The Great Uncle of Japnoise has to be Masayuki Takayanagi,who took a parallel route to deconstructed guitar abuse that Derek Bailey took slightly earlier in the UK, but in Japan. Here captured in full abstraction with chum, free improvising and wild living,early dying, saxophonist Abe Karou,who never made it to 30.Leaving a short recorded legacy before taking satan's music to heaven in 1978;if the Japanese believe in such nonsense, of which one doubts very much.They have their own nonsense, Shinto,and even weirder forms of Buddhism....like the Kamikaze cult who, among other things, invented suicide bombing as a neat way to lose wars.
This music, non-music,(and so far I have received three different translations for the title:"Deconstructive Empathy or Disintegration of the sense of intercourse,or Deconstructive exchange"...I like the Empathy one personally)...I dunno! would be a fine soundtrack to an unmade film that features Suicide bombers exploding in ultra slow motion.....i think I may make this unmade film y'know? Or did Sam Peckinpah already do that?Here's "Sam Peckinpah's Salad Days" anyway.
Anyone reckon this stuff may have had a tad of an influence on Keiji Haino by any chance?...that's Masayuki Takayanagi and not Monty Python's Flying Circus by the way.
A Untitled
B Untitled
Love you JZ - thanks for the Free Jazz but slight problems with this one.
ReplyDeleteThis record is known as 1) Kaitai Teki Kokan or 2) Kaitaiteki Kokan and translates as
Deconstructed Exchange.
You are also missing side two.
Other than that it's great and Abe and wife were the Sid and Nancy of Japanese Free Jazz - check the movie out!
Endless Waltz...Clearly, Abe had mental health issues, exacerbated by substance abuse, and justified by the alternative lifestyle he and Izumi lived; this is not to excuse his misogynist behaviour, nor to turn him into a kind of suffering saint, and the scenes of Abe beating a pregnant Izumi could hardly be viewed with anything other than outrage and contempt. The closest thing to a voicing of such judgement comes about half-way through the volume in a documentary-style interlude where Keiji Haino recalls Abe as a pretentious bore who didn't know how to listen/play with other musicians (the film shows Abe playing solitary shows to tiny audiences, rather than in the collective settings he occupied with Masayuki Takayanagi or Milford Graves, from whose tour he was banned after trying to one-up the drummer in a pointless act of 'who can play the loudest and longest' macho display). Through the film, we see Abe approached through layers of framing: the intellectuals who make up the core of Abe's audience (generally, it seems, about half-a-dozen people) but who also seem to maintain a kind of intellectuals' contempt for the 'idiots' they see perform, quoting Derrida or (mis)quoting Husserl from a position of lofty judgment in a kind of vicarious distancing; the judgments of neighbors, cops or doctors; the journalists eager to mythologise a 'martyr' to sell copies. Such often problematic framing acts might obviously extend to Wakamatsu himself, and the film is self-consciously set up to undercut the voyeurism of the biopic. The painful opening scene, repeated at the film's close, sees Izumi hang herself in front of her child to the maudlin strains of 'Amazing Grace' rendered on a harmonica, while her child recounts that this is one of the few memories she has of her mother, and the film's overall narrative is loosely framed in a conversation Izumi has on the phone to a publisher who wants a memoir of her life with Abe because 'retro' is in style (when both Abe's and Izumi's art was about destroying the point in the ruins of no future)....
ReplyDeleteawesome. thanks for this!
ReplyDeletePENIS
ReplyDeleteThe hyperlinks in this post (except for the download link) don't lead anywhere... is this intentional?
ReplyDeletealso: Penis
Hello all....all hyperlinks fixed, side two currently being uploaded, and i have several translations for the title but I like Deconstrive Empathy the best.....if i get outvoted i will change it, otherwise i'll keep that one for myself......penis.
ReplyDeleteJust got a fourth translation...."Desometic sympathetic"...hmmmm not bad?
ReplyDeleteDownload link now updated.....yes with side two on it!
ReplyDeleteWow , ace content as per usual !
ReplyDeleteThanks.
this is great! thanks! No air as far as the ear can see......nice
ReplyDeletethis mean anything to you?.........
ReplyDeletehttps://www.discogs.com/%E9%98%BF%E9%83%A8%E8%96%AB-%E6%9C%AA%E7%99%BA%E8%A1%A8%E9%9F%B3%E6%BA%90%E5%88%9D%E6%9C%9F%E9%9F%B3%E6%BA%90/release/3640346
obviously we need to hear it!! i love this post btw.
to the long winded anonymous above....i would enjoy reading that gossip, but for some reason having you quote it smacks of petty jealousy and self serving arrogance. Miles davis was a dick, john cale, jandek, lou reed, john lennon, and Albert Ayler liked to stare at the sun for religious reasons...big deal. At least they are known to the general public so there is added entertainment value at clawing at their clay feet. Something about your judgemental tone makes me want to say fuck you, not fuck Abe.
