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One of the least likely places for psych rock to have taken hold was Japan. Mid-\u201960s Japan was experiencing a homegrown cultural flowering of its own, thanks to figures like filmmaker Kurosawa Akira and printmaking artist Sait\u014d Kiyoshi. Pop music in Japan wasn\u2019t immune to global trends: the so-called GS (\u201cGroup Sounds\u201d) scene was a decidedly Japanese take on Western rock and pop styles like surf and garage rock. And by the late part of the decade, influential Japanese personalities who had visited places like London, New York and San Francisco brought back records, tapes and stories of the burgeoning psychedelic movement.<\/p>\n
Yet the psych rock scene in Japan would remain quite small, and never really broke through to the wider public. \u201cI don\u2019t know so much about the Japanese underground scene,\u201d says Kawabata, leader of Acid Mothers Temple, today the premier Japanese psychedelic group. \u201cI\u2019m not sure there was any<\/i> psychedelic rock scene in \u201860s and \u201870s Japan.\u201d He suggests what did exist was likely \u201cjust bizarre copies of Western music.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kawabata\u2019s own musical journey began in 1978. And in those early days, few seemed to appreciate what he was doing. \u201cNobody could understand my music, so I couldn\u2019t connect with them,\u201d he says. But he followed his inspiration, making his own psychedelic rock, imbued with an Asian character.<\/p>\n
Drawing not only from American and British styles, AMT often incorporates elements of noise (from avant-garde composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen) and drone (from the repetitive and hypnotic motorik<\/i> of German \u201ckrautrock\u201d). The results are every bit as heady as a Grateful Dead \u201cspace\u201d piece, but with a Japanese quality all its own. For his part, Kawabata characterizes AMT\u2019s studio work as musique concr\u00e8te<\/i>>, using recorded sounds as raw material.<\/p>\n
The first official AMT album, Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O.<\/i> was released in 1997. Asked how the album was received by the Japanese public, Kawabata laughs. \u201cTotally no reaction,\u201d he says. The media there ignored it, too.<\/p>\n
But the five-track album (featuring a nearly 20-minute drone freakout titled \u201cSpeed Guru\u201d) did get noticed. UK magazine The Wire<\/i> named the album one of the year\u2019s best. The group \u2013 a shifting cast of players with Kawabata as the guiding force \u2013 embarked on a busy schedule of concert tours around the globe. A staggeringly prolific outfit, AMT has released more than 100 albums to date.<\/p>\n
While early psychedelic music pioneers found inspiration among the drug culture. Kawabata\u2019s group stands apart from that tradition. \u201cAll of my music comes from my cosmos,\u201d he explains. \u201cI catch music from my cosmos, and I play with instruments to people. So I don\u2019t need anything like mind-altering substances.\u201d His goal is to remove ego from the process. Because, he says, \u201cmy ego\/personality gets in the way of reproducing music.\u201d<\/p>\n
And while flashing, colored lights and surreal projected visual images are often part of the psych-rock aesthetic. Kawabata says that his group doesn\u2019t emphasize those things. The group often plays in near-darkness. \u201cI can\u2019t even see my stage,\u201d he says. \u201cAnyway, the most important thing is the music; if people have their own [mental] images from our music, that\u2019s<\/i> the perfect visual for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
The music of Acid Mothers Temple is sometimes said to bring on a state of trance. Kawabata\u2019s goals, though, are decidedly more down to earth. \u201cMusic is just music: nothing more, nothing less,\u201d he asserts. \u201cI want to make people happy. Only this.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Musical prophets without honor in their home country, Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. have been making mind-melting psychedelic music for nearly three decades. The quintessential underground band […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26392,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,57],"tags":[5130,5272],"class_list":["post-26391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","category-psych","tag-acid-mothers-temple","tag-kawabata-makoto","cat-41-id","cat-57-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26391"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26393,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26391\/revisions\/26393"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}