Les Rallizes Dénudés - Mars Studio 1980 (2012) [4CD Box Set]

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Les Rallizes Dénudés - Mars Studio 1980 (2012) [4CD Box Set]

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Though Les Rallizes Denudes, also known as Hadaka no Rallizes, were one of the earliest and most revolutionary Japanese psychedelic rock bands, and have existed off and on through four decades, they are also one of the most obscure, barely known even in their native country. This cult of noise terrorists shrouded themselves in mystery, seldom touring and releasing very few records, usually with no discernible label. Their sound presages the later psychedelic experimental noise of Fushitsusha, High Rise, and others in the current crop more than any other Japanese psychedelic group from the late '60s.

Revolving around guitarist and vocalist Mizutani Takashi, Les Rallizes Denudes formed in November of 1967 at Kyoto University, inspired by Exploding Plastic Inevitable-era Velvet Underground as well as the over-amplified rock of Blue Cheer. By 1968 they were gigging live and even began a regular collaboration with an avant-garde theater troupe, which ended the next year because of Les Rallizes' penchant for extreme volumes of sound. Not only did they use massive amounts of feedback at loud volumes, their stage shows used strobe lights, mirror balls, and other effects for a live experience that was a total sensory assault.

Les Rallizes also aligned themselves with radical left-wing politics, performing at the front lines of student demonstrations against Vietnam and even the student occupation of Kyoto University in April of 1969. One original member, Wakabayashi, was involved in the Japanese Red Army hijacking of a flight to North Korea, known as the Yodo-go incident, and because of Mizutani's own connections with the Red Army, the group's gigs became more infrequent and clandestine. They didn't record much in the studio, and the only music of theirs to come out on vinyl at this time was one side of the double-LP compilation Oz Days Live, released by Oz Discs in 1973. In fact, Les Rallizes kept going throughout the '70s and '80s without releasing a thing, and then suddenly they put out three CDs of archival recordings in 1991, and a video the next year. Of these, the double CD/LP '77 Live highlights them at the top of their form, with 10- to 20-minute tracks of intense guitar feedback and drones over repetitive rhythms and heavily distorted vocals.

Les Rallizes played their final gig in October of 1996, nearly 30 years after their inception. All their albums were released in very limited quantities and are extremely difficult to find, with collectors grabbing them immediately when they show up in stores and catalogs. Because of their reputation for secrecy and violence, as well as the difficulty in tracking down their recordings, Les Rallizes Denudes have taken on an almost mythic status.

by Rolf Semprebon, allmusic

The gauzy veil of mystery that shrouds Les Rallizes Denudes is at least partly based on the fact that virtually all the group’s recordings that have seen the light of day, either officially or unofficially, have been live recordings. By all accounts Rallizes live shows were designed to provide audiences with a palpably sensory experience, in which film, psychedelic lighting effects, incense and, of course, overwhelming volume would alchemically combine to create other states of being. The dreamed, the hallucinatory, the phantom, the transient… Unsurprisingly Rallizes’ lyrics frequently reference precisely these states or the situations in which they can be invoked: dreams, drowsing, angels, vertigo, fissures, the night, the dark, the bleed between dream and awakening, the crepuscular dawn… The gossamer fragility and elusiveness of our emotions and perceptions in these kinds of states seems to be one of the things that Takashi Mizutani wished to evoke in the group’s shows. As Mizutani was keenly aware, the concentrated power of the live moment makes its experience highly elusive after the fact. Hearing a live tape of a gig you have attended is never much more than a cue to memory, a two-dimensional rendering of a far more complex experience, just as a description of a dream utterly fails to capture the experience of dreaming. Perhaps, then, the live moment was the only space in which the experience Mizutani aimed for with his group could exist.

