[atsonicpark]

COMPLETE LIST OF BANDS BOREDOMS MEMBERS HAVE PARTICIPATED IN:
1
Akabushi
AOA
Asa-Chang & Junray
ATR
Audio Sports
Base of Fiction
Children Coup d'Etat
C.C.C.C.
Concrete Octopus
Dendoba
Destroy 2
DJ Pica Pica Pica
DMV
Dowser
The Dramatics
Eastenburia
E-da
Elvis Dust
Flaming Lips (though, obviously, Yoshimi is only on one album...)
Jad Fair & the Shapir-o-Rama
Free Kitten
The Geisha Girls
God is My Co-Pilot
Goma
Gong Derby
Goonies
Grind Orchestra
Ground Zero
Guillotine Kyodai
Guitoo
Haco
Dekoboko Hajime/Yamantaka Eye
Hanadensha
The Hanatarashi/Hanatarash
The Hattifatteners
Hijokaiden
Incapacitants
Mason Jones
Karera Musication
Live Under the Sky
Masked Super Sister
MC Hellshit & DJ Carhouse
Million Mandara Band
Minga & Eye
Most
Musica Transonica
Mystic Fugu Orchestra
Nagisa Ni te
Naked City
Nankai Hawkwind
Nimrod
Noise Ramones
Novo Tono
Oh!Moro Video Series
(Omega) Loves You
Omoide Hatoba
OOIOO
Painkiller
Praxis
Psycho Baba
Purist
Puzzle Punks
Yoshimi P-We
Rashinban
RFD/Rise From the Dead
Roughage
Rovo
Ruins
Ruins-Hatoba
Alice Sailor
Miu Sakamoto
Shonen Knife
S.O.B.-Kaidan
Sound Hero
Sonic Youth (T.V. Shit!)
Standing Earth & Touching Air
Sun Kich
Sun PM 0:00
Tent
Three Day Stubble
Torture Garden
Tribal Circus
U.F.O. or Die
Universal Errors
The Vickly & the Ohdorockanize
Woods
XOX
Yamamoto Seiichi
Yamatsuka/Yamantaka/Yamataka Eye
ya-to-i
Yellowhouse
Otomo Yoshihide
Z-Rock Hawaii

[afterthefact]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awnCPzRISUw

[atsonicpark]

WHAT IS THE RAREST BOREDOMS SIDE PROJECT RECORDING?

According to a post by M. Rizzi on the (now-defunct) New-Music List:

"I almost forgot this other Yamatsuka Eye...er, I mean Yamantaka Eye tidbit from my recent trip to Japan.
"Eye was telling me about how the Karoake bars in Osaka have the capability to record a CD of the patron's evening of song for about $20 (they must be using that computer based recordable CD format).
"Eye talked about how he had them record his sing-along to 'Born To Be Wild.' Just the idea of this blew my mind. Unfortunately, he doesn't have it anymore. He went to a record shop (Forever 3 in Osaka, I believe) and sold it for like $70...and the store sold it for about $150 almost immediately.
"God, I would have loved to heard that. I guess none of us will either, but just thinking about it might be enough. Ha. I still laugh thinking of the possible looks the other customers must have had when he started screaming along to the bouncing ball.
"Boorrrrn The Be Wiraerararggggggggh!"

This CD was bought by Ozaki of Prisoner No. 6, is credited to Hanatarash, and also includes the children's song "Omocha no Cha Cha Cha" ("Toy Cha Cha Cha"). According to Ozaki (in an article he wrote about the CD in Exile Osaka #5), it also included one of Eye's teeth, which had been extracted by a dentist because it had a large cavity in it (and which continues to decay). He also bought the Boredoms EP Bon Bon Chiki Bon, which was also limited to one copy and sold for ¥100000 ($1000).


...

"Born to Be Wild" leaked a few years ago if I remember correctly.

[batreleaser]

jesus cooley, the fuck is wrong with you? haha. you forgot s.o.b. i think.

my fave boredoms record is still "chocolate synthesizer" to be honest. i mean i know theyve made better records, but ill always love the manic caveman jazz meets thrash meets devo sound of that record. every boredoms release introduced a new influence to the sound, this recordwas that synth punk-devo sound.

[atsonicpark]

According to http://www.googlism.com

 

:

boredoms is in full force not even five minutes into the song
boredoms is folk music
boredoms is as the andy kaufman of rock
boredoms is getting better
boredoms is een gevoel
boredoms is like watching six different bands at once
boredoms is what someone put on our poster once
boredoms is the virtual absence of vocals
boredoms is on cd
boredoms is deafening
boredoms is a very good band
boredoms is playing in london soon and > was curious if anybody > know what the lineup will be
boredoms is playing in london soon and was curious if anybody know what the lineup will be
boredoms is tenuous
boredoms is just plain undisciplined
boredoms is the fact that their back catalogue is either unavailable or ridiculously expensive
boredoms is
boredoms is on warner
boredoms is a
boredoms is just to replace an old copy; it's good clean fun
boredoms is a remix/excerpt from the vision creation newsun set
boredoms is a sign of greatness

Also:
ooioo is what happened when they learned to play and became the real thing
ooioo is her latest band
ooioo is a side project of yoshimi p
ooioo is fronted by the percussionist from the legendary noise group
ooioo is still around
ooioo is a band featuring yoshimi p
ooioo is spontaneity
ooioo is the newest project from our sweetheart of japanese noise
ooioo is boredoms drummer yoshimi p
ooioo is good
ooioo is something of a solo project for boredoms drummer yoshimi
ooioo is a side project of the boredoms and free kitten
ooioo is anyone from the fireparty in sydney?
ooioo is the highly awaited release from four talented japanese girls
ooioo is the solo
ooioo is beautiful

[atsonicpark]

"the andy kaufman of rock" is too good.

