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█ █ P U B L I C . S O U N D
█ █
█ █ presenting our latest release
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r e l e a s e . i n f o
Artist.....: Les Rallizes Denudes
Title......: Flightless Bird
Rip Date...: Sep-02-2007 Cat.No.....: 10thCD003
Style......: Psychedelic Rockabel......: 10th Avenue Freeze Out
Quality....: VBRkbps Type.......: Album
Size.......: 105,9 MB Source.....: CDDA
r e l e a s e . n o t e s
Seemingly endless sonic flame-throwers of phased white noise
streak across your inner landscape, as stupidly loud and
overly-backlit lead guitar emissions perpetrated by a perpetually
be-shaded longhair pummel the similarly be-shaded but barely
adequate musical backing that sags and creaks under the wattage.
Occasionally, lead vocals of a singular variety are provided by
said be-shaded mad axeman, whose paranoid personality ensures all
songs are delivered in a voice of querulous subterranean gargling
from beyond the valley of Alan Vega My giddy aunt, what's this,
then, a MEATY BEATY BIG & BOUNCY from the Underworld? A rough
guide to Japrock's most intuitive non-career movers? Has the
world's most revolutionary rocknroll band released a compilation
album of leader Mizutani's most frequently requested tracks due to
overwhelming popular demand? Ja, mein hairies, this certainly
seems to be the case. For, with the arrival of this superb
FLIGHTLESS BIRD compilation, obsessive fans of Les Rallizes
Denudes (are there any other kinds?) finally have a proper early
career overview of Mizutani & Co. at their fingertips, a
70-minute-long super distillation of this most contrary of band's
choicest musical moves executed between 1967-82, a superb sounding
and partly/mostly chronological trawl through the freaked out and
perpetually-yelping mindscape of singer and avant-avalanche
guitarmonger Mizutani, and his sinister-yet-interchangeable pool
of black clad world-to-rights acolytes. Indeed, except for the
somewhat shocking omission of Mizutani's time-honoured set-closer
The Last One, it's all right here on this CD in truly gargantuan
proportions, as FLIGHTLESS BIRD unloads on both fans and champions
of Rallizes a very enormous something with which to petition those
seething multitudes of Doubting Thomases among their friends and
relatives, whom they will have undoubtedly regaled with blasts of
shrieking Mizutani feedback - for the past decade or so - via
dodgy vinyl bootlegs, third or fourth generation C90 cassette
copies, or expensive handmade CD-Rs.
In short, FLIGHTLESS BIRD collects together and showcases Les
Rallizes Denudes' most directs hits from the early-to-mid-70s (an
enormously strung-out Enter the Mirror, a shockingly brief but
piercing Deeper than Night, a monumental version of Flames of Ice
that appears to have been ice-picked out of the ice after 25,000
years, the all-time best version of the beautiful Field of
Artificial Flowers aka People Can Choose, besides plundering their
earliest archives for the fabulously garage-y opener, 1967's
Otherwise My Conviction, a yelped skeleton of a song which
anticipates Subway Sect and is almost as bohemian and crapped out
a take on American garage rock as Armand Schaubroeck's 1965
teenage band The Church Mice and their ragged 45 Baby, We're Not
Part of Society. Unfortunately, Mizutani's inability to sing in
tune in the studio during this recording saw him desert studios
forever, inadvertently creating the lo-fi genius that would ever
after be associated with Les Rallizes Denudes. Otherwise My
Conviction is followed by the curious (and mistranslated) Valle de
l'eau, two minutes of unprovenanced I'll Be Your Mirror-style
querulous balladry, as though French music industry people had
copped some unknown Tim Hardin demo and re-recorded it in the
style of an out-take from the FOGGY NOTION 7" E.P.
At this precise point, FLIGHTLESS BIRD unfolds into a truly epic
treat, as a succession of four heavy mind-death drone-o-thons of
wipe-out monotony conspire to bludgeon the senses. The first of
these warhorses is the full 13 minutes of Enter The Mirror, a
glassy and tinnitus-inducing Dronefest Maximus replete with a
Mizutani solo that sounds as though he's tearing off shards of
light from the highest corners of the sky and ringing them out
over the exhilarated townsfolk. The ending is so truly
nerve-shatteringly berserk that itÆs something not to describe but
only to experience. Thereafter comes the astonishing 19-minute
freakout from mid-68 SmokinÆ Cigarette Blues, an antecedent-free
bone fide classic on a par with nothing else. What's it about?
