Gerogerigegege

Art Is Over.

The Gerogerigegege · Juntaro Yamanouchi · Vis a Vis Audio Arts · c. 1985 onward, fixed in print 1994 · Five lines, declarative, total. The end-state anti-manifesto of the M-series arc: the position that the work has dispensed with composition, melody, dedication, gratitude and finally with art itself. I hold Gerogerigegege as the closing entry of the seventy-two-year arc Russolo opened in 1913, twenty-two years before Vomir echoed the gesture from Paris.

§ 01

Editorial.

The late-wave closer · approx. 4,000 words · 20 min

Five lines from Tokyo, closing what Russolo opened in Milan seventy-two years earlier.

I keep Gerogerigegege as the closing entry of the Manifestos section. The M-series ran from Russolo at Russolo in 1913 to Yamanouchi at Gerogerigegege in about 1985 onward, across seventy-two years, four countries (Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States in two locations, Japan), and three language groups (Italian, English, Japanese). I later added Vomir (Vomir, c. 2007) as a structurally analogous late-wave entry, extending the arc by twenty-two years; but the arc closes here, with the five lines Yamanouchi printed on inserts of the early Gerogerigegege releases through the late 1980s and on the sleeve of the 1994 Instruments Disorder (170 Songs) cassette. The manifesto is articulated as five short declarations and that is the end of it.

The author is Juntaro Yamanouchi (山ノ内純太郎), founder in 1985 of the Tokyo-based project The Gerogerigegege (ザ・ゲロゲリゲゲゲ). The project name is a Japanese onomatopoeic compound derived from the verbs for vomiting and diarrhoea, a position statement in the project's title rather than an aesthetic gesture. Yamanouchi ran his own label, Vis a Vis Audio Arts, on which the project's documents (records, cassettes, conceptual non-records) were issued through the period of the project's first active phase 1985–2001. I note Yamanouchi's longstanding collaborator Gero 30 (Tetsuya Endoh, also credited as Gero 56) as the project's other continuous member, with on-stage exhibitionist gestures that I hold as documentary fact and note here for completeness without further dwelling.

The Gerogerigegege's method ran across several modes within the same project, an editorial fact I hold as distinctive of the entry. The harsh-noise mode the project is most-internationally associated with (the live performances, the 1990 Tokyo Anal Dynamite 75-track grindcore-and-noise live LP) sits alongside, on the same Vis a Vis catalogue, a Ramones-influenced punk vein (Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male), a quiet-ambient idiom (None Friendly, Endless Humiliation, >(decrescendo)), and a body of conceptual non-records: the Showa 1989 release bookending a recording of people having sex to the Japanese national anthem after Hirohito's death, the Night 7-inch consisting mainly of a recording of a man defecating into a toilet after the standard one-two-three-four count, the Shaking Box Music release consisting of one hundred blank cassettes in a metal box and the Art Is Over release I keep this Gerogerigegege entry against: a cassette box with no cassette inside, containing instead a single severed octopus tentacle and a lift-out card carrying the five lines. I keep the method's heterogeneity as part of the manifesto's position. The five lines apply across the catalogue. The catalogue contains a punk record, a noise record, an ambient record, an octopus tentacle and a hundred blank cassettes; the five lines say the same thing about each of them.

The text I reproduce in below appears, in my reconstruction from the available documentary record, on at least two Vis a Vis releases: the Art Is Over concept cassette itself (limited edition of 50 copies, Vis a Vis Audio Arts, undated but circulating from the late 1980s) on the lift-out card inside the cassette case and the 1994 Instruments Disorder (170 Songs) cassette on the sleeve notes. The latter is the most cited appearance of the text: Yamanouchi printed the five lines as part of the sleeve copy, alongside the recording-and-mixing dates (recorded 9 January 1994 at Hotel Ultra; mixed 16 January 1994 at Psycho Trash Centre) and the standard Vis a Vis Audio Arts sticker. The five lines also recur, with minor variations, on later Gerogerigegege releases through the late 1990s. I treat the text as a standing statement that Yamanouchi reissued whenever the occasion called for it, rather than a single dated document, and date the manifesto's editorial manner at c. 1985 onward with the appearance on the 1994 Instruments Disorder sleeve.

The five lines themselves are reproduced in below. I note here, before the reproduction, the structural palette of the document. The text is not a manifesto in the Marinetti-Russolo-Maciunas sense; it is not an argument for a position, with premises and conclusions, articulated at length. The text is closer in form to a Fluxus event-score (compressed instructions, total in their reach, refusing the apparatus of conventional discursive argument) and to George Maciunas's three-line Fluxus Manifesto 1963 (a typed page on the document's position, with the conventional discursive apparatus stripped away) than to either of the longer manifestos at Russolo or IR Prospectus. The five lines reject, in order, composition, melody, dedication, gratitude and finally art itself. The rejection is total. I hold the rejection as articulated at the limit of what a manifesto can be while remaining a manifesto: any further compression would be silence and silence is not a manifesto.