[batreleaser]

you know what's funny about hanatarash? everyone thinks of them as this absolute crazed nihilist-destructo noise force that was the basis for bands like cock espand the likes. and yeah, thats true for some of thier stuff, the "we are hardcore release" has stuff like that, and the first album, and performances, but a lot of thier stuff sounds a bit like hawkwind. that's not to say it's bad, but people often overlook the full scope of thier sound. i mean the later hanatarash stuff was basically boredoms, and had already evolved past the straight noise stuff.

[batreleaser]

i dont like ooloo really anymore.

[atsonicpark]

(intro) Over 15 years, Osaka's Boredoms have mutated from a splatterpunk avant noise group to the streamlined ferocity of their current matric percussion barrage. In London, tedium tearaways Yamantaka Eye and Yoshimi P-We explain the meaning of Boredom: their twisted history, the group as turntable, tips for recording underwater, and using discipline to channel chaotic energies.
(text) "Shut up!" Yamantaka Eye is screaming from behind his onstage control panel at London's Royal Festival Hall, as he swings a DJ CD player above his head in time to the feverish beat patterns exploding and ricocheting all around him. "Shut up!" he howls repeatedly, whirling his dreadlocks like demented helicopter blades at the three drummers who complete this latest incarnation of The Boredoms. Diagonally facing each other in a tight circle, Yoshimi P-We (nee Yokota), ATR and Yojiro hammer away at their kits in 4/4 time with unflinching determination and scapel-sharp precision. "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" Eye persists, shouting ever louder over the swirling cacophony of drumming and electronic warp, to no apparent effect. But then you realise he's not so much barking commands as generating a repetitive vocal chant designed to elevate the quartet's playing to still higher levels of consciousness. Their spiralling vortex of Kodo-like rhythm and digital collision sucks the astounded audience out their seats and lures them to the unofficial moshpit in front of the stage. By the close, the whole house has risen up as one for a standing ovation that gathers volume and momentum while The Boredoms file offstage. It's as if nobody wants the incredible noise to shut or shut down. Refusing to leave, the audience would willingly ride its rising swells forever.
This is not the first time The Boredoms have given their listeners a brush with infinity. On their "Super Roots 5" album, they bring you within its reach on a series of neverending guitar crescendos. And in the beginning, the savage cut-ups, collages and musical collisions of their earliest experiments slashed the linear flow of time fastening down the present, and plunged you into an endless freefall through The Boredoms' bottomless noise. As their shape shifts with each new manifestation, the one constant through two decades of mutations is their way of tricking time out of joint. These time slippages are further stretched by the inevitable holes in most Westerners' knowledge of a career largely played out of Japan since their inception in 1986. With few keeping up with their mercurial changes is nigh impossible for anyone who isn't permanently logged on to the plethora of Boredoms Websites monitoring their moves. For the rest, confusion goes with the territory. A few years back The Boredoms used to nurture a playful chaos; in contrast, the intense, joyful and exciting music of their newest incarnation at the Royal Festival Hall hinges on the super-tight precision of the drumming, while self-discipline has given their sound a keener edge.
Hailing from the southern port city of Osaka, which is also home to a thriving, deeply rooted noise culture pioneered by the likes of Masonna and Hijokaiden, The Boredoms first surfaced in the mid-to late 80s with Eye's crude "Anal By Anal" EP and The Boredoms' debut, "Osorezan No Stooges Kyo" (both were later slammed together under the title "Onanie Bomb Meets the Sex Pistols") The follow-up, "Soul Discharge 99", was given an extra boost when it was licensed to former Butthole Surfers bassist Kramer's Shimmy Disc label, but The Boredoms's underground cult status was secured shortly after, when they landed a recording contract with WEA Japan that miraculously promised them total creative freedom. Then as now, it allows them to work with American contemporaries like John Zorn and Sonic Youth, who both took The Boredoms under their respective wings, setting up various projects and collaborations, while encouraging them to take the music higher. Not that The Boredoms needed pushing. In the early 90s, they abandoned etiquette and made rock behave in unnatural yet increasingly fascinating ways on "Wow 2" (a live recording supervised by Zorn), "Pop Tatari" (1992) and "Chocolate Synthesizer" (1995). The line-up blasting out that period's deliriously untamed mix of psychedelia, Hip Hop, hardcore punk and alien free jazz included Eye, original drummer and co-vocalist Toyohito Yoshikawa, guitarist Seiichi Yamamoto, bass player Hira and the dynamic drum duo of ATR and Yoshimi P-We (the latter doubling on trumpet). Though these astounding records made a profound impression on those lucky enough to hear them, neither Eye nor Yoshimi can remember a thing about them. "Listening to "Chocolate Synthesizer" now, both myself and Yoshimi have forgotten all about what music we played then," confesses Eye sleepily, the day after The Boredoms's London triumph. "Hearing it now comes as a shock, it's surprising. How did we actually do that? Is this the sort of music that we played? It's interesting, but it's puzzling and we both wonder why it was we were actually able to do that."