Which isn’t to say that the group never tried to document its sound in the more controlled environment of the recording studio. While none of this material has ever been officially released, fragments of it have long circulated on cassette or CDr in fan circles or on bootlegs. Several examples have also been issued by Univive, the Japanese bootleg label that has consistently released the highest quality Rallizes recordings (underground scuttlebutt has it that Univive is run by an ex-member of the group’s technical support staff), including the so-called “Lost Rock Magazine Demo”, recorded at studios run by NHK (Japan’s national broadcaster, the equivalent of the BBC) in 1976. But the best-known studio recordings by the group are what you now hold in your hands, the legendary Mars Studio sessions from 1980. The tracks were laid down during the tenure in the group of guitarist Fujio Yamaguchi (usually known simply as Fujio). Yamaguchi is one of the more notorious figures in the Japanese rock underground. He was born to a Japanese mother and a black British father, brought up in a reformatory before channeling his anger and energy into a series of rock bands including Group Sounds garage rockers The Dynamites and proto-glam stompers Murahachibu.Yamaguchi’s soujourn in Rallizes lasted just over a year, from early 1980 to March 1981, but the weightless, languid weird-form blues created by the meshing of Mizutani’s billowing feedback and Yamaguchi’s acid-etched lines has been regarded by many Japanese fans as one of the group’s peaks. Three of the group’s best live shows from this era can be heard on the previous Phoenix release, Double Heads.

In September 1980 the group began one of their most extended periods of studio recording, at Mars Studio in the western Tokyo suburb of Kunitachi. Kunitachi is located on the JR Chuo line, one of the major commuter routes connecting Tokyo with its western hinterland. Since the seventies, several of the suburbs in that part of Tokyo had developed a distinctly counter-cultural vibe thanks to the presence of several major universities, cheaper housing, and direct access to the centre city. It was a part of town mat Rallizes were very familiar - following their move to Tokyo from Kyoto, the group lived in a communal house with blacked out windows in Fussa, eight miles to the northwest of Kunitachi. Tachikawa, where the seminal official ‘77 Live album was recorded was halfway between Fussa and Kunitachi. Mars Studio housed both rehearsal and recording studios, with the latter being unusually spacious for a Tokyo studio - spacious enough to be used on occasion as a live venue. As well as its geographical convenience, there was another reason that the band may have chosen Mars Studio. The studio was owned and run by Shokyo Harada who was originally from Kyoto - the same city where Rallizes were formed in November 1967.

The Mars sessions lasted on and off for three months, but it is unknown whether any of the tracks were ever completed. All the tracks on the current release are one-take live recordings, some of them very fragmentary, with little evidence of overdubbing. Strangely, they seem to have not come from copies of the reel-to-reel tapes but rather from a microphone set up in the mixing booth - several of the tracks include conversation between the engineers and the musicians. There are several flailing feedback-ridden jams (of course), but the sessions also see the group aiming at other ways of invoking the transient psychedelic states of their live shows. Here, it is the more quietly glistening gems that stick longest in the memory - a Mizutani solo version of “Гб/ kioku" (Distant Memories), two takes of a simultaneously wistful and heavy new song called “Ко/ no monogatarf' (A Tale of Love), and a new up-tempo arrangement of the live favourite “Kori no honno” (Ice Flames). But the emotional centerpiece is without a doubt the perfect Velvets downer melancholia of the four versions of “Shiroi mezame” (White Waking). There's a sense of the track developing in real time, as Mizutani essays several different arrangements of the lyrics, adding and subtracting instrumental elements - cymbal-heavy hiss, tambourine and tinkling music box, 12 string guitar and Hammond organ. In an aching, longing voice (and lyrics that suggest the narrator is female rather than male) that seems lost in its own reveries of something valuable from the past that has slipped through his fingers, Mizutani croons,

Pure white waking lulls me to sleep, singing its song of serenity
When my spring began, I wanted no one but you
After the winds have passed, my heart trembles still
Enfolded in the scent of light, I forget everything but you…

The fourth disk in the set comprises a live show from the same period as the studio recordings. Recorded on September 11, 1980 at the Yaneura club in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, this show was previously released by Univive under the title Double Heads September, though it was not included in the Double Heads 6CD document of Fujio’s tenure in the group.

Rosa Bryndis Einarsdottir

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Les Rallizes Dénudés - Mars Studio 1980 (2012) [4CD Box Set]

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Les Rallizes Dénudés - Mars Studio 1980 (2012) [4CD Box Set]

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Les Rallizes Dénudés - Mars Studio 1980 (2012) [4CD Box Set]

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Les Rallizes Dénudés - Mars Studio 1980 (2012) [4CD Box Set]

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Les Rallizes Dénudés - Mars Studio 1980 (2012) [4CD Box Set]

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