I note Yamanouchi's documented disappearance after the 2001 release of Saturday Night Big Cock Salaryman, the project's last release before a fifteen-year hiatus during which Yamanouchi was uncontactable and rumours of his death or institutionalisation circulated in the Japanese noise scene. On 27 August 2013 the Japanese noise figure Gidayū Kaitai (解体義太夫) posted to Twitter that Yamanouchi had been in contact; the project's first post-hiatus release, Moenai Hai (燃えない灰, "ash that will not burn"), was issued 20 April 2016 on Eskimo Records. I keep the 2001–2016 hiatus as the form's own literal enactment of the manifesto's closing line: the work stopped, for fifteen years and then resumed. I do not over-read the resumption. Yamanouchi returned to making records; the five lines remained printed on the inserts of the earlier ones. The manifesto's position and the project's biography are, in my reading, the same document.

I also note, before closing the editorial section, the documentary-citation mode of the entry. The five lines are cited at length in two academic sources: Paul Hegarty's Noise/Music: A History (Continuum, 2007, the standard English-language critical history of noise music) and David Novak's Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Duke University Press, 2013, the standard English-language ethnomusicological study of the Japanese noise scene). I cite both works at the head of the Gerogerigegege entry as the sources for the Anglophone secondary literature on the Gerogerigegege. The English-language interview corpus is thin (Yamanouchi gave few interviews during the project's first phase and the Yamanouchi interview material from the post-2016 return is in Japanese-language publications I hold at one remove). I note the source-density limitation and keep within it.

VAGO · c. the Late Pleistocene

§ 03

The Manifesto, Reproduced.

Five lines · printed on Vis a Vis inserts appearance · 1994 sleeve

Art Is Over · five lines · as printed on the 1994 Instruments Disorder sleeve and on the Art Is Over cassette-case insert
The text, verbatim, as printed
Fuck compose, Fuck melody, Dedicated to no one, Thanks to no one, ART IS OVER. Sleeve of Instruments Disorder (170 Songs) · Vis a Vis Audio Arts · Tokyo · January 1994 · alongside the standard recording-and-mixing-date vein (recorded 9 Jan 1994 Hotel Ultra; mixed 16 Jan 1994 Psycho Trash Center). Punctuation and capitalisation reproduced as printed.

The text is printed in this form on the sources: as a single comma-separated string with the closing phrase set in capitals. I display it below in the M-series house typographic idiom, with each clause given its own panel; the source text itself, however, is the one above.

Fuck
compose.·01·
Fuck
melody.·02·
Dedicated
to no one.·03·
Thanks
to no one.·04·
ART IS
OVER.·05·
My gloss · five lines, each in order

The five lines run, in order: a rejection of composition (the apparatus of conventional musical authorship); a rejection of melody (the recognisable manner of conventional musical pleasure); a rejection of dedication (the social contract by which a recording is offered to a recipient, named or unnamed); a rejection of gratitude (the social contract by which a recording acknowledges the support that produced it); and a declaration that art itself is over. I note that the first four lines reject the conventions around the work and the fifth line rejects the category the work is under. The compression is precise. The earlier four lines clear the ground; the fifth line says there is no further work to be done on the ground.

I do not paraphrase the five lines into a longer argument because the five lines are, by Yamanouchi's editorial choice, not the abbreviation of a longer argument. Where Vomir (Vomir, twenty-two years later) sits on top of a longer paragraph that articulates the political position the five negations summarise, Gerogerigegege sits on top of nothing. The five lines are the whole document. The Vis a Vis Audio Arts insert, in the Art Is Over cassette release, carried these five lines and the project's catalogue number and nothing else. The 1994 Instruments Disorder sleeve carried these five lines alongside the recording-and-mixing date palette and the band's standard self-identification ("This is the 11th album of Japanese trash noise band"), and again, nothing else of argumentative substance. The manifesto's editorial completeness is the position it is making.

I note one further observation on the text. The five lines were printed in English, not Japanese, by a Tokyo-based project whose audience was Japanese, on releases issued primarily in Japan, on a label run from Tokyo by a Japanese-speaking proprietor. I hold the English-language mode as a position statement on the form's documentary audience: the manifesto was framed for the international noise-and-experimental circuit, which received it in due course through Hegarty's Noise/Music (2007) and Novak's Japanoise (2013).

