[atsonicpark]

BORN TO ANAL
By the time Hanatarashi had burned themselves out, Eye had developed a taste for rock. He signed on as drummer with the shortlived Acid Makki & Combi And Zombie, who featured future Boredoms members Seiichi Yamamoto on guitar and Hira on bass. For his part, Yamamoto wasn't immediately taken with the prospect of Eye's arrival. Before Acid Makki's singer Makki Sasara introduced them, Yamamoto's reaction was: "The Hanatarashi guy? He's scary! I hate him!" But the pair instantly bonded as musical allies. Eye later quit the group to sink the foundations for The Boredoms. Holed up in his bedroom's makeshift studio, he experimented with a multitrack recorder and cranked out cassette copies of the resulting "Boretronix" on his own labels, ? Ltd., Mega Scum Groove Inc., and Condome Cassex. His first homemade recording to make it onto vinyl was the "Anal by Anal" EP (aka "The Anal Trilogy"), released by the Japanese independent Transrecords. Written, recorded, and mixed and mastered entirely on one hot summer's day, "Anal by Anal" features Eye yelping and gurgling over a basic guitar and a "found" drumming instruction tape, before he brings it to a climax by screaming "GO!" at the top of his lungs. "The Boredoms started out as a bedroom project where I was just multitracking stuff myself," remembers Eye, when asked about the origins of "Anal by Anal". "Anal by Anal was basically solo multitrack stuff. Now the group has no guitarist and bass player in it, so in a way that links into what The Boredoms were earlier."
The first version of the Boredoms proper came together in 1986 with Eye on vocals, his partner and bodyguard Taketani on drums, Mara Tabata on guitar and Hosoi on bass. During that summer, Taketani was replaced by the wild and eccentric drummer Toyohito Yoshikawa, and Acid Makki bassist Hira took over from Hosoi. When Mara Tabata later quit to join Zeni Geva, Eye seized the opportunity to draft his friend Seiichi Yamamoto into the group, which he had now officially baptised The Boredoms. Partly named after the early Buzzcocks' best known song, it was mainly chosen to reflect the mental state of its members, and they had every intention of living up to their name. "We were really really boring back when "Anal by Anal" had just come out and we were playing our first gigs," laughs Eye. "There were these really long gaps between the songs. We'd take forever tuning up. Everyone would be falling asleep. We could really make the audience yawn. It was like there was nothing exciting about the music."
I saw them back then and they were totally boring," confirms Yoshimi. "It was utterly tedious. There was no drive, it just went on and on. The gaps between the songs would be longer than the songs themselves. I remember it was so boring that I left the first time I saw them. That was the only time I saw them before I joined." Considering her to be a better drummer, Eye invited Yoshimi take over from Yoshikawa on drums in 1988. Yoshikawa was shifted to percussion to make way for her, and she soon became a permanent fixture. But why did she want to join such a boring lot in the first place? "I thought they would change if I joined," she replies. "Things became very fucked up when I joined. We'd do something, then forget about it, then do something else. In the same way the group has constantly kept changing."
"It changed a lot then," adds Eye. "We forgot the original concept of being boring. I think I wanted to recreate the feeling of a boring afternoon at a petrol station in the countryside with nothing to do. Apathy and weariness. Chronic apathy."
He has recently been thinking hard about to the original concept of the group, he reveals, continuing, "I think there's something very important to be found in boredom. There's something beautiful about it when you're utterly bored."
"You yourself have changed a lot since then," Yoshimi interjects, "so maybe you see boredom differently."
A kind of inner calm, perhaps? Yoshimi rebuffs this suggestion immediately. "No, it's not calmness," she giggles. "If he was calm he really would be Mr. Boring."

CALL ME GOD

To acknowlege the group's latest evolutionary change, Eye has decided to customise the group's name from The Boredoms to the more mystical sounding V(infinity symbol)rdoms. The decision apparently took a considerable time to formulate.
"Do you know what kotodama means?" he asks. I admit my ignorance, but luckily interpreter Alan Cummings is on hand to explain that kotodama is an ancient Japanese belief that words possess a mystical, self-realising power in the right circumstances.
"All of my group names, including The Boredoms, have a meaning," reveals Eye, explaining, "When we still spelt it with a B - now it's V - it linked to 'boa', the huge snake you find in South America. There was also the idea of 'bore' and boring, but primarily I think I wanted to access the power of the serpent and the power of the Earth.
"The idea of being bored was important too," he reiterates. "Like when you've caught a cold and you're feverish, you hear music in a very strange and mysterious way. I used to get like that a lot."
Amplifying his experience of how physical conditions affect perception, Eye has some very definite ideas about the relationship between musicians and audience, and how they should be positioned to play and hear this new music to best advantage. "I have a concept for the band now," he says, settling into his stride. "I don't think of it as a group, more as a kind of circuit, or a piece of equipment. Usually you think of a group as a guitar, bass and drums all colliding, but I see the group as being like a record player. You can see that in the layout when we play. We weren't able to do it here last night, but usually when we play in Japan we set up in the middle of the venue, in a circle so we're facing each other. So the audience is all around us, and together we make up a huge circle." Apparently this human circle bears similarities to the traditional Japanese Bon Odori dance. At festivals throughout Japan in the middle of July, whole communities participate in circular dances to welcome the dead, who are believed to return to their old homes during this period. "We're all facing the centre of the circle," continues Eye, "and that's where the energy is concentrated. So it's different from watching TV."
"Concerts up till now have always been like watching TV," emphasises Yoshimi, "but this way the musicians and the audience are both focused on the centre point. We want it to be music that people can dance to. We want them to dance. When you're playing drums you want people to move their bodies."
Eye, it transpires, is thinking ways beyond the established performer-audience relationship. His vision of Voordoms casts the group as the flesh and blood equivalent of a technologically advanced information receiver, plugged into a higher plane of cosmic consciousness. "Because we're facing each other, we're situated on diagonals, aren't we?" he elaborates, "and we can pick up information along these diagonals. Where the diagonals intersect, it's like this important source of information suddenly appears there and we can access or download it. In that sense it's like a database. I always want to connect to a higher energy, that's what I mean by a database - something I can access and download data from."
Elaborating his record player concept, Eye points out the the V in their name resembles a stylus, while the infinity symbol takes on the shape of two records. "We're the motor to the record player, and where our diagonals intersect is the hole in the record." "But we don't think about it when we're playing," interjects Yoshimi. "We try as hard as we can not to 'try'. We believe that if you don't play naturally then the record in the sky won't revolve. We put too much energy into it. When we're playing naturally and facing each other, it feels like the music flows really smoothly." His vision of Voordoms as a human Technics record deck, scratching the grooves of an enormous intergalactic record with the concentrated power of their music and audience is certainly astonishing. And it gets better.
"For me The Boredoms' music is like a really long email address," Eye enthuses. "It doesn't matter whether we're any good or whether we're crap, what matters is precision. If you make a mistake with a mail address then your message won't go to where it's supposed to. Make just one mistake and it's like you get crossed lines on the telephone. So The Boredoms are like a mail address for accessing this higher data, and at the same time it's like we call out and this higher form of energy appears."