I'd say Tokyo is about the only place on the planet i feel you can see better music that i can see live .. sonds fantastic.. you mind is i ask what kind of job you have over there waiting for you??

I had one album and I didn't really like it (I don't even remember what it was now) but I decided to give him another shot and got "Affection" and I love it. And even with these experiences, I wouldn't consider him a hit or miss by any means, I've loved anything else I have heard. I wish I could remember what that album was that I didn't like though. :)

This is what I hate about long threads. I read the first post, post something actually related to the thread, only to find out that somwhere in the 5 pages the topic of discussion has GREATLY deviated, making my post stand out like a sore thumb and interrupting someboy's conversation. Bunch of jerks; not that I care.

I was accepted into the Jet Program and was originally going to go with them, but I was recentely offered a Job by a private English language school that pays better and will place me where I want, so I'm going to work for them.
It's actually quite easy to get a teaching job in Japan as long as you're a native speaker of English and hold a 4 year degree.

incidentally, i'm wearing my haino shirt today.

that was september last year, it was right before i moved house. time flies!

nova, eon?

i'm thinking about applying to one of those but i'm not sure if i want to live abroad at the moment. i'd like to spend a year in osaka though.

seems to be a lot of those jobs out there

Yeah, small world indeedy. I wasn't drunk (for once), but do recall being with a mate of mine making pisspoor jokes about black metal groups. Seeing as I got the month of the gig only about 3 months wrong, I think it's good evidence that my senility's kicking in nicely.

GEOS. I would avoid Nova if I were you. The ship is sinking. Plus the pay is shit.

In his Bratislava gig, he combined AirFX action with guitar improv and some screaming. And the guitar part was undoubtly the best one.

Haino is great but Takayanagi is better... the godfather of japanese free improv noise guitar.

Contentious... Takayangi is brilliant, but I can't help but feel that he's at his best with Abe, and not essential always (and, obviously, dead now). I take it you've heard his protege Imai? He's a ridiculously, absurdly amazing player. Sickening really, and I nearly never say that about a guitarist.

It's all fun and games and stuff and also things.

yeah, takayanagi probably is "better" but i prefer haino

think I'll pick this up soon.

What would be a good Haino introduction?

I always ask myself that question.

if you're looking to get in to haino i'd say start with fushitsusha. these three first:

untitled/first PSF3/4

untitled/second live PSF 15/16

Hisou (Pathetique) PSF50


they're some of the more easily available and also among his best work

http://youtube.com/watch?v=rG7gpI-Rirc

Haino playing on some absolute turd.

insane!

hendrix boring? i agree about some of his songs, but band of gypsies kinda gets rid of any of those notions. i absolutley love that record. 'machine gun' might be one of the coolest songs ever, and the guitar playing on that record is just epic, really psychedelic at times too. buddy miles, fucking great. theres a couple songs on there, ;ike 'changes', thats like straight up funk too. damn i love that record, the dvd is good too.

Anyone interested in swapping Haino live sets, contact me, I have tons and tons:eek:

Yes please!

I was just listening to some Fushitsusha as it happens.

What is his best album/best intro to him album.
I'm about to be going to amoeba records.

my faves keiji solo:

Watashi Dake, Kaii Abe, Nijimuju, Itskushimi, Ama no Gawa, Execration That Accept to Knowledge, Beginning and End Interwoven, A Challenge to Fate, I Said This is the Son of Nihilism, Evolving Blush or Driving Original Skin, Even Now I still Think

my faves fushitsusha:

Allegorical Misunderstanding, Pathetique, The Caution Appears, A Death Never to Be Complete, The Time is Nigh, A Little Longer Thus, The Wisdom Prepared, I Saw It! That Which before I could Only Make Sense

Fushitsusha - Live (PSF 3/4)
Fushitsusha - 2nd Live (PSF 15/16)

Either of those are a good first Haino record to get

I've been looking for the Paratactile release, I Saw It... for about three years. Been outbid on Ebay at the last minute four times. I've heard great things about it and I'm really nice to small animals.
Make of this supplication what you will.
Is it true, by the way, that the only time He was due to play in Dublin He couldn't because He'd eaten too many cream cakes?
I love, also the quote, from Alan Cummings, I think, that "not even His cat has seen Him without His sunglasses".
I also wanted to note that I think the Sanhedolin album pisses over New Rap. But we can have both, can't we?

deep fried cream cakes

so the man can get seek...damn!

yeah, i saw it... is great.

I'm going to see Kikuri (Haino and Merzbow) play in a fucking church on Friday! I can't wait, although I'm glad I don't have to talk to anyone for a few days afterwards.

i'm so vexed i don't have the money to go to either birmingham or newcastle for that

haino must live in london now.

i'm pissed because there was a slight chance he might have come play here earlier this year but didn't pan out.

hopefully he'll get around to it next year.

Yep. That's how I got into him.

Right now I'm listening to Track 5 off Mamono again at full volume. Seriously, every time I listen to it I nearly go into convulsions. This is the best track ever recorded.

Fucking typical - I'm gonna be in Leeds tomorrow :(
Saw Stars of the Lid in the same church a few weeks back and it's a really cool venue. Free beer (with a donations jar) too!

Could somebody help me out? My face appears to have melted.

bastard

New Haino release on PSF!




