Decades before bands like the Boredoms and Melt Banana put the Land of the Rising Sun on the noise rock map, another Japanese band was making discordant sounds—Les Rallizes Dénudés.
The racket-inclined psych-rock/folk band’s story—which began in 1967 at Kyoto’s Doshisha University—reads like a good novel. You get clamorous feedback of epic proportions. Radical politics and a connection to a prominent terrorist group. A spotty recording history—they never released a proper album despite the fact they were around for years, but left behind only a series of shoddily recorded live and abortive studio recordings. A reclusive and possibly paranoid lead singer. Oh, and to top it all off, an airplane hijacking by a former member turned revolutionary. Plane crashes are a staple of rock mythology, but a plane hijacking? Why not throw in demonic possession and a few zombies into the mix?
Les Rallizes Dénudés has been on the public radar recently due to the 2023 release of CITTA’ ’93, a polished-up and carefully remastered recording of the band’s final show—after a very long hiatus—at Tokyo’s Club Citta in 1993. Some of their other official releases—there are bootlegs galore circulating out there—have been remastered as well. One is 2022’s The OZ Tapes, which was remastered from the original tapes, discovered after the 2019 death of frontman Takashi Mizutani. You get howling guitar, more howling guitar, a song or two reminiscent of the Velvet Underground at their most melodic mellow and, surprisingly, some laid-back psych-folk that would do the Grateful Dead proud.
But first, a quick glance at the band’s tumultuous early days. They started the band as students, and took some tenuous steps towards recording in a proper studio before deciding to focus exclusively on playing live. While they played at protests—including a show at a student-occupied (as in they took the fucker over) auditorium—only one of the group, founding member and bassist Moriaki Wakabayashi, took the leap into violent revolutionary activity, joining the Yodogō Group of the radical New Left Japan Communist League’s “Red Army Faction.”
In 1970 Wakabayashi was one of a band of Red Army members who highjacked a Japan Airlines flight and forced its pilots to fly to North Korea. Evidently they believed, God bless ‘em, that North Korea was some kind of socialist Club Med, where everyone sat around tossing off pithy quotes from Mao’s Little Red Book while sipping mixed drinks with colorful names with little umbrellas and eating pigs in a blanket.
While there he married a fellow radical and had two children. But at some point in time he realized the errors of his ways—he called the hijacking “selfish and conceited”—and began trying to return to Japan to face the music. Information on whether he’s managed to do so is sketchy. Meanwhile, Mizutani, who’d hung with members of the Red Army Faction, was so unnerved by the hijacking—guess he expected that knock nobody wants to hear on the door—that he went into hiding and remained a hard-to-contact recluse for the remainder of his life.
Opener “OZ Days” is exactly one minute and thirty-three sections of wonderful feedback—Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music made in Japan. “A Shadow on Our Joy” is practically a pop number and brings to mind the Velvet Underground at their most accessible, with Mizutani contributing raggedy vocals (he’s no singer, but that’s part of the charm) after which he plays a pair of restrained—but only by his usually unhinged standards—guitar solos.
“Wilderness of False Flowers” is a bluesy number on which Mizutani stretches his vocal cords past the snapping point—the word “hoarse” doesn’t do them justice. He then goes full feedback while drummer Shunichiro Shoda bashes away behind him. Mizutani understands the concept of melody, although he doesn’t always pay it much heed, but on this one he manages to make a real racket and play nice at the same time. No chaos here, just a great song.
“White Awakening” is a slow, laid-back number that brings the Velvet Underground to mind. The song sounds like it was recorded in an auditorium the size of Rhode Island—everything sounds far, far away. Mizutani’s vocals are tattered even by his standards, but the melody is very pretty and you can sway to it. It’s not a Les Rallizes Dénudés album without the sprawling and anarchic blowout “The Last One” on it, and The OZ Tapes boasts two, count ‘em two, versions.
The first, “The Last One_1970″ is an epic, twenty-four minutes and change free-form foray into a forest of murky feedback, mighty power chords, amp squeal, drum pound, and generalized mayhem. It takes a few minutes to kick into a full gear, and a few more noisy minutes for Mizutani to come in on vocals, and god bless him he can’t sing a lick. He’s perfect, sounds like a guy screaming in Aokigahara, Japan’s suicide forest. Then the drums get louder and he goes full demented on guitar, doing his best imitation of Pearl Harbor. This is no-holds-barred rock ’n’ roll at its anarchic best, and damn I wish I’d been there when this one was played.
“Memory Is Far Away” is far away indeed from the dementia of “The Last One_1970.” It’s a pretty little number with a melodic guitar riff that coulda come off Loaded, and when Mizutani sings nonsense syllables he sounds like the happy-go-lucky guy he wasn’t. And his shambolic vocals increase the song’s poignance factor tenfold. “Vertigo Otherwise My Conviction” is a cool garage rock number centered around a big, fuzzy riff on which Mizutani sings like he has a really bad cold and delivers on a long, killer ax solo with flurries of stinging notes that dissolve into feedback here and there before going completely over the top WW1 trench style. It’s a tour de force of raw power, what you might have gotten had Iggy Pop said to Ron Asheton, “Okay buddy. Show me what you got.” And all the while Shoda’s going at the cymbals like he’s being paid by the crash.
The OZ Tapes closes with “The Last One_1970 (ver. 2),” which is about a minute shorter than the first version. Feedback squeal predominates at the beginning, then Tadashi comes in on vocals, and everything is quite restrained and repetitious and hypnotic until about the seven-minute mark when all hell breaks loose, with Tadashi turning his guitar into a tattoo needle which he uses over the next eleven-plus minutes to permanently tattoo your eardrums in dayglo ink.
It’s not the longest guitar solo ever by a long shot—one David Didonato of the metal band Modok played a solo that went on for 24 hours and 55 minutes, although I’m inclined to dispute the record because his lazy ass took five-minute breaks here and there to maintain his sanity and he was obviously trying to set a record. Tadashi Mizutani was just doing what came naturally—I’m sure the Guinness Book of World Records never entered his mind. And talk about feedback—Mizutani fashions huge walls of the stuff that if they were to fall on you would kill you dead. So step carefully.
It’s a loss to music fans everywhere that Les Rallizes Dénudés never recorded a proper studio album. Other bands have left us hanging, but they were generally here and gone in a flash. Les Rallizes Dénudés were with us for fourteen long years, from 1967 to 1988 and then again from 1993 to 1996. Which makes their failure to record a single album totally perverse.
On the other hand, it adds to the band’s almost mythical status—given their proclivity for murky noise, it makes perfect sense that Les Rallizes Dénudés would leave behind a legacy of murky, poorly recorded LPs. They existed in a kind of rock and roll Twilight Zone, where the normal laws of recording physics simply didn’t apply. Where time bent and sound blurred, and where “The Last One” will go on forever.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
