquaintance of Soejima, was invited there along with Cosmos (Sachiko M and Ami Yoshida), Ko Ishikawa who plays sho, pianist Takuji Kawai, etc. Since I did not want to perform as a solo, I wanted to present a new ensemble with a certain concept, instead. I wanted to gather musicians who have their own temporal axis unlike those found in the established free music or drone, and set the biological clocks of the listeners out of order.
What happens if frequency bands that each player in a string quartet is in charge of, are translated more violently into the modern electric/electronic instruments? And what if one divided the whole audible range into four bands, and let the four musicians perform to show their own time senses fully in each band?
There was no struggle for me to select the right members. Atsuhiro Ito, in charge of the low frequency, already had found a way of his own beyond the realm of a visual artist in the music of synchronized light and sound, with the self-made instrument called Optron which was basically a customized fluorescent light. For the low-mid, no other than Utah Kawasaki who boasted one and only rare de-musical sense. And we had Naoaki Miyamoto for the mid-high, who had been playing single-note drone solos on his guitar around that time, which I had found was delicate, elegant, then mysterious and precise while having an unshakable rock spirit at the same time. I was concentrating on the high frequencies with the technique which I presented on my solo album “résophonie”, rubbing six same gauged strings on the brass bodied guitar with the blade-less side of a Japanese sword with contact microphones attached on the top and end.
Partly because we were well received by the audience at the festival, I was waiting for an opportunity to make some recording with the band. About 18 months later, I heard that a friend of mine, Yosio Ootani, a rising critic and also a saxophonist himself by then, was producing a compilation CD album called “Le Son Sauvage : Tokyo Next Texture”, aiming to introduce new jazz-based groups at the time in Tokyo area. And he invited us to participate in that project, although we were not playing “jazz” at all. The ten-minute track we recorded for the compilation was mostly an improvisation, but the fifty-two minute track on this album was also recorded in the same session, and was composed beforehand contrary to the track for the compilation.
On the one long track throughout this album, each musician devoted himself to a very simple performance that rather exuded the beauty and complexity of the intertwined individuals. As a result, it has turned out to be something like an organic monster as a whole. This was what had been plotted as a concept of the band from the beginning, which was also the destination it should have ended up at. In other words, while the time axis was even twisted, the end led to the beginning like a Mobius strip.
In the noise music scene, there are destructive ones like so-called harsh noise which would tear your eardrums, and in the clubs, the sound systems which focus on super heavy bass would directly shake the lower half of your bodies. However, there is an aspect that it is very hard to realize such an extreme idea that is aimed to destroy all the cells of the listeners’ bodies, due to the limitation in the sound equipment. Although the real value of this band would be maximized at live concerts and unfortunately we can present only superficial elements of us on the
CD, I am sure you will hear the essence of the music here. We did not dare to indicate “enjoy at full volume as much as possible on your stereo system” anywhere on the cover, but an eager listener like you will surely find yourself turning up the volume knob of your stereo set as you go on listening. Because the nature of rock music is nothing more than “Play It Loud!” and in this sense, this music is persistently a development of rock & roll as the band name suggests.