Vis a Vis Audio Arts · Tokyo · appearances late 1980s through 1994 · reissued on later Gerogerigegege releases through 2001

§ 04

Documentary Context.

The octopus tentacle · the conceptual non-records the 2001 disappearance · the 2016 return

The octopus tentacle.

The Art Is Over release proper is, in the Vis a Vis Audio Arts catalogue, a conceptual non-record. The object is a cassette case, dimensioned and styled exactly like a Vis a Vis tape release, containing no cassette: in place of the tape, a single severed octopus tentacle is glued to the inside of the case, alongside the lift-out card carrying the five lines. The edition is limited to fifty copies, hand-assembled at the label. I hold the object as the manifesto's own physical realisation: the cassette case promises a recording (the conventional unit of musical authorship), the case opens to reveal that the recording has been replaced by an organic object that will decompose on its own schedule and the lift-out card confirms in five lines that the substitution is deliberate. The manifesto and the object are the same document at two scales.

I note the Vis a Vis catalogue's conceptual-non-record vein as the editorial context the Art Is Over release sits within: Shaking Box Music (one hundred blank cassettes in a metal box, with the instruction to shake the box); This Is Shaking Box Music Part 2 (a destroyed copy of the Mother Fellatio EP in a cassette case); the Ai-Jin flexi-disc (1988, two thousand copies pressed for the express purpose of being burned in front of the audience at the release performance, about twenty-five copies surviving). The releases are not parody. The releases are the form's documentary idiom.

ART IS OVER · a Gerogerigegege concept release · an octopus tentacle glued to the inside of a cassette box · limited edition of fifty copies · on Vis a Vis Audio Arts · Tokyo. Source: Vis a Vis Audio Arts release documentation · undated, late 1980s · later archived in collector reference materials

The disappearance and the return.

The Gerogerigegege's first phase closed in 2001 with the release of Saturday Night Big Cock Salaryman. Yamanouchi then became uncontactable; the project, as a practice, stopped. Across the period 2001–2013 there was no documented Yamanouchi communication with the noise scene, no new Vis a Vis releases and persistent rumours among collectors and scene figures that Yamanouchi had died, been hospitalised or been institutionalised. The rumours circulated through the period and were not corrected, by Yamanouchi or by anyone authorised to speak on his behalf, for twelve years.

On 27 August 2013 the Japanese noise figure Gidayū Kaitai (解体義太夫) posted to Twitter that Yamanouchi had been in contact. The first post-hiatus Gerogerigegege release, Moenai Hai (燃えない灰, "ash that will not burn"), was issued 20 April 2016 on Eskimo Records, fifteen years after the project's last release. I note the project's later post-2016 activity as a continuation rather than a relaunch: Yamanouchi has continued to release records, the method has continued to range across noise, punk, ambient and conceptual modes and the five-line position has not been retracted.

I keep the 2001–2016 hiatus as the manifesto's own literal enactment of its closing line. Art was, for fifteen years, over. Then it resumed. The five lines remained on the inserts of the earlier releases; the later releases have not retracted them. Source: Wikipedia talk · Gerogerigegege fan community archives · Eskimo Records release notes · 2013–2016

§ 05

Cross-references.

Connected entries in this archive

Cross-Reference.