YOUNG, LOUD, AND SNOTTY

To properly understand how The Boredoms evolved their mutated punk disco to the incredible percussion-driven sound of today, it's necessary to return Eye to his dark past as the major catalyst behind one of Japan's most notorious 1980s noise/performance units, Hanatarashi. He first brought himself up to speed playing appaling electric guitar (by all accounts) in an early speedcore outfit called Jakotsubaba (meaning Snake Bone Witch), and ending most shows by diving onto the drums. He carried over this Metzger-like destructivism into Hanatarashi, Japanese for "the snot-nosed". Asked at the time for the origin of the name, Eye responded: "Just all of the sudden someone will punch me. When I think about getting hit, my nose starts to run, and by the time I get home my nose will be all stopped up. Really crammed with snot."
Drawing inspiration from San Francisco performance group Survival Research Laboratories (who created gladiatorial robots out of auto parts, decommisioned military hardware and dead animals) and self-destructive hardcore icon GG Allin, Hanatarash (the "i" was later dropped) set out to be the most extreme act on the planet. Their tongue in cheek manifesto taunted the people they would have to kill to get there: "KILL ALL THE NOISE ARTISTS! WE HATE WHITEHOUSE. PISS OFF NWW. ASSHOLE C93. SUCK PTV. FUCK COIL. WE LOVE DISCO SOUND." Featuring Yamatsuka Eye (his original name, which he would change several times before he started calling himself Yamantaka) on vocals and "bodyguard" Taketani on percussion, Hanatarashi's various attempts to create "a visual experience of war" are the stuff of legend. Most notoriously, Eye hotwired and mini-digger and ran amok with the machine in the hall where they were performing. But things only got out of hand when Eye accidently smashed a hole in the wall with the digger's shovel, carved up the joint with circular saws, and split petrol on the wreckage.
Another time, Eye took an electric saw to a dead cat which he found in an alley just before going onstage. The live reviews read more like despatches from a war zone: "Ten minutes after the show begins, the room is full of broken glass," described the shaken reviewer. "The fence set up to protect the audience was the first thing to be destroyed, adn they are throwing pieces of the fence around. The audience are huddled like refugees in the corners of the hall. A broken pipe spewed water into the room. A gas burner was flaming. So much metal and glass and concrete was being thrown against the walls that I got out just watching. The fire extinguisher were smashed. There was no applause, or indeed any sound from the audience. The fire alarm went off. The room was getting too smoky to see. There was little bits of dead, dry meat stuck to the walls and ceiling from the animal cutting."
By now, Eye was branded with a reputation for being hostile, unpredictable and dangerous. "Yamatsuka is clearly insane," insisted the same reviewer. In reality, Eye was much more unassuming. "I'm not charismatic at all," he admitted to interviewer Sakevi Yokoyama in 1985, "Hanatarashi is more more interesting to read about than to see or hear." Even so, listening to Hanatrashi's ultraviolent early recordings reveals that they're fuelled by the same energies firing the present Boredoms quartet. Only he now channels his earlier destructive impulses into a higher, more spiritual level of communication. No longer driven to repel and terrify, the only thing Eye wants to tear down today is the invisible boundary between performer and spectator.

[atsonicpark]

