![]() Early Japanese psych acts like the Flower Travellin’ Band sang in English and covered popular songs from abroad. came just as Western rock exploded in popularity among Japanese youth. The genre’s late-Sixties emergence in the U.S. Japan has developed its own small psychedelic-rock scene. “Psychedelic rock originated and it has lots of background like roots, like country music, blues music, lots of influence,” Kurosawa says. And rather than the classics of the Sixties, Kurosawa cites krautrock and more obscure crate-digging finds as key influences. Indeed, growing up, Kurosawa thought jam-band godfathers the Grateful Dead were a fashion label when he first saw their famed skull-and-rose merch in the vintage boutiques of Harajuku. “Japanese psychedelic bands kind of imagined what is psychedelic culture not knowing and not really experiencing exactly what happened in San Francisco, for example,” Kurosawa says, “but kind of imagining … and then trying to create our original.” Part of what makes their sound unique is the fact that the band formed in Tokyo, more than 5,000 miles from psychedelia’s Bay Area birthplace. They play an expansive take on psychedelic rock that ranges from metallic to meditative. Indecipherable lyrics are just one of many things that makes Kikagaku Moyo - which translates to “geometric patterns” - unique. “It’s amazing that the music we play echoed,” Kurosawa explains. Two of the band’s five members - drummer Go Kurosawa and multi-instrumentalist Tomo Katsurada - spoke with Rolling Stone about their approximately decade-long run and the decision to call it quits. Now, they’re planning to go on “indefinite hiatus” following a final album Kumoyo Island, out May 6, and an international farewell tour. Since getting together in 2012, the band has gone from playing small bars to amassing more than 200,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, selling out major venues, and becoming a fixture on the jam-band circuit. But singing in tongues hasn’t stopped this Japanese quintet from connecting with audiences around the world. The group’s lyrics consist entirely of invented syllables - phonetic sounds that complement their intricate looping riffs. Another Bandcamp holiday is upon us, the least you can do is give some love to this near-perfect documentation of mind-fry goodness.Kikagaku Moyo literally speak their own language. This performance proves essential for both KM fans and collectors of Ryley’s ever-growing pieces of his live improv pantheon. Sometimes the best phrase is already cast. Molten wax guitars, percolating sweat rhythms, sonic symbiosis and, well as the band so succinctly puts it - deep fried grandeur. The pieces are truly two halves of a whole experience, the time needed to flip is just a breath between sonic sculptures, haunted and hungry. There are no surges of applause, no banter, just the assembled players finding their way around the cosmic cloud for a touch under an hour. With Cooper Crain mixing it down in Chicago post performance, the record quite honestly bears few hallmarks of a live record. ![]() This is exactly the argument for live records done right. The Utrecht festival boasts a long history of collaboration and genre-defining/defying performances, and the meeting of Walker and Kikagaku Moyo on the stage is a performance that practically beged to be documented, pressed and pondered. ![]() The set on Deep Fried Grandeur was recorded live at Le Guess Who? in 2018. As Ryley’s Husky Pants label continues to bloom into a fertile ground for experimentation, here it becomes a necessary hub of documention some of the guitarist’s historical high water marks as well.
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