AKA Hadaka No Rallizes, the mystique-laden Japanese psych/noise band, 1967-1996, practitioners of monstrous distortion and volume. A forum search just now turned up nothing.

Overrated? Amazing? In between? ...More info here: http://noise.as/main/japan9



I'm going with Not Crap because of "Flames of Ice" off of '77 Live, but I'm not sure the legend is justified.

Where can you get hold of a record? I looked them up a few years ago and had no luck...

The idea of them is certainly not crap.

Forced Exposure and ebay would be places to look. Prepare to spend some money.

Still more info here: http://www.fakejazz.com/reviews/2002/lesrallizesdenudes.shtml

Fuck it, I just *cough*illegallydownloaded*cough* "People Can Choose" from Heavier Than A Death In The Family. Shit is INSANE, terrible recording and all.

What we have here is certainly the Japanese equivalent of Funhouse-era Stooges / VU circa "Sister Ray" and "I Heard Her Call My Name" / GOD KNOWS WHAT, only better than that because of the GOD KNOWS WHAT factor and because I haven't already heard it 8000000 times.

Impossible to listen to on headphones because even at moderate volume it hurt my ears.

Poverty looms as I turn to ebay.

MIZUTANI TAKASHI IS YOUR NU-GOD. That is all. Have a nice day.

xero wrote:I'm going with Not Crap because of "Flames of Ice" off of '77 Live, but I'm not sure the legend is justified.

I'm just listening to some live stuff from 1977....it's pretty wigged-out. Sheets of crazy guitar feedback over the top of VU-style melodic pop. Interesting, and moreover quite pleasant in a perverse way. Actually, some it is intensely romantic sounding, evoking a sort of blissful exotic beauty.

Clearly very influential, in terms of Japanese noise (bands like Shizuka).

I'll go with, Not Crap.

I'd like to hear what the studio stuff sounds like.

Cranius wrote:I'd like to hear what the studio stuff sounds like.

Here is their discography page, as you probably already know. I've never seen any of their studio stuff for sale anywhere, online or off. Rumor has it that the album 67-69 Studio et Live may be on Soulseek, but I don't have it. Yet.

Have you heard "The Night Collectors" (or "The Night Harvesters") from Le 12 Mars 1977 a Tachikawa? (Forced Exposure sells that album.) It's 8.30 long, the second track on the second disk. It starts out incredible and at about 4:45 something happens where ... fuck it, words fail me, but the bass comes forward for a bit and it enters some completely uncharted zone. "Psychedelic" is far too weak a word. You also need to hear "People Can Choose," which as far as I can tell exists only as a live track on Heavier Than A Death In The Family.

Cranius wrote:bands like Shizuka

Who is that? Google isn't helping.

p.s. NOT CRAP, again

ctrl-s wrote:

Cranius wrote:bands like Shizuka

Who is that? Google isn't helping.

Lush mid-nineties psych with incredible female vocals, perhaps related to Fushitsusha and Keiji Haino. Sounds kind of Twin Peaks-y, but with swathes of controlled feedback over the top.

Google tells me that their stuff is out of print...I have some somewhere in a box upstairs.

Cranius,

Where do you dig out this stuff from? Years of Amazon abuse have made me pathetically lazy and rubbish at digging out obscurities.

[I'm going to voluntarily stand in the corner now.]

Julian Cope's reviewof Heavier Than A Death In The Family, via the Wayback Machine. "Short of shooting himself and burning all of the band's tapes, Mizutani has done everything he can possibly think of to assure himself and his cohorts a place in total rock'n'roll oblivion."

Entry on Les Rallizes Denudes from OngakuBlog: Music from Japan, with an mp3 of "Zouka no Genya."

Aquarius has a couple of CDs available, last I checked.

They were maybe the first in the line of what became PSF/Tokyo Flashback Japanese bands (High Rise, Mainliner, Fushitsusha, etc.) that in my opinion have taken heavy psych rock music beyond any logical conclusion one could come to in the work of Hendrix, Blue Cheer, etc.

In terms of sheer intensity, these Japanese bands make virtually all the "classic" stuff sound completely tame.

N/C with a waffle for how expensive and obscure this band's recordings are.