BORN TO ANAL
By the time Hanatarashi had burned themselves out, Eye had developed a taste for rock. He signed on as drummer with the shortlived Acid Makki & Combi And Zombie, who featured future Boredoms members Seiichi Yamamoto on guitar and Hira on bass. For his part, Yamamoto wasn't immediately taken with the prospect of Eye's arrival. Before Acid Makki's singer Makki Sasara introduced them, Yamamoto's reaction was: "The Hanatarashi guy? He's scary! I hate him!" But the pair instantly bonded as musical allies. Eye later quit the group to sink the foundations for The Boredoms. Holed up in his bedroom's makeshift studio, he experimented with a multitrack recorder and cranked out cassette copies of the resulting "Boretronix" on his own labels, ? Ltd., Mega Scum Groove Inc., and Condome Cassex. His first homemade recording to make it onto vinyl was the "Anal by Anal" EP (aka "The Anal Trilogy"), released by the Japanese independent Transrecords. Written, recorded, and mixed and mastered entirely on one hot summer's day, "Anal by Anal" features Eye yelping and gurgling over a basic guitar and a "found" drumming instruction tape, before he brings it to a climax by screaming "GO!" at the top of his lungs. "The Boredoms started out as a bedroom project where I was just multitracking stuff myself," remembers Eye, when asked about the origins of "Anal by Anal". "Anal by Anal was basically solo multitrack stuff. Now the group has no guitarist and bass player in it, so in a way that links into what The Boredoms were earlier."
The first version of the Boredoms proper came together in 1986 with Eye on vocals, his partner and bodyguard Taketani on drums, Mara Tabata on guitar and Hosoi on bass. During that summer, Taketani was replaced by the wild and eccentric drummer Toyohito Yoshikawa, and Acid Makki bassist Hira took over from Hosoi. When Mara Tabata later quit to join Zeni Geva, Eye seized the opportunity to draft his friend Seiichi Yamamoto into the group, which he had now officially baptised The Boredoms. Partly named after the early Buzzcocks' best known song, it was mainly chosen to reflect the mental state of its members, and they had every intention of living up to their name. "We were really really boring back when "Anal by Anal" had just come out and we were playing our first gigs," laughs Eye. "There were these really long gaps between the songs. We'd take forever tuning up. Everyone would be falling asleep. We could really make the audience yawn. It was like there was nothing exciting about the music."
I saw them back then and they were totally boring," confirms Yoshimi. "It was utterly tedious. There was no drive, it just went on and on. The gaps between the songs would be longer than the songs themselves. I remember it was so boring that I left the first time I saw them. That was the only time I saw them before I joined." Considering her to be a better drummer, Eye invited Yoshimi take over from Yoshikawa on drums in 1988. Yoshikawa was shifted to percussion to make way for her, and she soon became a permanent fixture. But why did she want to join such a boring lot in the first place? "I thought they would change if I joined," she replies. "Things became very fucked up when I joined. We'd do something, then forget about it, then do something else. In the same way the group has constantly kept changing."
"It changed a lot then," adds Eye. "We forgot the original concept of being boring. I think I wanted to recreate the feeling of a boring afternoon at a petrol station in the countryside with nothing to do. Apathy and weariness. Chronic apathy."
He has recently been thinking hard about to the original concept of the group, he reveals, continuing, "I think there's something very important to be found in boredom. There's something beautiful about it when you're utterly bored."
"You yourself have changed a lot since then," Yoshimi interjects, "so maybe you see boredom differently."
A kind of inner calm, perhaps? Yoshimi rebuffs this suggestion immediately. "No, it's not calmness," she giggles. "If he was calm he really would be Mr. Boring."

CALL ME GOD

To acknowlege the group's latest evolutionary change, Eye has decided to customise the group's name from The Boredoms to the more mystical sounding V(infinity symbol)rdoms. The decision apparently took a considerable time to formulate.
"Do you know what kotodama means?" he asks. I admit my ignorance, but luckily interpreter Alan Cummings is on hand to explain that kotodama is an ancient Japanese belief that words possess a mystical, self-realising power in the right circumstances.
"All of my group names, including The Boredoms, have a meaning," reveals Eye, explaining, "When we still spelt it with a B - now it's V - it linked to 'boa', the huge snake you find in South America. There was also the idea of 'bore' and boring, but primarily I think I wanted to access the power of the serpent and the power of the Earth.
"The idea of being bored was important too," he reiterates. "Like when you've caught a cold and you're feverish, you hear music in a very strange and mysterious way. I used to get like that a lot."
Amplifying his experience of how physical conditions affect perception, Eye has some very definite ideas about the relationship between musicians and audience, and how they should be positioned to play and hear this new music to best advantage. "I have a concept for the band now," he says, settling into his stride. "I don't think of it as a group, more as a kind of circuit, or a piece of equipment. Usually you think of a group as a guitar, bass and drums all colliding, but I see the group as being like a record player. You can see that in the layout when we play. We weren't able to do it here last night, but usually when we play in Japan we set up in the middle of the venue, in a circle so we're facing each other. So the audience is all around us, and together we make up a huge circle." Apparently this human circle bears similarities to the traditional Japanese Bon Odori dance. At festivals throughout Japan in the middle of July, whole communities participate in circular dances to welcome the dead, who are believed to return to their old homes during this period. "We're all facing the centre of the circle," continues Eye, "and that's where the energy is concentrated. So it's different from watching TV."
"Concerts up till now have always been like watching TV," emphasises Yoshimi, "but this way the musicians and the audience are both focused on the centre point. We want it to be music that people can dance to. We want them to dance. When you're playing drums you want people to move their bodies."
Eye, it transpires, is thinking ways beyond the established performer-audience relationship. His vision of Voordoms casts the group as the flesh and blood equivalent of a technologically advanced information receiver, plugged into a higher plane of cosmic consciousness. "Because we're facing each other, we're situated on diagonals, aren't we?" he elaborates, "and we can pick up information along these diagonals. Where the diagonals intersect, it's like this important source of information suddenly appears there and we can access or download it. In that sense it's like a database. I always want to connect to a higher energy, that's what I mean by a database - something I can access and download data from."
Elaborating his record player concept, Eye points out the the V in their name resembles a stylus, while the infinity symbol takes on the shape of two records. "We're the motor to the record player, and where our diagonals intersect is the hole in the record." "But we don't think about it when we're playing," interjects Yoshimi. "We try as hard as we can not to 'try'. We believe that if you don't play naturally then the record in the sky won't revolve. We put too much energy into it. When we're playing naturally and facing each other, it feels like the music flows really smoothly." His vision of Voordoms as a human Technics record deck, scratching the grooves of an enormous intergalactic record with the concentrated power of their music and audience is certainly astonishing. And it gets better.
"For me The Boredoms' music is like a really long email address," Eye enthuses. "It doesn't matter whether we're any good or whether we're crap, what matters is precision. If you make a mistake with a mail address then your message won't go to where it's supposed to. Make just one mistake and it's like you get crossed lines on the telephone. So The Boredoms are like a mail address for accessing this higher data, and at the same time it's like we call out and this higher form of energy appears."

