I've been listening to a lot of Japanese music lately, mostly on the "psychedelic" end. Bands with names like Fushitsusha, Nagisa Ni Te, Les Rallizes Denudes, Boredoms, OoioO, Acid Mothers Temple, well you get the idea. While part of the fascination is due to my even deeper fascination with Krautrock, that German music popular in the 1970s, full of steady motorik rythyms and spacious arrangements, a style which the Japanese proudly carry on, it's also due to what I feel is an rather idiosyncratic take on psychedelic music. Psychedelic music as popularly perceived is closely tied to the hippie culture of the 60s, feel good, good time, take some acid and tune out music. It's also tied to a rather vacuous religious sensibility, as music that is in touch with the divine. In the 90s the Japanese rescued this sensibility, connecting psychedelic tropes to what I feel is a more mature religious sense, one of striving and reaching for God, rather than the lazy comfort of drugs. The Boredoms released my favorite cd ever during this period, Vision Creation Newsun, which also happens to be, in my opinion, one of the most religious records ever made without a single lyric.

But, while I'm far from an expert on this subject (though I'm fast becoming one), I think at the same time another trend emerged within Japanese psychedelic music, a trend stared in the 70s by the mind blowingly brilliant Les Rallizes Denudes and carried on by the also phenomenal Fushitsusha, led by the incomparable Keiji Haino, pictured above. While the first style of psychedelic music represents self-transcendence in search of the divine, this side is a plunge into the abyss. Haino's ear-splitting harangues of guitar feedback seemingly eating itself in an infinite circle recall nothing so much as self-annihiliation. While the first style search for that good feeling to be found in what Freud called the "oceanic sense" we sometimes have, Haino's guitar represents a striving for self-destruction. This is the music of nihilism, and it's as terrifying and beautiful as it should be.