Posts Tagged psych

Acid Mothers Temple and the Cosmic Inferno| IAO Chant From the Cosmic Inferno

iao_chant
AMT is a band I have always respected more than listened to. No matter how great they are to experience live, I can’t find a record that changes this. I mean I think they’ve put out some good recordings of some memorable songs, but I don’t know any of their records front to back. Until now. I mean like right now. Because while writing this post I had to really listen to the song and pay attention to the parts of it and I’m pretty into it. I was going to go more with something like, “well, you have to be there”. “There” being in a crowd of people dancing inside a cloud of pot smoke illuminated by lasers. While that helps, this is hardly an aimless jam. (“This” is a single 51 minute track, not entitled “IAO Chant From the Cosmic Inferno” but “OM Riff From the Cosmic Inferno”.)

First, some words on “The Cosmic Inferno”: I can’t really tell the different incarnations of this band apart. I don’t really know why they do it, but I like that they do it. You can get more info about that some place else. What am I, gonna rewrite a Wikipedia article? I’m not. It’s just something that should be mentioned. I didn’t put it in the title of the post at first so it would fit in one line, but it didn’t fit in one line anyway. This really bothered me, so I put it in and now it fills out two lines very nicely. But maybe your screen resolution is different and it looks terrible. I’m trying not to think about it.

Also, this is basically an extended semi-stealth cover. I didn’t know this until I read the notes on this bootleg which I mentioned in the last meta post.

Om Riff *a musical portmanteau of Gong’s “Master Builder” and Steve Hillage’s “The Glorious Om Riff”. Also known as OM Riff, also known as Om (or OM) Riff From the Cosmic Inferno.

OR IS IT. Short answer: yes. That’s kinda it. Resorting to wiki, we find Om Riff is just Hillage’s remake of Master Builder. Hear both here (or not).

Alright, so they just remade it again and added the chanting part. Well they added some stuff and stretched it out, but the “chant” is from another version of Master Builder from the live album Gong est Mort, Vive Gong. It’s at this point I start to become concerned about my inconsistent usage of italics vs. quotation marks but I am resolved to continue regardless, but why? Why do I do it. Why does it keep—oh. Here:

AMT’s version adds sections of ambient monk-like chants at the beginning, end and part of the middle. It’s not until about 2:30 the the “IAO chant” and The Riff begin. Rhythm guitar sticks to that over a propulsive beat and among swirling synth sine sweeps while main man Kawabata Makoto embarks on a wild noodly solo that eventually becomes an open-ended counter-riff. Then around the 18 minute mark the beat fades. The synth and rhythm guitar relax into drony washes. The counter riff continues but recedes into the background. After a few minutes a slow beat returns for another long solo backed by a one note dirge on rhythm until we hit 30 minutes. Then both guitars lock in to a simple gradually accelerating crescendo figure which becomes a phasy bridge which leads back to the beginning: the beatless chant (but this time with bagpipes? Nope, it’s hurdy gurdy.) and the triumphant return of The Riff and all the rest of that. They ride that for another fifteen minutes, which is a bit much, and towards the end it’s barely the song anymore, it’s kind of a glorious mess that even the main riff is buried in, but, eventually (45:20) the keyboard comes through with the actual Master Builder melody. Which, if you have the liner notes you can sing along to. (They don’t.) But it’s a pretty good payoff once you know it’s coming. Without noticing these separate parts it seems pretty structureless. And if you come in at the middle (like if you’ve got in the car or an iPod) it seems to end too quickly, the chanting part and feedback as everything falls apart at the end is only a minute. But they already ended the song once at the halfway point. It seems like a logical compositional choice. Or maybe they were running out of studio time and overestimated how long they could pad out one song to album-length so it just turned out that way. I don’t know.

Btw you can see all the liner notes at this site.

And you know what, of course the entire thing is also on youtube. Sure it is.

But wouldn’t ya rather buy it? Because you can get it for a buck. I mean the CD is regular CD price but it’s only one song and these guys don’t give a fuck, clearly, about trying to charge you more just because they had some some fun with it. Support that! And yes, the track is mistagged as “IAO Chant From The Cosmic Inferno”. Why you gotta be so uptight about everything? You can change it if you want. You can do that. Go do that. Enjoy. Listen to it more than once. %

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Yamantaka // Sonic Titan | YT//ST

YT-ST Hm. According to…my own internet presence…I’ve gone completely insane as of a few years ago. I’ve just been looking through what is the backlog of records I should be in the process of reviewing, if I’m taking this project seriously, and uh…it’s not looking too good. But I know better. The truth is, I’ve been insane most of my life maybe until…today? I dunno, people can snap and go insane one day, not always traumatically, just a lot of little things build up sometimes. Why can’t it work the other way around? I’ve had a few good night’s sleep in a row and things have been generally ok…maybe that’s all it took. After…so many years.

So anyway, in Japan, it’s Buddha’s birthday today, or yesterday, since it’s already tomorrow there. Some people think it’s in early December. It’s not really important. But you’re supposed to spend the day in mindful reflection, I guess, which in what you’re supposed to be doing all the time, but it’s like every other religion pretty much in that most people aren’t taking it very seriously most of the time.

So here we are. I’m picking this one unrandomly out of the pile.

Hey, I’m glad I have a blog. I would not have remembered this album. I’m trying to reorganize my files and it would take years to get to this listening to this again. Goddamn mess. What the hell do you expect from a crazy person? It made my Best of 2012 (altho it came out late 2011), which should really be a best of albums I already reviewed, shouldn’t it. Well.