[afterthefact]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQffAlQDKzw

[atsonicpark]

DON'T FALL IN THE AUDIO HOLE

Partly hatched out of his obsessions with records, Eye's human turntable theory also links to his parallel role as a DJ. As MC Hellshit, he teamed up with turntablist Otomo Yoshihide (aka DJ Carhouse) in 1995 for a Disobey event in Manchester; and as DJ Pica Pica Pica, he has released a CD on vinyl cut-ups, scratched edits and raw remixes that hark back to his earlier "Boretronix" cassette recordings. But why is he so fascinated by the role of DJ? "Since I was a kid I've always been interested in the idea of making sounds using records," Eye replies. "When I first started making my own multitracked recordings, I'd use a tape deck and a record player. I'd put a big rock on the arm of the player, so it would play the same thing over and over, make up loops and ping-pong them back and forth. I've always been really interested in records as a medium, and in sound reproduction equipment. So when DJs first appeared I wanted to have a go myself."
The technical aspects of sound generation notwithstanding, Eye is also fascinated by the DJ's potential for creating an alternative identity. "I'm really interested in how putting 'DJ' in front of a word adds some special value to an action. You could be drinking coffee and become DJ Coffee," he laughs. "My fundamental reason for becoming a DJ, though, is the psychological satisfaction I get from seeing a round object revolving." Asked if he admires and DJs currently treading the club circuits, Eye cites sound artist Christian Marclay. "I remember seeing my first photograph of Marclay who was wearing a turntable like he was selling hot-dogs at a baseball game. Seeing that picture was exciting. He looks punk, the whole image. I thought his "Record Without a Cover" was also hugely exciting. It's somebody doing something which hasn't been done before - how could you not be impressed?"

BOREDOMER IN BORETRIBE

Contact with contemporary Western musicians has been enormously beneficial in the development of The Boredoms, especially for Eye and Yoshimi, who have forged strong links with John Zorn and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. In October 1992 Zorn brought in producer Kazunori Sugiyama to oversee the recording of The Boredoms's fourth album, "Wow 2", for his label Avant. After witnessing him at work, Zorn invited Eye to join his hardcore jazz orchestras Naked City and Painkiller. They have since recorded two albums together for the New Japan and Radical Jewish Culture sections of Zorn's Tzadik label.
"I think I met him in Japan," replies Eye, recalling his first contacts with Zorn. "I was playing in some band and John came along to watch us. We started talking and he said that we should do something. I then went to New York to do vocals for Naked City and things developed from there. One thing I noticed from working with Naked City was that if they were recording something and John noticed a mistake, he would stop everybody from playing and they would do it again until it was right. It was that idea of getting things precisely right [that intrigued me]." The pair returned to the studio in 1995 to record "Nani Nani", for which Zorn assumed the name Dekoboko Hajime. During the same session, they found enough time to record a short CD called "Zohar" as The Mystic Fugu Orchestra. Under the alias of Rav Tzizit, Zorn played harmonium over the pops and crackles of a "found" LP of ancient Judaica recordings, with Eye, as Rav Yechida, supplying an accompanying vocal drone. "John was doing this Jewish music series on Tzadik and we wanted to do something that would fit into that idea," remembers Eye, "so we found an old record in some junk shop and played it, and this was the sound of that record. "Nani Nani" was recorded first, and when that was all finished we had some time left so we did this. It just came out very quickly it wasn't thought over."
For Eye, working on this outwardly Jewish project tapped into darker cultural resonances closer to home. Something about the music dredged up the long buried history of the Oomoot cult, a Japanese religious order claiming to possess visions of a new world order. The military-controlled government eventually banned the heavily persecuted cult in 1935. Several generations of Eye's family had belonged to the Oomoto movement; combined with Zorn's deep personal commitment to Jewish culture, the duo's shared memories of grief made them especially close. The music resulting from these sessions is at once mystical and marvellous.
The Zorn connection led to The Boredoms being booked as support for a Stateside Sonic Youth tour. When it was over, Thurston Moore followed Zorn's lead and lured Eye into the studio to record together on various projects for his Ecstatic Peace! label, some of which are still in the can awaiting release.
"I like the way that Sonic Youth's sound is very similar to the Glenn Branca guitar orchestra he was doing with guitars with different tunings," comments Eye, about his experiences touring with Sonic Youth. "Where he was creating music that was both contemporary composition and rock 'n' roll at the same time. That was something that was very important to me. I never really wanted to just play rock as it was, even though as a group it does have that rock structure to it. I've never been able to play pre-existing rock and I've always wanted to do something else.
"When you play like that you begin to hear new sounds coming from beyond the sympathetic resonances and overtones," he continues, "like voices, or melodies you've never heard before. The more you listen, the more you hear. I'm really interested in that phenomenon. That was something I learnt from Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth." During the same 1992 Sonic Youth tour, Yoshimi was herded into the studio by Kim Gordon to play drums and trumpet for her and ex-Pussy Galore guitarist Julie Cafritz's Grrrl Power punk trio Kitten (later renamed Free Kitten). Smiling at the memory, Yoshimi recalls, "Kim, who I didn't know at the time, told me that this was going to be group called Kitten, and at first I thought she said Kitchen! It was a very long time before I knew this was going to be a group with Kim and Julie. Then Mark [Ibold] from Pavement joined and we toured, but Julie has been too busy recently so the band haven't done anything."