Well, the first half sounds like the wheels came off the thing but
they still tried to drive it. Then, at about 12 minutes into the
track, they take up flying as the music enters Teo Macero-cut up
territory of the kind that turns it into a bizarre combination of
Miles Davis' 1975 funk band (Messrs Cosey, Lucas, Henderson and
Mtume) at their most primitive meets pure HYMNEN-period
Stockhausen (67-67), thereafter forever ascending towards the
swampiest parts of Funkadelic's self-titled debut LP. What it's
about is revolution, and the track is the one surviving Rallizes
recording that captures the early line-up as they inhabited an
essential cosmic doorway; that time right after their leader's
Eureka moments after hearing White Light/White Heat and Blue
Cheer's apocalyptical second LP OUTSIDEINSIDE (both events
happening in the spring of '68), but before bass player Moriyasu
Wakabayashi and eight others hijacked a JAL airliner and took it
to the North Korean capital Pyongyang. If Les Rallizes Denudes had
recorded nothing other than Smokin' Cigarette Blues, they would
still have gone down in rocknroll as lost legends. For that song's
a unique hybrid of Amon Duul/Hapshash a-rhythmic percussion and
the Velvets/Parson Sound playing a-rhythmic Creedence riffs, and
is in possession of such rocknroll attitude that it must surely
endear itself even to the staunchest despisers of avant-garde
music. ItÆs what the Jesus & Mary Chain would have barfed out if
theyÆd had more than a passing interest in the La Monte Young side
of the Velvet Underground, and had been related to the Mongol
hordes. Next comes Flames of Ice, on which thereÆs a strangely
Spaghetti Western flavour to this aridly dry version of Rallizes'
standard/classic. Here, it's a mercilessly-trudgeful 17-minute
trek across Mesopotamian plains by a posse of black-clad horsemen,
as Mizutani drags the Ventures and the Shadows down into the
Underworld, along with the early Guess Who and a whole bunch of
Shadows-obsessed Japanese eleki bands. In all honesty, while this
version is at least matched by the inverted RSJ-funk of the
version of this song located on BLIND BABY HAS ITS MOTHER'S EYES,
there's a cinematic quality to this take that blows my melted
plastic mindà the kip of its wail, this version, Struth! Next up
is the ten-minutes-plus of wiped out San Fran guitar hysteria
hidden on æField of Artificial Flowers'. This Blue Oyster Cultish
devil drive by Woden's Wild Hunt through unknown sleepy suburbs is
one of Mizutani's genuine classic rock songs, combining the white
noise supersonics of the Yardbirds' Happenings Ten Years Time Ago
with Grand Funk's monolithic version of Gimmie Shelter. At this
point the long performances finally conclude, for this wodge of
modern sonic stylings is, like the recordÆs beginning, buffered at
the end by two far briefer songs. The first is a startlingly
short-but-brain crushing Deeper Than Night, that sounds remarkably
like the version on HEAVIER THAN A DEATH IN THE FAMILY, but which
concludes naturally rather than fading. Unfortunately, a second
(and vastly inferior) version of Otherwise My Conviction (which
I've chosen to omit from the streaming) brings this double-LP to a
stumbling halt. Out of tune, out of sorts and precisely what
Mizutani will have needed to hear in order to convince himself
that studio recordings were a bummer. But, then, 7-out-of-8
classics ain't half bad, brothers'n'sisters, especially as
FLIGHTLESS BIRD is all wrapped up in a sleeve that depicts the
actual Yodo-go JAL airliner hijacking of March 1970 that caused
the band to be cast out of Japanese society for all time. Yes,
this is a seminal and essential work by a seminal and essential
band and it donÆt half sound good. A real CD for a change. Get
that, a real shrinkwrapped CD, motherfuckers!
--Julian Cope
p l a y l i s t
01 Otherwise My Conviction 03:35
02 Valle de lÆeau 02:38
03 Enter the Mirror 13:47
04 SmokinÆ Cigarette Blues 19:18
05 Flames of Ice 17:12
06 Field of Artificial Flowers 10:37
07 Deeper than Night 02:24
08 Otherwise My Conviction 04:05
73:36 min
g r e e t i n g s
agw - amok - bass - bcc - bex - boss - cmg - cmc - cms - d2h
def - dh - disc0 - drum - emp - ftd - fwyh - gem - i8 - ipc
jce - jfk - jrp - just - khz - kinky - kw - lame - maem - mbs
mgc - psycz - r2r - rac - radial - rapid - rks - rtb - sb
sever - sfe - soup - sour - sq - tr - trt - ube - uc - upe
uki - xtc - yard - zi
respect to music lovers worldwide
never forget : go to the show. buy the t-shirt. order the vinyl