☸☸☸☸☸

First of all: could we just call this album “self-titled”? We could. It is. But you know what the deal with this band is? They’re fuckin’ cool. It’s a good thing. It’s a band. That’s why you start a fuckin’ band, to do something cool. Look, if you put some unicode bullshit in your name that has to be copypasted every time, you’re kind of a cock. Granted. Some would say double slashes are just as pretentious, but it ain’t. It’s just the right amount. So the name of this album just looks better in this format so I’m using it, but let’s be clear that it a self-titled album and we’re not going to say “why-tee-slash-slash-ess-tee” in conversation, if it comes up. Which it should. Also acceptable at this point would be “the album” or, in the future, “the first one”. OK.

This band has a whole live element I don’t know much about, it’s supposedly “operatic”. I only get this from the first track, Raccoon Song, which is the most forgettable. I had literally forgotten about it. This is definitely against the general common sense “rules” for new bands, which is to put your best song first. But another of those rules is to not make the cover some kind of incomprehensible artwork that does not even have the name of the band on it, but like, a picture of the band. That makes sense. But man, fuck making sense. This cover rules. There’s no way I could not listen to a record with this cover. I would be so bummed if it wasn’t great. What the fuck is that thing? Fuckin’ cool, that’s what.

Also, there’s only 7 songs that average out to average length, for a total of only about 31 minutes. Maybe that doesn’t seem like a full album, but how many songs do you need. More than 1 or 2? NO. It’s just about perfect. If you can’t say something in under 45 minutes, you don’t have anything to say.

And what are they saying? Absolutely nothing coherent or intelligible as a real message. JUST THE WAY IT SHOULD BE. (Or not, get off my back, I’m just not-crazy today.) The only words I can make out on this album are in Japanese, a language I don’t believe any of the members actually speak. They translate to “I AM STAR CAT.” YES.

This is the single I guess, Hoshi Neko. The big stand out with a with a phased intro and the catchy Japanese hook. These are Canadians, btw. I assumed at least one was J-Canadian but apparently not. The bandcamp page uses the tags “chinese” and “iroquios”, so it’s intentionally mixing things up. Seems like some of the references are Buddhist and some are Native American…maybe. Maybe they are just making some of the shit up out of thin air. You can totally do that when you work on something cool. It’s not like fucking fan fiction. There’s no canon!

The other songs are also pretty good put not as pop. “Operatic” outside of whatever the live show consists of is squarely within the concept and sound more or less of “rock opera”, altho this is usually a bad thing in my opinion. They make something that works. I think they achieve the effect by making music that is more like soundtrack music than part of a musical.

Reverse Crystal is like a more-rocking out/less Kraut Stereolab with those same kind of high-register, unintelligible, repeating vocal phrases, and even a long second-half pop drone coda but with a lot of cymbal bashing, and it’s got like an Iron Butterfly organ solo in there. Great.

A Star over Pureland is the only explicit Buddhist reference I can find apart from the name, which most people(?) will people recognize from the Boredoms’ Eye Yamantaka (it’s not his real name). Altho if you want to get into it, these are reference to competing schools of Buddhism. Yamantaka is mostly a Tibetan thing. Pure Land is a like a Buddhist afterlife which not all Buddhists believe in. No, there’s no way to prove I am not looking this up as I go along. Oh wait, there is Pure Land in Tibet. I did just look that up. Well, there you go. There’s some Tibetan cymbals and horns in there. I knew that. I know stuff. Guitar freak-out on this track is cool, but it’s clear the keys are more their thing. It’s definitely the climax of the show, but as far as songs and general moods go, they are best and building up the tension than actually exploding. Or resolving. But it all seems worth it for the parts that work.

You know what, Crystal Fortress Over a Sea of Trees could also totally be a Tibetan thing. I don’t know that much about the Tibetan stuff. But I do know it has another killer organ solo. The particular synth rhythm track they use sounds a little out of place. It’s like we’ve been in something like a 70s horror movie and now it’s like Knight Rider all of sudden. Doesn’t quite mesh. Ends with some vague chants. Maybe that is in Tibetan. Usually done by dudes of course so it doesn’t sound anything like the standard stuff, or maybe it’s not that at all. Questions, with answers, that I am not going to try to find out. It just doesn’t matter. %

buy it on bandcamp [cd/digital]

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Acid Mothers Temple@Johnny Brenda’s

Acid Mothers Temple must be seen live, obviously.

The afternoon of the show I started feeling nostalgic for all the times I have almost seen this band in the past because I almost didn’t see them again. (I was late getting a paycheck. It’s always something dumb.) But at the last minute things came through and off I went. I told myself it didn’t matter that much anyway—there was a moment of panic where I thought I would never see them now, what with them saying this is their last tour in America and all—but wouldn’t these guys be deep into the 2012 thing? It’s a psych band. Yeah, if the world is ending, this would be the last tour wouldn’t it. Sure enough, the tour poster has a Mayan calendar symbol right damn in the middle:

I seem to have misplaced my pictures for the night so this is going to have to do for an illustration.
It was pretty much like this.

I do not think the world is ending, not this year anyway. But some people might disagree with me. The opening acts on this tour for example. The AMT set seemed typical, a mind-melting performance, but nothing that suggested impending retirement or cosmic extermination. No goodbyes, barely any audience interaction at all. But these other guys really set the mood for apocalypse. All shrewd marketing maybe, art even. Really you can’t ask for a better theme.
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