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WE NEVER SLEEP
"What we also learned was that we shouldn't eat junk food, and eating really great food is a source of energy in itself," asserts Eye, discussing how his ideas about music making had changed during this period. "We realised that you couldn't actually continue to make great music by eating instant ramen."
Their experiences with Zorn and Sonic Youth left members of The Boredoms hungry for fresh opportunities to play with different musicians. In 1994 Eye, Yoshimi and guitarist Yamamoto took part in a televised concert for NHK (the Japanese equivalent of the BBC) called "Video Opera". Other participants included New York avant garde dancer Simone Forti, Fluxus artist Nam June Paik and his fellow Fluxus musician Takehisa Kosugi, of Taj Mahal Travellers fame. In the end, it was never broadcast, but The Boredoms appreciated the company. Similar to Sonic Youth's later "Goodbye 20th Century" project - the group's homage to the century's avant garde pioneers - The Boredoms participation in "Video Opera" revealed them to be adept at mastering the intricacies of a Fluxus performance, what with Eye bouncing out the tempo for Yamamoto and Yoshimi with a rubber ball. The most impressive aspect of this performance was the trio's natural ability to communicate with each other. "The communication works best when it's natural, on full force and people aren't thinking about anything," confirms Eye. "When you're on that level of communication they know instinctively where the sound should be directed. It's only when you're thinking too hard that unnecessary communication methods have to be used to get back to where we should be.
"For me, music is more about listening than producing a sound myself. I'm not a musician. I can press a button or I can scream, but the most musical thing I can do is listen."
It has now been three years since The Boredoms released the mind-altering masterwork "Vision Creation Newsun" (Birdman). The group underwent a considerable metamorphosis since its release, which has left them feeling somewhat detached from it.
"We think that "Vision Creation Newsun" is over and belongs in the past," retorts Eye, "because it's ceased being a collision." Both Eye and Yoshimi prefer to look straight ahead and concentrate on finding some way to release the hours of new material they have recorded since the completion of the "Vision Creation Newsun" period. "I've got lots of other groups, so I'd like to release something by them," hints Eye teasingly. "But we've recorded some Voordoms stuff too. We recorded at the beach, lined up three drum kits at the water's edge so the waves would hit the bass drums."
"It was like field recording," enthuses Yoshimi. "We'd set up mics in the waves to record the drums."
"Underwater mics, recording the drums in the water," continues Eye. "I wanted to record the movement. So we'd be moving the mics around as we were playing. Someone would be on the beach, someone else would be playing in the sea. We'd swing the mic right up close to the drums. We were recording like that all last year. We got this huge gun mic, like a corncob, and had eight people moving it around as were recording. We had one of those big cars that have a digital mixing studio built into them down at the beach with us. We got some great sounds. I'd like to edit those recordings and put them out. It cost us so much to record that we've got to release it."
Though he has done his utmost to stifle any giveaway signs, it becomes evident that Eye stayed up all night following the concert, and he's beginning to succumb to his desire for sleep. It's not the most auspicious moment to ask him about the new found precision presently dominating The Boredoms's music. "But surely everyone wants to be able to reproduce their vision, their tastes as precisely and closely as possible?" he insists. "The stuff you have in your head! I can't write music, so I can't use the same methods, but precision is still important. It's a bit like when you go to a shrine in Japan, and you're supposed to bow twice, and each one should be a different depth. It'd be wrong if you bowed three times. It doesn't matter if the form isn't perfect, but you need to do it twice - and the same with the depth, even if it's not perfect it's got to be one deep and one shallow. If it's not, then it's meaningless. That's the kind of precision I'm talking about," he pauses a moment, before concluding, "I thought about learning how to write down my vision, but I just couldn't do it."
.......that was from the Wire and is by far the best article on the Boredoms ever.
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