Manifestos · Index · Gerogerigegege stands as the late-wave closer · the arc's seventy-two-year arc Russolo → Yamanouchi
◆ Japanoise · direct attribution · the form the manifesto sits within · I keep The Gerogerigegege in the Tokyo pre-founding wing of Japanoise, alongside Hijokaidan, Incapacitants, Hanatarash and the 1980s Japanese trash-noise milieu · the manifesto's English-language manner frames it for the international Japanoise reception that Hegarty 2007 and Novak 2013 later consolidated
Fluxus · the event-score genealogy · the five-line format descends, formally, from the Fluxus event-score tradition (Maciunas's 1963 typed three-line manifesto, La Monte Young's Composition 1960 #5, Yoko Ono's Painting to Be Stepped On); the Gerogerigegege manifesto's compression of the manifesto into five lines is the same gesture transposed from the conceptual-art palette to the noise mode
Cut-up · upstream · the Gerogerigegege's tape-collage vein (the Showa 1989 release, the conceptual non-records, the Night 7-inch defecation recording with the standard one-two-three-four count) descends from the Burroughs-Gysin tape-cut-up tradition by way of the Japanese 1980s noise scene
Russolo · L'Arte dei Rumori · the M-series opening · seventy-two years prior · the arc's origin point · Russolo's six thousand words on six families of noise compressed, over the intervening period, to five lines on the inside of a cassette case · the arc's arc closes here
The Mission Is Terminated · TG's 1981 dissolution postcard · the structural antecedent for the Gerogerigegege manifesto's compression · the manifesto issued four years earlier, in English, on a postcard mailed from London rather than on an insert from Tokyo · the view is the same gesture at a different scale
Vomir · HNW Manifesto · the structural sequel · twenty-two years later · five lines from Paris in about 2007 echoing five lines from Tokyo in about 1985 · I hold Gerogerigegege and Vomir as the M-series's two compressed-statement closers, separated by a generation and a continent
COUM · Prostitution at the ICA 1976 · the catalysing first-wave manifesto · COUM's gallery-as-provocation idiom reads forward, through the form's arc, into the Vis a Vis Audio Arts label's deliberate-confrontation manner the Gerogerigegege manifesto inhabits · both entries articulate the position that the work-and-its-presentation are continuous
IR Prospectus · Industrial Records Prospectus · the label-as-aesthetic-vision palette · I note Vis a Vis Audio Arts as the Gerogerigegege entry's analogue: a Tokyo-based artist-owned label running across the project's full active life, structuring the method's documentary mode
ART Merzbow (Masami Akita, b. 1956 Tokyo) · the Japanese noise scene's international figure · I note Merzbow as the Japanoise form's most-internationally-cited practitioner, alongside whom the Gerogerigegege were active across the 1985–2001 period · the projects are stylistically distinct (Akita's method runs through electronics-and-feedback; Yamanouchi's runs through tape-and-performance) but share the Tokyo 1980s milieu
ART Hanatarash (Yamantaka Eye, founded 1983 Osaka) · the Japanese noise scene's parallel destructive-performance project · Eye later re-emerged as Yamatsuka Eye in The Boredoms · I hold Hanatarash and the Gerogerigegege as the two 1980s Japanese performance-noise projects whose live work pushed the form's limit (Hanatarash's bulldozer-into-venue 1985 set the documented extreme case)
The Long Prelude · the prehistory essay frames Gerogerigegege as the Fluxus event-score tradition's noise-scene successor · the genealogy runs Maciunas 1963 → TG postcard 1981 (The Mission Is Terminated) → Yamanouchi Gerogerigegege c. 1985 → Perrot Vomir c. 2007
Lexicon · Japanoise · cut-up · Vis a Vis Audio Arts · conceptual non-record · cassette network

A Coda · on five lines
and the seventy-two-year arc behind them.

I keep Gerogerigegege as the closing entry of the M-series's main arc. The arc runs Russolo (Milan, 1913) → COUM (London, 1976) → Industrial Records (Hackney, 1976) → Throbbing Gristle (Veterans' Hall postcard, 1981) → Whitehouse (London, 1983) → The Gerogerigegege (Tokyo, c. 1985 onward). Seven entries across seventy-two years, four countries, three language groups and a documented compression of the manifesto-as-form from Russolo's six thousand words to Yamanouchi's five lines. I hold the arc as closed here. Vomir (Vomir, c. 2007) is a structurally analogous late-wave entry that extends the arc by twenty-two years and that I keep alongside Gerogerigegege as the M-series's second compressed-statement closer; the arc, however, closes at Gerogerigegege.

The shape of the compression is worth noting. Russolo at Russolo wrote a long manifesto in 1913 advocating six families of noise and proposing the intonarumori as the form's tools. COUM at COUM staged a retrospective at the ICA in 1976 and let the press do most of the writing. The Industrial Records prospectus at IR Prospectus typed up a corporate parody in late 1976 and let the document speak for itself. The Throbbing Gristle communiqué at The Mission Is Terminated in 1981 was a single sentence on a postcard, the form's previous-most-compressed entry. Whitehouse at Whitehouse in 1983 pressed an album dedicated to a serial killer in three hundred copies, the form's most-confrontational entry. The Gerogerigegege at Gerogerigegege in c. 1985 wrote five lines, glued an octopus tentacle inside a cassette case and stopped. The arc's progressive compression and progressive refusal closes at five lines and an organic object: any further compression would be silence and any further refusal would be silence's own.

I note, finally, the entry's editorial position on the relationship between the manifesto and the catalogue it speaks for. The five lines apply to a catalogue that includes a 75-track grindcore-and-noise LP (Tokyo Anal Dynamite 1990), a Ramones-influenced punk record (Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male), four ambient records, several conceptual non-records, two thousand burned flexi-discs (Ai-Jin 1988), one hundred blank cassettes in a metal box (Shaking Box Music), and a cassette case containing an octopus tentacle (Art Is Over itself). The catalogue's heterogeneity is the manifesto's argument: the five lines apply because the method refuses to settle into a single vein that the five lines could be a description of. The manifesto is true of the catalogue because the catalogue refuses to be true of anything else. I keep the entry with this observation and close the entry.

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