Tetuzi Akiyama, December 2012
Tetuzi Akiyama > high frequency, resonator guitar with samurai sword
Naoaki Miyamoto > mid-high frequency, electric guitar
Utah Kawasaki > mid-low frequency, analog synthesizer
Atsuhiro Ito > low frequency, optron
Editions ⤵︎
91 / BURKHARD STANGL & DIEB13 Jardin Des Bruits
89-90 / JOKE LANZ / JASON KAHN / NORBERT MÖSLANG / GÜNTER MÜLLER / CHRISTIAN WEBER kangaroo_kitchen
88 / ANDREA ERMKE / CHRIS ABRAHAMS / MARCELLO BUSATO / ARTHUR ROTHER Sink
87 / LARS ÅKERLUND / ERYCK ABECASSIS Falls
86 / FEN / OTOMO YOSHIHIDE / RYU HANKIL / YAN JUN / YUEN CHEE WAI No One's Island
75 / FREE ELECTRONICS T-SHIRT
74 / WABI EXPERIENCE Wabi Experience
73 / KEN GANFIELD / KURT LIEDWART / PETR VRBA Something Wrong There
71 / JEROME NOETINGER / SEC_ La Cave Des Etendards
69 / KURT LIEDWART & PETR VRBA Punkt
68 / KURT LIEDWART / JULIEN OTTAVI / KEITH ROWE L'Or
65 / GÜNTER MÜLLER / KURT LIEDWART / NORBERT MÖSLANG Ground
64 / YUI ONODERA & STEPHEN VITIELLO Quiver
63 / ANGELICA CASTELLO & JEROME NOETINGER Disturbio
61 / THE PITCH & SPLITTER ORCHESTER Frozen Orchestra (Splitter)
60 / THOMAS LEHN & MARCUS SCHMICKLER Neue Bilder
59 / THE ELKS This Is Not The Ant
57 / ALFREDO COSTA MONTEIRO & MIGUEL A. GARCIA Aq'Ab'Al
56 / BURKHARD BEINS / LUCIO CAPECE / MARTIN KÜCHEN / PAUL VOGEL Fracture Mechanics
54 / KURT LIEDWART / ANDREY POPOVSKIY / MARTIN TAXT Hjem
53 / CILANTRO / ANGELICA CASTELLO / BILLY ROISZ Borderland
52 / EASE / KLAUS FILIP & NOID No No No, No
50 / GEORGE LEWIS & SPLITTER ORCHESTER Creative Construction Kit™️
49 / SERGE BAGHDASSARIANS / BORIS BALTSCHUN / BURKHARD BEINS Future Perfect
47 / NORBERT MÖSLANT / KURT LIEDWART / ILIA BELORUKOV sale_interiora
46 / KEITH ROWE / MARTIN KÜCHEN The Bakery
45 / KURT LIEDWART / PHIL RAYMOND Rim
43-44 / RYU HANKIL / NOID / MATIJA SCHELLANDER AND OTHERS Foreign Correspondents
41-42 / ANGELICA CASTELLO / MARIO DE VEGA / ATTILA FARAVELLI / BURKHARD STANGL Sqid
39-40 / SIMON JAMES PHILLIPS Blage 3
38 / BURKHARD BEINS / ENRICO MALATESTA / MICHAEL VORFELD / CHRISTIAN WOLFARTH / INGAR ZACH Glück
37 / ERIKM / MARTIN BRANDLMAYR / Ecotone
36 / CASEY ANDERSON / JASON KAHN / NORBERT MÖSLANG / GÜNTER MÜLLER / MARK TRAYLER Five Lines
33-35 / VARIOUS ARTISTS Feedback: Order From Noise
32 / KEITH ROWE / ALFREDO COSTA MONEIRO / KURT LIEDWART / ILIA BELORUKOV Contour
31 / MICHAEL THIEKE UNUNUNIUM Nachtlieder
30 / ANGELICA CASTELLO / BILLY ROISZ / BURKHARD STANGL / DIEB13 Scuba
29 / COMMON OBJECTS / JOHN BUTCHER / RHODRI DAVIES / LEE PATTERSON Live In Morden Tower
28 / KAZUHISA UCHIHASHI / NOID / TAMARA WILHELM I Hope It Doesn't Work
26 / MARGARETH KAMMERER / Why Is The Sea So Blue
25 / ILIA BELORUKOV & KURT LIEDWART Vtoroi
24 / HANNO LEICHTMANN Minimal Studies
23 / BARBARA ROMEN / KAI FAGASCHINSKI / GUNTER SCHNEIDER Here Comes The Sun
21-22 / CATHERINE JAUNIAUX / ERIKM Mal Des Ardents / Pantoneon
20 / EL ENFIERNO MUSICAL El Infierno Musical. A Tribute To Alejandra Pizarnik
19 / ALESSANDRO BOSETTI / CHRIS ABRAHAMS We Who Had Left
17-18 / RICK REED / KEITH ROWE / BILL THOMPSON Shifting Currents
14-16 / VARIOUS ARTISTS Echtzeitmusik Berlin
13 / CHRIS ABRAHAMS / LUCIO CAPECE None Of Them Would Remember It That Way
12 / SATANIC ABANDONED ROCK & ROLL SOCIETY Bloody Imagination
11 / ERIKM / NORBERT MÖSLANG Stodgy
10 / RHODRI DAVIES / MARK WASTELL Live In Melbourne
7 / JASON KAHN / GÜNTER MÜLLER / CHRISTIAN WOLFARTH Limmat
5-6 / VARIOUS ARTISTS Klingt.org: 10 Jahre Bessere Farben
4 / WERNER DAFELDECKER / CHRISTOF KURZMANN / JOHN TILBURY / STEVIE WISHART Violet
2 / ALAN COURTIS / JAIME GENOVART / CHRISTOF KURZMANN / PABLO RECHE Palmar Zähler
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