Beulah Land

if you haven't been following the underground hype so far, here's a quick update. Les Rallizes Denudes were a group of Japanese noise terrorists who, from the late 60s until 90s, played the loudest, most misanthropic, minimal 'rock' music never recorded. due to leader Takashi Mizutani's hatred of recording studios, the band never released a studio album (except for the posthumous 'mizutani'), so the entire history of the band has to be researched by diving into a massive amount of semi-official bootlegs and cd-r box sets. LRD's sound is characterized by retardedly simple "my girl"-meets-krautrock bass grooves that sound like they may collapse at any moment. when Mizutani decides to 'sing', he unleashes various yelps, gurgles and frail, damaged melodies all sent through way too much echo. and all of it is buried under the unholy amount of feedback coming from Mizutani's guitar amps. a comparison to the Velvet Underground is the closest thing anyone can come up with... they also had an exploding plastic inevitable-style lightshow for a while. they were originally connected to experimental filmmaker/performance artist shuji terayama, who kicked them out of his theater troup when they refused to turn their amps down. and they continued to play the loudest, most fucked up music in existence for the next 30 years... despite their total obscurity outside of japan (or in japan, for that matter) up until recently, they've been extremely influential in the world of Japanese psych/noise/rock; it's doubtful that the Acid Mothers, High Rise, LSD March, Boris, Keiji Haino or any of the others would be quite the same without their influence.

December's Black Children is probably one of the better quality bootlegs out there, it's from 1980. find out why this is my favorite band...