[atsonicpark]

(intro) Over 15 years, Osaka's Boredoms have mutated from a splatterpunk avant noise group to the streamlined ferocity of their current matric percussion barrage. In London, tedium tearaways Yamantaka Eye and Yoshimi P-We explain the meaning of Boredom: their twisted history, the group as turntable, tips for recording underwater, and using discipline to channel chaotic energies.
(text) "Shut up!" Yamantaka Eye is screaming from behind his onstage control panel at London's Royal Festival Hall, as he swings a DJ CD player above his head in time to the feverish beat patterns exploding and ricocheting all around him. "Shut up!" he howls repeatedly, whirling his dreadlocks like demented helicopter blades at the three drummers who complete this latest incarnation of The Boredoms. Diagonally facing each other in a tight circle, Yoshimi P-We (nee Yokota), ATR and Yojiro hammer away at their kits in 4/4 time with unflinching determination and scapel-sharp precision. "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" Eye persists, shouting ever louder over the swirling cacophony of drumming and electronic warp, to no apparent effect. But then you realise he's not so much barking commands as generating a repetitive vocal chant designed to elevate the quartet's playing to still higher levels of consciousness. Their spiralling vortex of Kodo-like rhythm and digital collision sucks the astounded audience out their seats and lures them to the unofficial moshpit in front of the stage. By the close, the whole house has risen up as one for a standing ovation that gathers volume and momentum while The Boredoms file offstage. It's as if nobody wants the incredible noise to shut or shut down. Refusing to leave, the audience would willingly ride its rising swells forever.
This is not the first time The Boredoms have given their listeners a brush with infinity. On their "Super Roots 5" album, they bring you within its reach on a series of neverending guitar crescendos. And in the beginning, the savage cut-ups, collages and musical collisions of their earliest experiments slashed the linear flow of time fastening down the present, and plunged you into an endless freefall through The Boredoms' bottomless noise. As their shape shifts with each new manifestation, the one constant through two decades of mutations is their way of tricking time out of joint. These time slippages are further stretched by the inevitable holes in most Westerners' knowledge of a career largely played out of Japan since their inception in 1986. With few keeping up with their mercurial changes is nigh impossible for anyone who isn't permanently logged on to the plethora of Boredoms Websites monitoring their moves. For the rest, confusion goes with the territory. A few years back The Boredoms used to nurture a playful chaos; in contrast, the intense, joyful and exciting music of their newest incarnation at the Royal Festival Hall hinges on the super-tight precision of the drumming, while self-discipline has given their sound a keener edge.
Hailing from the southern port city of Osaka, which is also home to a thriving, deeply rooted noise culture pioneered by the likes of Masonna and Hijokaiden, The Boredoms first surfaced in the mid-to late 80s with Eye's crude "Anal By Anal" EP and The Boredoms' debut, "Osorezan No Stooges Kyo" (both were later slammed together under the title "Onanie Bomb Meets the Sex Pistols") The follow-up, "Soul Discharge 99", was given an extra boost when it was licensed to former Butthole Surfers bassist Kramer's Shimmy Disc label, but The Boredoms's underground cult status was secured shortly after, when they landed a recording contract with WEA Japan that miraculously promised them total creative freedom. Then as now, it allows them to work with American contemporaries like John Zorn and Sonic Youth, who both took The Boredoms under their respective wings, setting up various projects and collaborations, while encouraging them to take the music higher. Not that The Boredoms needed pushing. In the early 90s, they abandoned etiquette and made rock behave in unnatural yet increasingly fascinating ways on "Wow 2" (a live recording supervised by Zorn), "Pop Tatari" (1992) and "Chocolate Synthesizer" (1995). The line-up blasting out that period's deliriously untamed mix of psychedelia, Hip Hop, hardcore punk and alien free jazz included Eye, original drummer and co-vocalist Toyohito Yoshikawa, guitarist Seiichi Yamamoto, bass player Hira and the dynamic drum duo of ATR and Yoshimi P-We (the latter doubling on trumpet). Though these astounding records made a profound impression on those lucky enough to hear them, neither Eye nor Yoshimi can remember a thing about them. "Listening to "Chocolate Synthesizer" now, both myself and Yoshimi have forgotten all about what music we played then," confesses Eye sleepily, the day after The Boredoms's London triumph. "Hearing it now comes as a shock, it's surprising. How did we actually do that? Is this the sort of music that we played? It's interesting, but it's puzzling and we both wonder why it was we were actually able to do that."

YOUNG, LOUD, AND SNOTTY

To properly understand how The Boredoms evolved their mutated punk disco to the incredible percussion-driven sound of today, it's necessary to return Eye to his dark past as the major catalyst behind one of Japan's most notorious 1980s noise/performance units, Hanatarashi. He first brought himself up to speed playing appaling electric guitar (by all accounts) in an early speedcore outfit called Jakotsubaba (meaning Snake Bone Witch), and ending most shows by diving onto the drums. He carried over this Metzger-like destructivism into Hanatarashi, Japanese for "the snot-nosed". Asked at the time for the origin of the name, Eye responded: "Just all of the sudden someone will punch me. When I think about getting hit, my nose starts to run, and by the time I get home my nose will be all stopped up. Really crammed with snot."
Drawing inspiration from San Francisco performance group Survival Research Laboratories (who created gladiatorial robots out of auto parts, decommisioned military hardware and dead animals) and self-destructive hardcore icon GG Allin, Hanatarash (the "i" was later dropped) set out to be the most extreme act on the planet. Their tongue in cheek manifesto taunted the people they would have to kill to get there: "KILL ALL THE NOISE ARTISTS! WE HATE WHITEHOUSE. PISS OFF NWW. ASSHOLE C93. SUCK PTV. FUCK COIL. WE LOVE DISCO SOUND." Featuring Yamatsuka Eye (his original name, which he would change several times before he started calling himself Yamantaka) on vocals and "bodyguard" Taketani on percussion, Hanatarashi's various attempts to create "a visual experience of war" are the stuff of legend. Most notoriously, Eye hotwired and mini-digger and ran amok with the machine in the hall where they were performing. But things only got out of hand when Eye accidently smashed a hole in the wall with the digger's shovel, carved up the joint with circular saws, and split petrol on the wreckage.
Another time, Eye took an electric saw to a dead cat which he found in an alley just before going onstage. The live reviews read more like despatches from a war zone: "Ten minutes after the show begins, the room is full of broken glass," described the shaken reviewer. "The fence set up to protect the audience was the first thing to be destroyed, adn they are throwing pieces of the fence around. The audience are huddled like refugees in the corners of the hall. A broken pipe spewed water into the room. A gas burner was flaming. So much metal and glass and concrete was being thrown against the walls that I got out just watching. The fire extinguisher were smashed. There was no applause, or indeed any sound from the audience. The fire alarm went off. The room was getting too smoky to see. There was little bits of dead, dry meat stuck to the walls and ceiling from the animal cutting."
By now, Eye was branded with a reputation for being hostile, unpredictable and dangerous. "Yamatsuka is clearly insane," insisted the same reviewer. In reality, Eye was much more unassuming. "I'm not charismatic at all," he admitted to interviewer Sakevi Yokoyama in 1985, "Hanatarashi is more more interesting to read about than to see or hear." Even so, listening to Hanatrashi's ultraviolent early recordings reveals that they're fuelled by the same energies firing the present Boredoms quartet. Only he now channels his earlier destructive impulses into a higher, more spiritual level of communication. No longer driven to repel and terrify, the only thing Eye wants to tear down today is the invisible boundary between performer and spectator.