The reclusive Kyoto band whose feedback-drenched volume, droning repetition and near-total refusal to record made them the foundational myth of the Japanese underground · the deepest root of the Tokyo scene that Fushitsusha and High Rise grew from.
Les Rallizes Dénudés are the foundational myth, and the Bureau files them at Tier I as the deepest root of the Japanese underground this archive documents. Formed in Kyoto in 1967 by the guitarist and vocalist Takashi Mizutani, the band built a feedback-drenched psychedelic noise rock on simple, droning, endlessly repeated figures played at extreme volume, with Mizutani's reverbed voice riding over a relentless pulse. The strobe-and-mirror-ball live assault drew lasting comparisons to the Velvet Underground.
What sets the band apart as much as the sound is the refusal. Mizutani's perfectionism kept Les Rallizes Dénudés from official studio release for most of their existence; the catalogue circulated instead as live bootlegs and ninth-generation cassettes, attaining a whispered, Holy Grail status among initiates. The facelessness was total, even the band's name is an obscurity, a corruption of the French valises dénudées, naked suitcases, and Mizutani's own identity remained enigmatic even to former bandmates.
The band grew from a charged milieu. They were tied to the radical avant-garde theatre of the late-1960s Kyoto student scene and to a politics of the far left, nihilism and a rejection of both the West and Japanese tradition. The political shadow is part of the legend: founding bassist Moriaki Wakabayashi took part in the 1970 Yodogō aircraft hijacking carried out by the Japanese Red Army and went to North Korea, and Mizutani was reportedly approached to join and declined. The Bureau records this as documented fact and as context, not as glamour.
Their influence is out of all proportion to their visibility. Les Rallizes Dénudés were a forcible influence on Japanese noise rock and, abroad, on psych and shoegaze; they are the deepest root of the Tokyo underground from which High Rise and Fushitsusha later grew, and the guitarists of that scene, Munehiro Narita of High Rise among them, name Mizutani's playing as formative. Julian Cope's advocacy carried the legend further west.
The Bureau files Les Rallizes Dénudés at Artists · Tier I as the foundational myth of the Japanese underground: the band whose volume, repetition and refusal to be documented set a template the whole Tokyo and Osaka scene worked within, and whose influence runs, mostly unrecorded, under everything that followed.