[atsonicpark]

WE NEVER SLEEP

"What we also learned was that we shouldn't eat junk food, and eating really great food is a source of energy in itself," asserts Eye, discussing how his ideas about music making had changed during this period. "We realised that you couldn't actually continue to make great music by eating instant ramen."
Their experiences with Zorn and Sonic Youth left members of The Boredoms hungry for fresh opportunities to play with different musicians. In 1994 Eye, Yoshimi and guitarist Yamamoto took part in a televised concert for NHK (the Japanese equivalent of the BBC) called "Video Opera". Other participants included New York avant garde dancer Simone Forti, Fluxus artist Nam June Paik and his fellow Fluxus musician Takehisa Kosugi, of Taj Mahal Travellers fame. In the end, it was never broadcast, but The Boredoms appreciated the company. Similar to Sonic Youth's later "Goodbye 20th Century" project - the group's homage to the century's avant garde pioneers - The Boredoms participation in "Video Opera" revealed them to be adept at mastering the intricacies of a Fluxus performance, what with Eye bouncing out the tempo for Yamamoto and Yoshimi with a rubber ball. The most impressive aspect of this performance was the trio's natural ability to communicate with each other. "The communication works best when it's natural, on full force and people aren't thinking about anything," confirms Eye. "When you're on that level of communication they know instinctively where the sound should be directed. It's only when you're thinking too hard that unnecessary communication methods have to be used to get back to where we should be.
"For me, music is more about listening than producing a sound myself. I'm not a musician. I can press a button or I can scream, but the most musical thing I can do is listen."
It has now been three years since The Boredoms released the mind-altering masterwork "Vision Creation Newsun" (Birdman). The group underwent a considerable metamorphosis since its release, which has left them feeling somewhat detached from it.
"We think that "Vision Creation Newsun" is over and belongs in the past," retorts Eye, "because it's ceased being a collision." Both Eye and Yoshimi prefer to look straight ahead and concentrate on finding some way to release the hours of new material they have recorded since the completion of the "Vision Creation Newsun" period. "I've got lots of other groups, so I'd like to release something by them," hints Eye teasingly. "But we've recorded some Voordoms stuff too. We recorded at the beach, lined up three drum kits at the water's edge so the waves would hit the bass drums."
"It was like field recording," enthuses Yoshimi. "We'd set up mics in the waves to record the drums."
"Underwater mics, recording the drums in the water," continues Eye. "I wanted to record the movement. So we'd be moving the mics around as we were playing. Someone would be on the beach, someone else would be playing in the sea. We'd swing the mic right up close to the drums. We were recording like that all last year. We got this huge gun mic, like a corncob, and had eight people moving it around as were recording. We had one of those big cars that have a digital mixing studio built into them down at the beach with us. We got some great sounds. I'd like to edit those recordings and put them out. It cost us so much to record that we've got to release it."
Though he has done his utmost to stifle any giveaway signs, it becomes evident that Eye stayed up all night following the concert, and he's beginning to succumb to his desire for sleep. It's not the most auspicious moment to ask him about the new found precision presently dominating The Boredoms's music. "But surely everyone wants to be able to reproduce their vision, their tastes as precisely and closely as possible?" he insists. "The stuff you have in your head! I can't write music, so I can't use the same methods, but precision is still important. It's a bit like when you go to a shrine in Japan, and you're supposed to bow twice, and each one should be a different depth. It'd be wrong if you bowed three times. It doesn't matter if the form isn't perfect, but you need to do it twice - and the same with the depth, even if it's not perfect it's got to be one deep and one shallow. If it's not, then it's meaningless. That's the kind of precision I'm talking about," he pauses a moment, before concluding, "I thought about learning how to write down my vision, but I just couldn't do it."





.......that was from the Wire and is by far the best article on the Boredoms ever.

[atsonicpark]

Sonic Youth first went to Japan around 1988. We weren't the first New York import. I believe Zorn and Frith and a few others from the underground improvisors scene had been connecting there. But as far as post-no wave/noise rock bands go we weren't the first. Einsturzende Neubauten had gone there. And Lydia Lunch went with Richard Kern and they hated it. But it was Pussy Galore who were the first New York noise freaks to hit Japan. They came back and mumbled something about this band that opened for them in Tokyo called The Boredoms. They referred to them as Japan's Butthole Surfers.

Six months later we make it to Japan and play a tiny, tiny club in Tokyo and, sure enough, The Boredoms are opening. Yamatsuka Eye literally burst into the dressing room (the hallway between the stage and the back door) saying, "Hello we are Boredoms. I am Eye. This is P-We. She is 16 years old. We are Pisshole Surfers! Yeah yeah yeah!" And they played a set of music very tangled and free and with a full-on head of velocity. We were awed. Eye gave us records. One was the first Boredoms LP called Onanie Bomb Meets The Sex Pistols. The other was an LP by something else of Eye's called the Hanatarash (loosely translates as: the snot nose). The Hanatarash LP was pure screaming noise. We were told the legend of a Hanatarash gig in Osaka where Eye hot-wired a mini street-demolition tractor and drove it into the club and proceeded to tear the place apart.