KEIJI HEINO - Koitsukara Usetaitameno Hakarigoto

The return of the "21st Century Hard-y-Guide-y Man"! "With its crank handle mechanism and drone strings out-numbering melody strings, the hurdy-gurdy is the Ur-industrial instrument par excellence, a connection Keiji Haino makes abundantly clear on the opening track of Koitsukara Usetaitameno Hakarigoto, the third album he has made under the tortuously punning banner of the 21st Century Hard-y Guide-y Man. The terrifying density and textures of his bone-shearing noise immediately bring to mind the arresting closing sequence of Halber Mensch, Japanese director Sogo Ishii's document of Berlin group Einstuerzende Neubauten's mid-1980s visit to Japan, when he filmed them in all their destructive glory at a busy intersection bringing the city to a standstill with their armoury of scraped metal and heavy machinery. The major difference is Haino achieves his pandemonium totally alone on an electrically amplified medieval instrument, and the chaos he invokes is of a wholly other kind to that of the displaced Berliners. Rather than creating chaos, he accepts it, even as he taps it for the tremendous energies needed to generate the overarching schemes that shape and contain his monumental works. Haino is not the only person using the hurdy-gurdy as something more than folksy color. There's Stevie Wishart working at the interface of contemporary composition and improvisation; and hurdy-gurdy player Cliff Stapleton featured strongly in the late output of Coil (the UK outfit of John Balance and Peter Christopherson, not to be confused with the Japanese unit of the same name with whom Haino has performed blues sets live). And though the hurdy-gurdy is but one of the hundreds of instruments he has gathered during his frequent working trips around the world, next to guitar, voice, percussion and electronics, it's the one on which Haino continues to evolve a distinctive body of work that is at once of a piece with and different from the main thrust of his music. Not that any one style holds true, mind, in a discography that is approaching 200 entries. As with his other instruments, Haino has developed methods of playing the hurdy-gurdy that both exploit and defy its particular character. Asked what compelled him to acquire one on a trip to France in the mid-1990s, he replied by mimicking the turning of a handle, saying it was the only instrument he knew of that you played that way, as opposed to striking, blowing, bowing or plucking it. His long-held interest in medieval European troubadour music might well have been another contributing factor. However, the hurdy-gurdy is more than the purely mechanical cranked instrument such as the barrel organ which it is sometimes confused with. The handle turns a rosined wooden wheel that bows a melody string, whose pitches are determined by pressing the tangents, or keys, with the other hand. The instrument usually contains two more sympathetic drone strings. How the player jerks or cranks the handle creates the fluttering beats and rhythms characteristic to its traditional use as a folk instrument at carnival or festival dances. Knowing as much is only so helpful to understanding the way Haino plays it. He hadn't had the instrument long when he released his first hurdy-gurdy album, Twenty-first Century Hard-y- Guide-y Man, on PSF in 1995. It was followed in 1998 by Even Now, Still I Think, released by the Japanese major label Tokuma as part of an extraordinary deal that saw the release of eight Haino/Fushitsusha projects in two stages (and if you think signing to a major in any way compromised the artist, you only have to check the number of CD length tracks of unrelieved intensity produced during the deal). First impressions from both is that Haino's instrument of choice is immaterial, that Haino plays Haino regardless, and on these two occasions the hurdy-gurdy just happened to be the tool selected to do so. To be sure, they both set out an extreme position from which they rarely retreat, with Haino sounding like he's pushing the instrument to the very limits of endurance. This is especially the case on the barely wavering 72-minute assault of the Tokuma disc. But as with much of Haino's music, it rewards the listener's perseverance through its most extenuated passages, which often come right at the front of his work, with moments of otherworldly, overwhelming beauty amid the swarming overtone activity generated at this volume. Before returning to his 21st Century Hard-y Guide-y Man persona on Koitsukara Usetaitameno Hakarigoto here, Haino dedicated a hurdy-gurdy disc apiece to the two double sets, Abandon all words at a stroke, so that prayer can come spilling out (released in 2001 by the Canadian label Alien8) and Reveal'd to none as yet -- an expedience to utterly vanish consciousness while still alive (recorded live at Tokyo Super Deluxe in 2005 and jointly released in December that year by the U.S. labels Archive/Important). Through them, all it's possible to discern id an increasing awareness and appreciation of the hurdy-gurdy's character. It's very much evident in this disc's opening track, alluded to earlier, in the way the turning crank handle sinks its drone deeper to the core, even as it sends up the baleful clouds of overtone dust that hover above the churning chaos. Tracks two and three make play with the bowing mechanism of the hurdy-gurdy wheel, its sorely tested violin tone transformed into an electric buzzsaw over rasping tones that simultaneously betray and exploit the hurdy-gurdy's fundamentally primitive construct. The third track, incidentally, is the album's magnificent centerpiece, evolving from a manic hoedown into a frenzied dance warding off the onset of melancholia represented by a buzzing secondary drone. Elsewhere the sounds Haino draws from the instrument range from delicate music box prettiness to something altogether darker, conjuring an image of a creaking ghost ship whose fate it was to be sealed at the point of breaking up in a storm for all eternity." --Biba Kopf

has anyone heard Haino's-Black Blues (violent version)? The name pretty much describes the sound and I love it, one of my favorite's of his. As much as I love Keiji my collection is admittedly fairly limited. I have three Fushitsusha records, 7 solo records, and 5 collabs, but his discography is massive, taunting even.

The Black Blues albums are definitely my favorite of what I've heard from him. They seem the most...focused or singular or something. Other stuff is generally crazy but highly enjoyable freakout shit.