“In 1965, the Ventures unleashed their alien music onto an audience in Tokyo, unaware that they were in the midst of a miniature cultural revolution. Soon to follow was the explosion of the ‘Group Sounds’ scene, which made sensations out of bands with names like The Tigers and The Mops and caused Japanese instrument manufacturers to churn out ice-white Mosrite-knockoff guitars by the thousand. GS was massive. But dissent lay at the periphery of this meticulously stylized, tightly controlled, and entirely commercialized scene. A handful of disgruntled musicians, most bedecked entirely in black and with hair longer than was permitted by the record labels, rejected the widespread Beatle-worship and refused to bow to the west. Out of this refusal sprung the intense desolation of Jacks’s Vacant World (banned from the airwaves for nihilistic lyrical content), the ‘Total Sensory Assault’ wrought by militant Rallizes Denudés, and the dizzying jazz-rock mash-up of Masahiko Satoh’s Amalgamation, to name just a few of the countless seminal works which defined this epoch. English-language homages to Western rock gods saturated the psychedelic scene in Japan, but this mix is devoted [almost] entirely to those who sang in Japanese, who married distorted guitars to Buddhist chanting, who went beyond the Western rock paradigm and made something far richer, weirder and, in many cases, better.”
Sonic Landscapes: The Ventures
Feb 21, 2013 | memos, Uncategorized