Hijokaidan's severest studio document. Roughly eighty minutes of howling feedback, electronics and voice, the Osaka wall-of-sound method set down on record in 1990.
Romance is a 1990 studio album by Hijokaidan, released on Alchemy Records, the Osaka label run by the group's guitarist and constant member Jojo Hiroshige. The Bureau files it at Tier I as the group's harshest studio document and as the natural Japanoise counterpart to Merzbow's Pulse Demon · the two records mark the form's two poles, the solo project against the group, the pedal chain against the wall of feedback.
Hijokaidan began at the end of the 1970s as a performance-art group whose shows ran to the destruction of venues and equipment, but by 1990 the work had settled into something more sustained, and Romance is one of a run of long studio records · alongside Modern (1989) · that the group made at the turn of the decade. The core here is Hiroshige on guitar, his wife Junko on voice and Toshiji Mikawa, also of Incapacitants, on electronics. The record runs to around eighty minutes, near the limit of the CD, and holds its intensity across nearly all of it.
The method is the wall of sound. Hijokaidan's approach, built on stage, takes the high-tension moments of Western rock · the feedback, the destroyed guitar, the final crashing chord · and feeds them back on themselves into a continuous, chordless, rhythmless blast. Romance carries that method into the studio: Hiroshige's feedback, Mikawa's electronics and Junko's voice layered into a single shifting mass that overwhelms any centre a listener might try to hold. It is harsh noise, but the line to free improvisation runs thin, and the record documents one of the group's severest improvised sessions.
The record has a place in the critical account of the form. Paul Hegarty, in his history of noise, reaches for Romance as an example, describing it as a constantly changing mess of howling feedback in which the residue overpowers any possibility of a musical centre to fix upon. The Bureau notes that the academic writing on Japanoise often points to this record, which is part of why it files it as a reference rather than as one severe album among many; it is the one the literature returns to.
The title is the record's open question. Romance, over eighty minutes of unrelenting feedback, may be sincere or ironic, and the group does not resolve it. The Bureau takes no position: the heat of passion and the crashing blast of noise are not so far apart, and the record holds both readings at once. What is not in question is the severity, which is total, and the place the record holds as the group's harshest committed statement.
Where it sits: Hijokaidan's severest studio document, primary in F·08 Japanoise; adjacent to free improvisation through the thin line between harsh noise and free playing; the natural counterpart to Pulse Demon, the group against the solo project; and the record the critical literature on the form most often names. Where Merzbow stands for the pedal chain, Hijokaidan stand for the wall, and Romance is where the wall is set down.