Keiji Haino's long-running Tokyo power trio: total improvisation as heavy as doom and as free as any improvising unit, scorching guitar noise under a voice that runs from whisper to scream · a central pillar of the Japanese underground.
Fushitsusha is the free-rock power trio, and the Bureau files it at Tier I as the most important project of Keiji Haino and a central pillar of the Japanese underground. Formed in Tokyo in 1978, with Haino the one constant across decades of shifting line-ups, it is the vehicle through which his guitar and voice found their fullest band setting: as heavy as any doom-metal group, as free as any improvising unit, and recognisable instantly.
It began as a duo of Haino on guitar and voice with Tamio Shiraishi on synthesiser, and settled into the power-trio shape of guitar, bass and drums that defines it. The method is total improvisation that blurs any line between composed and improvised: vast fields of scorching, feedback-laden guitar, drums that slam with militaristic force while ignoring conventional time, and Haino's voice ranging from whisper to scream, carried by a Butoh-inflected stage presence and his signature silhouette.
The band was extant for over a decade before it was documented. Though it had performed since 1978 at venues like Kichijoji Minor, no LP surfaced until 1989, when the underground label PSF issued a double-live set, the first of the records that built its reputation. The classic 1990s line-up, with bassist Yasushi Ozawa often serving as a co-lead voice and drummer Jun Kosugi, produced the 1991 double-live album held as a key document of 1990s Japanese psychedelic rock.
Its connections run straight into this archive's other files. Allegorical Misunderstanding (1993) appeared on John Zorn's Avant label, and in 1997 the band moved to the major label Tokuma for four studio discs. On 26 September 1991 at Tokyo's Shibuya La Mama, Fushitsusha shared a now-storied bill with Zorn's hardcore trio Painkiller, a meeting of Japanese free-rock and downtown skronk that has passed into legend.
The Bureau files Fushitsusha at Artists · Tier I as the truest free-rock group of its era: Haino's long vehicle for improvisation at maximum volume and total freedom, a band central to the Japanese underground and to the larger field of Japanese experimental rock this archive documents.