Through Eye we found out about other musicians exploring like-minded territory. Eye was at the centre of it all in the sense that there was an evolving history of Japanese noise-music before him (notably Hijo Kaidan, Merzbow, Null and Keiji Haino) and an insane influx of it after his Hanatarash debut. Noise labels, such as Alchemy Records, documented the music on vinyl. But it was the cassette which would give this expanding scene its identity. Eye ran a cassette label called "?" and musicians as wild as Masonna and Aube created labels (Coquette and G.R.O.S.S.) to further the exploits of their own noise as well as others.

The next time Sonic Youth went to Japan I spent every free minute tracking down noise-cassettes. The music began appearing on CD and I started gathering those as well. Enthusiasts in America, the U.K. and Europe began to release cassettes of Japanese noise: Boredoms, UFO Or Die, Masonna, Ruins, Bustmonsters, Omoide Hatoba, Zeni Geva, Volume Dealers, Incapacitants, Hanatarash, Gerogerigegege, Violent Onsen Geisha, Hijo Kaidan, Aube, Pain Jerk, Merzbow, MSBR, Magical Power Mako, Fushitsusha, and many, many more. It all reached a peak in about 1992-93. Many of the same noise-artists continue to release brutal hyper-electronic noise cassettes and CDs. I want them to stop. I figured I may have 900 hours of sick and insane Japanese noise-music in my apartment. I've stacked it all in boxes. I told Yoshimi, the Boredoms' drummer, that I plan on selling it all as a lot. She looked at me and smiled and said, "No one will buy it." Sometimes I think I'm going to have a nervous breakdown when I receive notice that Vanilla, G.R.O.S.S., Alchemy, P.S.F., Mom 'n Dad, Public Bath, Japan Overseas, Beast 666, Forced Exposure, Nux, Endorphine Factory, My Fiancee's Life Work, Coquette, etc, etc, etc have released a new Merzbow or Incapacitants cassette, CD, LP or 7" (Masonna released a mini-disc made to order for anyone willing to buy it. I bought one immediately.) I devised various plans of action. One was to purchase hundreds of cheap walkmans and build a small-scale house and line the structure with continuous playing noise. I'd heard that Merzbow released a CD in an edition of one. This CD was in a car CD player installed in a Mercedes- Benz. I bought the less limited edition, the one in a box with a t-shirt. I obsessed about buying the car edition, though. I imagined parking it in front of my noise-house. From time to time I figure I should just dump the stuff on someone who loves the music but can hardly afford to buy anything.

As I pondered this over the summer of 95 I got a call from a major label record company asking me if I wanted to remix a track off the forthcoming Yoko Ono LP Rising. I said I hate being locked in recording studios and am not into remixing anything but I'd listen to the tape. There was one track on there, the title track, which I loved. It was 10 minutes of acoustic guitar, tabla drum and Yoko singing these scarily beautiful lines and going off into lovely warble-improvs. I realized I had found a home for my Japanese noise-cassette children. I called the record company and said I'd do it but it had to be immediately as Sonic Youth was preparing to leave for tour in a few days. The next day I went to this amazing studio in Manhatten. The Yoko tapes were there as were two studio engineers prepared for a good two days minimum pro-remix. I brought my box of noise. I pulled out cassettes, some wrapped in homemade gunk, and had the engineer fill up every open track on the song. There were many open tracks. I cranked Yoko's voice, closed my eyes and listened to the playback. When I yelled, "Go!" the engineer would toggle switch the stereo-rainbow of MSBR, The Gerogerigegege, Hanatarash, Masonna, Solmania, Incapacitants, Violent Onsen Geisha, C.C.C.C., Hijokaidan, Aube, Monde Bruits and Keiji Haino into the mix completely obliterating everything in its path. And when I yelled, "Stop!" heŐd toggle it off. It took four hours and I got paid enough to cover a good percentage of what I had paid out for all this noise. My guilt was somewhat relieved. Only problem: I didn't ask any of the artists for their permission. I told the record company to get clearance from each artist and to compensate them fairly. The label received two responses from Japan. One was, "Please use my music freely anywhere, anytime, anyplace!" and the other was, "How dare Thurston Moore use our music and tell us afterward?!" I responded to all who had animosity and everything was ironed out but I did get called a weird Japanese name by Hijokaidan.
Which leads me to what is probably my favorite Japanese recording. It's a cassette compilation entitled Gomi-Akta (Gomi and Akuta roughly translate as Trash and Dirt, metaphorically as something with absolutely no value). It's released by Masonna's Coquette label and a weird, wild assortment of the Japanese noise underground is present on this tape. Yamazaki Takushi from Masonna gave all participants a set of rules: 1. No electricity or batteries allowed - 2. One take, no corrections - 3. Recording time less than three minutes - 4. All recording done on Yamazaki's Walkman. The tape is wrapped in aluminium foil and has ripped Sony cassette wrappers rubber-banded to it and itŐs all dumped in a crinkled plastic bag. All 41 tracks are masterpieces. Eye is screaming and flushing a toilet in a club dressing room. The liner notes claim, "The resonances of the toilet bowl are idiotically fascinating." All kinds of shit goes on here with people shaking pachinko balls in beer cans, breaking chopsticks, screaming underwater, hitting cash registers, teeth brushing, ordering yakitori, a paper cup leaking cola, teeth being extracted.

