The Tokyo guitarist who has, since 1970, treated guitar and voice as instruments to be pushed past their ordinary limits; the figure at the centre of Japanese free improvisation, leading the power trio Fushitsusha and a long line of project names around it, the work caught live and undubbed at the volume the playing demands.
Keiji Haino is the continuous figure of the Tokyo free-improvisation underground, born 3 May 1952 and at work since 1970. The turn to music came, by his own account, on hearing The Doors' "When the Music's Over"; the early ground was theatre and blues rather than rock training. His first group, the free-improvising Lost Aaraaf (formed 1970, the name drawn from Edgar Allan Poe's Al Aaraaf), built its sets around screamed voice in the manner of Antonin Artaud's late radio work, and met audiences who did not want it. The Japanese broadcaster NHK is reported to have kept him off the air for years from 1973. The blues he took up at the same time, Blind Lemon Jefferson above all, sits under everything that followed: the work is closer to the country-blues idea of one voice and one instrument held to breaking point than to any rock lineage.
After Lost Aaraaf he worked in the mid-1970s with the psychedelic multi-instrumentalist Magical Power Mako, then formed Fushitsusha (不失者) in 1978, the name turning loosely on the idea of one who does not lose, or the undying. The group is his central project and the one the catalogue rests on. It began as a duo with the synthesiser player Tamio Shiraishi, moved through several line-ups, and settled as a power trio. The classic trio, with Yasushi Ozawa on bass and Jun Kosugi on drums, is the one most documented: Ozawa often a second lead voice, Kosugi striking the drums hard while ignoring any settled sense of time, Haino's guitar opening vast fields of scorching noise above them. The model behind it is the free end of psychedelic rock, the Tokyo underground reading of what the late-1960s electric groups had opened up, taken much further out.
The recorded catalogue arrived late and then did not stop. Fushitsusha released nothing on record until 1989, when the Tokyo underground label PSF Records (Hideo Ikeezumi's shop-and-label, the meeting brokered through Asahito Nanjo of High Rise) issued the first Live double set; the 1991 double-live, variously called Live II or left untitled, is one of the documents of 1990s Japanese psychedelic rock. From 1997 Haino moved Fushitsusha to the major label Tokuma for a run of studio discs. Around the group sit the other project names, each a different reading of the same questions: Nijiumu, Aihiyo, Knead, Sanhedolin, and later Nazoranai with Stephen O'Malley and Oren Ambarchi. The point of the many names is that each frames one approach and holds to it.
The instrument list is wide and the method is constant. The guitar is the centre, a Gibson SG handled less as something played than as something fought; around it Haino has built recitals on hurdy-gurdy (21st Century Hard-y-Guide-y Man, PSF), on voice and percussion alone (Tenshi No Gijinka, Tzadik), on flute, air-synthesiser, percussion and electronics. The recordings are made live, with no overdubbing, the voice moving between a held soprano and screams torn out at full pressure. The all-black surface, the long hair cut straight, the dark glasses, are part of the work rather than a stage costume: a figure deliberately hard to read.
The collaboration list runs across the international experimental field from the late 1980s onward, the channel opened by the Massachusetts magazine Forced Exposure and by Thurston Moore's advocacy. Haino has recorded with John Zorn (the 1993 Allegorical Misunderstanding on Zorn's Avant label), with the free-improvising bassist Motoharu Yoshizawa and the folk-blues singer Kan Mikami (Live in the First Year of Heisei), with Faust, with Jim O'Rourke, with Stephen O'Malley and Oren Ambarchi as Nazoranai, and with the Japanese noise figures the archive files elsewhere, among them Masami Akita of Merzbow. The KK Null file records the close working line between the two across the Tokyo underground.
The Bureau files Haino at the head of its free-improvisation holdings, the boundary case the dossier keeps because the work crosses constantly into the noise and avant-garde territory the archive documents proper. The filing covers the 1970 Lost Aaraaf founding, the 1978 founding of Fushitsusha and its late-arriving but central catalogue, the long line of project names, the blues-and-Artaud ground under the playing, the live-and-undubbed method, and the figure's place as the connector between the Tokyo underground and the larger international improvising field. The work continues into the 2020s at the same pressure it set out with.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Iron Age · last revised c. the Anthropocene