ReplyDeleteDiscovered a polish band today on DIME. Their name is KOMBAJN DO ZBIERANIA KUR PO WIOSKACH which translated as Chicken Pickers Combine After Villages. But sensibly it's probably Combine of the Chicken Pluckers Outside the Village. Almost as good as one-hit-wonders Swift Boat Veterans for Truth
ReplyDeletespeaking of long winded....i found this less damning summary of abe and his toodling. Not sure what my explosion was about, but eh, whatyagonnado? Any way, thanks johnny for opening up a whole new world for me. He is all over www, including harmonica jams!!!! breathe deep, here comes the bullshit:
ReplyDeleteAbe was born in 1949 in Kawasaki. He left school aged 17, and moved to Shinjuku, a city which then, as now, seems to have been something of a centre for the counter culture and a welcome environment for the kind of music he would go on to play. He taught himself to play alto sax, and learned the apposite theory of his own accord. He made his debut aged 19, but ws not really to impact on the scene for a few years yet. His playing was heavily grounded in the hours he spent practising alone; most of his recordings and performances were solo (it has been speculated that this was because of his tendency to literally play over the top of potential collaborators), and show him to be, in a way, a quite 'selfish' player. The normal pattern for Japanese jazz musicians was to study with their elders, practise regularly with fellow musicians, and eventually make their professional debut. From the very beginning, Abe flouted the rules. He took to practising for hours at a time on the hard-shoulder of the Tokyo-Yokohama Expressway near his home, much to the consternation of passing motorists. (One story has it that when Abe held a solo session of the banks of a nearby river one freezing cold mid-winter's day, an old boatman took mistook him for an escaped mental patient and called the police!)
Fittingly, Abe's first release was a duo with fellow jazz heretic, guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi. The two are often cited in tandem as key inspirations, and certainly, Takayanagi was a figure who would come to be seen as similarly troubled. Like Abe, Takayanagi went on to carve himself a massive notch in the wall of missing culture. In his prime, whether solo or with his New Direction Unit (also known at various points as New Directions and New Direction For The Arts), he operated at a level miles beyond that of Sonny Sharrock, the only relatively comparable figure, and Takayanagi's recordings from that decade period stand alone as examples of what is possible when the technique and skill of improvisation, the energy and dissonance of free jazz, and the volume and aggression of rock music meet at one point. His influence can clearly be detected in modern-day heavyweights such as Rudolph Grey and Ascension's Stefan Jaworzyn. Unfortunately, Takayanagi was also possessed of an extremely acid tongue, and managed to get himself completely offside with the jazz establishment in a fairly short space of time, going on to live an enforcedly marginal musical existence. A great Takayanagi anecdote has been related via Henry Kaiser who, on one of his early visits to Japan, was asked in an interview who his main inspirations were. He immediately cited Takayanagi, and the interviewer was so horrified that he changed it in print to Wynton Marsalis.
Though never doubted for his musical abilities, Abe was in person apparently quite difficult to deal with bordering on unbearable, and greatly tended to rub people up the wrong way. Not helping matters was his obsessive and destructive relationship with his wife, writer Suzuki Ikumi. A film, Endless Waltz, was released a few years ago, chronicling their troubled union (it also featured many of Abe's associates reminiscing fondly about what an asshole he was). [i'm told there is also a nicely-produced and illuminating book on Abe now available in Japan.] The film depicts one of their more violent arguments, with both completely drunk & drugged, where Ikumi cuts off one of her toes to prove that she loves him. Abe's life was punctuated with and curtailed by imprudent (ab)use of alcohol and drugs. Never the most robust physical specimen to begin with, he died in September 1978 of a drug overdose. It's not known whether his death was an accident or suicide.
"Something about your judgemental tone makes me want to say fuck you, not fuck Abe."
ReplyDeleteI hoped that the bright dawn heralded by Biden's new tranny would have had a calming effect, here and over at Bleak Bliss.
Dearest Fanny...without judgemental tones there would be no DieorDIY or Bleak Bliss.....now stop being judgemental and remember we are all debt slaves in a doomed civilisation...Biden is mearly a case of re-arranging deckchairs on a certain famous cruise liner on her maiden voyage....the iceberg is waiting in the form of an enormous recession.I'd like to think of the two blogs mentioned as the band who played on as the ship was sinking.......ps Kevinesse,your comment stretched beyond my 21st century attention span....is there an edited version with lots of cusswords in it,as written by that geezer in Sleaford Mods??
ReplyDeleteAlso Kevinesse.....yes that link means something to me....loads of solo Abe I have.....great for sampling....its a big file,so another by my fav pink clad japanese person first huh?
ReplyDeleteAll the greats were pieces of shit and pedophiles, but as long as you enjoy the music who really cares, no one wants to get into another argument about Bowie and Jagger boffing 13 year olds, or Lennon beating the shit out of Ono and hating on anyone brown.
ReplyDeleteOh yes we do John John....would love to see Jagger banged up like Harvey Wankstain. Not like these bastards have made anything good in the last fisty years. Drain the swamp I say.
ReplyDelete"John John" was a racially motivated slur in the UK in the sixties, and featured regularly in the excellent "To Death Will Us Part", starring the bigotted Alf Garnett...I know not from whence this insult came, but it was used on national TV,and we all laughed......'twas very funny. The real low in UK TV came with "Love Thy Neighbour" which was the stupider cousin of "To Death Will Us Part"....but still hilarious.....now totally Banned.
@john john... here you go john john: https://youtu.be/52CRC1LjV6M
ReplyDeleteHA! Yes that is quite right Jonny, your the first to point it out actually.All the fun things are banned, unless you know, you cut your dick of and are now calling yourself Jasmine or something(I would opt for Jonbenet, just to be as offensive as humanly possible"
ReplyDelete