Acid Rocket

Kawabata Makoto’s Acid Mothers Temple launches another one into orbit.
by Evan George

As a small child, Kawabata Makoto had a ringing in his ears. When the screeching would start he’d run to the window of his family’s house looking to find the source of the noise. “I believed it was messages from UFOs,” he says.

A few years later, Makoto was watching television when the drone of a tamboura—a classical Indian instrument—caught his ears. “The sound of the tamboura was really close to what I used to hear,” he says. Then, when he stumbled upon early electronic music by composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, it was as if “someone had turned the ringing in my ears into music.”

Since that alien-inspired inception into the world of minimal and experimental music, Makoto has been returning the favor, one tripped-out album at a time. As ringleader of the infinitely fluctuating, psychedelic circus Acid Mothers Temple, Makoto has broadcast his own brand of improvised cosmic rock ’n’ roll to listeners all over the globe. Whether released under the name Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso UFO, or Acid Mothers Temple and the Cosmic Inferno, Makoto’s trademark insane feedback jams are a guaranteed earful.

Formed in 1995, the Acid Mothers Temple “soul collective” encompasses both incarnations of the live band, plus a slew of side projects Makoto’s involved in, and even ones he isn’t. This collective also acts much like a tight-knit record label for Japan’s noisier artists from Osaka to Nara. So tight, in fact, they’ve also been confused for a cult more than once. After the 1995 poison gas attack on Tokyo’s subway, Makoto’s neighbors mistook one of the AMT houses for the hide-out of religious cult Aum Supreme Truth and they were evicted from the shared residence.

Now, after nearly 50 albums in 11 years (which includes numerous foreign imprints and a smattering of hard-to-find compilations), Makoto is back with the Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso UFO for one of their strangest offerings yet. Have You Seen the Other Side of the Sky? began as the first acoustic-only Acid Mothers Temple project, which explains the abnormally baroque sound of the six-track album.

“In the beginning of this recording, we were going to record all acoustic—just folk music style,” Makoto says. “But on the recording, I changed the idea to use electric instruments too. I never have much of an idea before the recording.”

The result is an electro/acoustic fusion that sounds a little bit like a kraut rock rendition of “Green Sleeves”—one part interstellar feedback, one part Karate Kid pan flute.

“I just play the sounds that I hear from my cosmos,” Makoto says. “‘Have you ever seen the other side of the sky?’ is my question to everyone.”

It’s a question most of us are probably unprepared to answer; to do so would take a good deal of audio research into Makoto’s musical language.

Have You Seen the Other Side of the Sky? opens with “Attack From Planet Hattifatteners,” a whistling of barren electronic space—the spiraling signal of an unstable synthesizer on top of repeating robot glitches—until suddenly the noise catapults into their full-on rocket ship, speed metal shredding and hyperactive drum fills. Then, without warning, the feedback quickly gives way to chimes, flute and reverb-laden kazoo vocals. Whereas on other AMT albums, the spaces between the freak-outs are often little vignettes of near-silence before the next cataclysmic explosion, here Makoto and crew jam endlessly on wind instruments, acoustic guitars and simple, melodic chants (of an indistinguishable dialect). Rather than jump out of the in-between spaces into their trademark electric freak-outs, they patiently hunker down inside of them.

On “Interplanetary Love,” Makoto’s fretwork shines like a comet trail, depicting this newfound ability to chill out. While the obligatory synthesizer Theremin sparkles all over the speakers, the rest of the song is a simple composition of acoustic guitar and drunk-monk incantation.

Similarly, the closing track, “The Tales of Solar Sail,” shares more with the minimalism of the 1970s, which originally piqued Matoko’s interest in playing music, than the amp-worshipping heaviness that AMT has become synonymous with. (The only easy comparison within the AMT catalogue seems to be their full-length cover version of Terry Reilly’s techno-hippy masterpiece “In C.”) One sustained reed organ note pumps without end, while a flute and something akin to a bagpipe tickles untraditional scales for minutes on end in solos that extend to astronaut heights. When the group finally breaks out of the dreaminess for the last 20 minutes of the record, it’s the first bout of Deep Purple riffage on Have You Seen the Other Side of the Sky? that is on par with their earlier efforts.

The album’s players are, for the most part, staple members of the Acid Mothers Temple “soul collective.” Have You Seen the Other Side of the Sky? features AMT regulars Tsuyama Atsushi on bass, guitar and flute and Higashi Hiroshi on synth, plus newcomer Uki Eiji on drums. Ono Ryoko and Noa contribute alto sax and “erotic voice,” respectively. As for line-up changes, Matoko says that the studio players are always chosen simply by who is around to partake. If some members of the extended AMT family are traveling, or are busy with other endeavors, the show must go on. And it does.

“When you come to see our next tour, you can see everything,” Makoto promises. LAA

Acid Mothers Temple plays Sept. 9 at the Smell.