Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O.
Nam Myo Ho Ren Ge Kyo
Ace Fu
It’s kind of marvel that Kawabata Makoto is still alive. The number of drugs he must be taking on a regular basis, along with his never-ending release of never-ending songs/communications with the elder gods must take a toll on him emotionally and physically. Of course, it could just be that he’s inhuman as his persona would leave us to believe. With his most recent disc for Ace Fu, he and five other members of Japan’s rich improvisational scene serve up a new arrangement of the traditional “Nam Myo Ho Ren Ge Kyo” which clocks in at over 65 minutes. Yes, you read that right, 65 minutes for one song. It’s the most ambitious statement of Kawabata’s that I’ve been exposed to thus far and it’s also the strongest, oddly enough. Kawabata is credited in the liner notes as “speed guru” and he lives up to that title by fashioning disparate sounds and movements together seamlessly, making the hour pass quickly. He works predominantly with two musical movements on this song: a hazy, droning and spacey heavy psychedelica and a much more terrestrial elliptical acoustic guitar and bells melody. Interspersed among these are any number of free jazz horn freak outs, gong crashes, monkish chants, sci-fi theremin close encounters and gutteral, peyote-induced alien languages. Despite the length and basis in repetition, it’s not an album that easily bores. That doesn’t mean that putting in on when company comes over won’t mean the death of your party, but as far as schizophrenic audio love letters to H.P. Lovecraftian space monsters go, it’s pretty accessible.
Ace Fu Records: http://www.acefu.com