One track is by the owner of a record store called Fujiyama. Fujiyama is a shack full of noise on the outskirts of Tokyo. I had heard of this mecca a few years ago and trekked there only to find it shut. There was no information on when it was open and so I returned two or three times a day for two or three days until it was finally open. The owner was an interesting, eccentric fellow and he had a motherload of original Japanese noise artifacts. I found cassettes from the incredible Beast 666 label as well as early Hanatarash items. Photographs of Eye destroying stages as a young man were slipped in plastic baggies and sold as Hanatarash ephemera. I went hog wild. I've been back a few times since then. On the Gomi-Akta cassette the store owner, Watanabe Tadashi, recites what the liner notes refer to as "incomprehensible repetition of nonsense". The liners also note that Watanabe "often capriciously closes his shop. He was once severely scolded by Thurston Moore, who was unable to shop there despite several attempts."

Well, this is patently untrue as I believed myself to be dutifully respectful to Mr Watanabe. My thanks to Resonance for letting me put the record straight.

- Thurston Moore

[atsonicpark]

Pick a band and answer only using that band's song titles: Boredoms

Are you male or female?: Nice B-O-R-E Guy & Boyoyo Touch
Describe yourself: Rat Soup
How do some people feel about you?: Call Me God
How do you feel about yourself?: NUTS ROOM
Describe your girlfriend/boyfriend/interest/spouse: 96 Teenage Bondage
Where would you rather be?: Hawaiian Disco Bollocks
Describe what you want to be: Super Coming
Describe how you live: Born to Anal
Describe how you love: Sexy Boredoms
Share a few words of wisdom: We Never Sleep

[atsonicpark]

Before the eight minute and thirty-six second mark on “Super Going,” the third song on The Boredoms’ late-90s masterpiece Super AE, there is a whole lot of tension.

The Boredoms are one of the most unique bands on the planet. Like many bands, they could be claimed to be both backwards and forwards looking, retro but also futuristic—but The Boredoms (like they do with most things) take it to the extreme. They’re looking all the way back to ancient times, with the most primal of music—drum rituals, tribal chanting, incantations and hymns, and they’re looking forward to a place we can only hope music reaches in the next 1000 years, so far ahead of their time as to be thought of on a completely different plane than the music made by “the normals.” Before Super AE they were only one or the other, but it’s the juxtaposition of these two elements—which on Super AE seems as wholly natural as discopunk—that makes the Boredoms so fucking special.

It starts, fittingly enough, with a rite of passage. The Boredoms are perhaps the only band on earth would decide to open their opus with a song that isn’t merely difficult, but actually tries to physically harm the listener. The metallic grind of “Super You” seems harmless enough at first, if a bit monotonous, but it soon turns malevolent—shards of the aural equivalent of shrapnel cone shooting at you, daring you, taunting you to reach for the stop button. If you listen to it at loud volume or on headphones—both of which are necessary for full appreciation of the album—the son of a bitch really stings.

A very long seven and a half minutes later, the initiation is complete, and the band commences a brief opening hymn. The first half of “Super Are,” the second track on Super AE, is a welcome respite from the needlessly cruel opener. But soon the hymn ignites, and after a bloodcurdling scream from head Boredom eYe, the flame grows more and more intense, Yoshimi P-We and assorted other Boredom percussionists pounding away, getting louder, more brutal. Then a final howl from eYe brings us into “Super Going.”

“Super Going” is manna from heaven, and it sounds like the first rainfall after months upon months of drought. The song is nothing but two chords, a repeating bassline, a lot of assorted sound effects and one false ending. It’s fabulous at first, but eventually you start to grow weary of the two-chord pattern, and pray for some non-production based variation. After five minutes you start to lose hope. After seven minutes you’ve lost hope entirely. Then finally it is eight minutes into the song, still just the same two chords, the same bassline, the same galloping drums, nothing but tension, tension, tension.

And then there is release.

The tape stutters. eYe wails loud enough for the gods to hear him. And the song switches. It’s the closest thing music will ever come to an orgasm, and it is fucking beautiful. The chords change. The bassline changes. The drums change. And the song goes from a gorgeous rainfall to an even more glorious thunderstorm. The Boredoms can control the elements, and they prove it with 8:36-8:39 on “Super Going.”

Three minutes later, its over. There’s more on the album after it, some of which is almost as impressive, but at the moment you can’t picture anything even touching this. For me, no other moment in music ever will.

- Andrew Unterberger

[atsonicpark]

B.O.R.E.D.O.M.S. in the sun.

[amerikangod]

I'm going to have to come back here later and read some of this.

I too love Boredoms.

[atsonicpark]

 

 

 

Someone on soulseek (adamhodgson) is sharing a folder called "the boredoms - itchy the killer soundtrack".

[amerikangod]

Oh, and this is the only place in which I've heard any Concrete Octopus:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iey3vr__wDY

If anyone knows where I can find some MP3s, that would be awesome. I understand it that they never actually recorded anything?