Hijokaidan (非常階段, "emergency staircase") is, with Merzbow, one of the two first-generation Japanoise projects, and the anchor of the Japanese noise tradition this archive documents. The Bureau files it at Tier II and F·08 Japanoise. A single project has run continuously for more than four decades, evolving from anarchic stage destruction to a dense wall of noise, and it founded Alchemy Records, the label that became the spine of the scene.
It began in Kyoto in 1979 as a spin-off from Rasenkaidan ("spiral staircase"), the free-improv guitar duo Jojo Hiroshige had formed with Naoki Zushi. The naming is documented unusually well: Hiroshige invited Zushi to a studio session, Zushi's friend Idiot tagged along and picked up a pair of drumsticks, and during the jagged improvisation that followed Idiot remarked that this was no spiral staircase but an emergency staircase. The name stuck.
The trio did not. Idiot failed to return after the first rehearsal, leaving Hiroshige and Zushi as a duo. Their first show, in autumn 1979 at the Drug Store venue in Kyoto, a haunt of the local underground, was two guitars improvising with a ferocity unlike hard rock or punk and a chaos unlike free jazz, void of melody, harmony and rhythm.
The 1980 reformation came via an intermediate band, Corroded Mary (腾食のマリィ). In spring 1980 Hiroshige formed it with several players, including Toshiji Mikawa, the first Mikawa-Hiroshige collaboration, meaning to play in the style of Hawkwind. None of them could really play, so the rehearsals collapsed into improvised noise, and out of that the reformed Hijokaidan took shape.
Its early stage work was notorious. Performances brought destruction of venues and equipment, food and rubbish thrown about, on-stage urination and vomiting, fire extinguishers turned on the audience, smashed lights and broken glass. The group was banned from Tokyo live houses, La Mama and The Loft among them, in the early 1980s.
The recorded catalogue opens in 1980 with the split LP Shumatsu Shorijo ("Sewage Treatment Plant", Unbalance) with NG and Jurajuum, capturing the reformed ACB Hall line-up. Masami Akita, later Merzbow, reviewed it in Fool's Mate, one of the first crossings between the two scenes. The 1982 Zoroku no Kibyo (Unbalance, reissued by Alchemy), drawn from 1981 live tapes, was the first full-length.
After 1985 the work settled into the dense wall of noise it is best known for: Hijohkaidan Tapes (1986), Modern (1989), Romance (1990), which Paul Hegarty would later describe as a constantly changing mess of howling feedback with no musical centre to hold, Windom (1991) and Noise from Trading Cards (1997).
Its most distinctive late turn is the -Kaidan collaboration series. It began with Sta-Kaidan, with Michiro Endo of the punk pioneers The Stalin, and grew to take in SOB-Kaidan (with hardcore band S.O.B.), Togawa-Kaidan (with the art-pop singer Jun Togawa) and Hatsune-Kaidan (with the Hatsune Miku vocaloid software), each splicing the noise into another genre or medium.
The Bureau's reading: Hijokaidan is one of the two founding Japanoise projects, the great collaborative hub of the Japanese underground, the founder of the Alchemy Records label that carried the scene, and a project whose continuous run since 1979 makes it one of the longest-sustained noise catalogues anywhere.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the interwar period · last revised c. the Late Stone Age