Les Rallizes Dénudés - Double Heads (2011) [6CD Box Set] Re-up

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Though Les Rallizes Denudes, also known as Hadaka no Rallizes, were one of the earliest and most revolutionary Japanese psychedelic rock bands, and have existed off and on through four decades, they are also one of the most obscure, barely known even in their native country. This cult of noise terrorists shrouded themselves in mystery, seldom touring and releasing very few records, usually with no discernible label. Their sound presages the later psychedelic experimental noise of Fushitsusha, High Rise, and others in the current crop more than any other Japanese psychedelic group from the late '60s.

Revolving around guitarist and vocalist Mizutani Takashi, Les Rallizes Denudes formed in November of 1967 at Kyoto University, inspired by Exploding Plastic Inevitable-era Velvet Underground as well as the over-amplified rock of Blue Cheer. By 1968 they were gigging live and even began a regular collaboration with an avant-garde theater troupe, which ended the next year because of Les Rallizes' penchant for extreme volumes of sound. Not only did they use massive amounts of feedback at loud volumes, their stage shows used strobe lights, mirror balls, and other effects for a live experience that was a total sensory assault.

Les Rallizes also aligned themselves with radical left-wing politics, performing at the front lines of student demonstrations against Vietnam and even the student occupation of Kyoto University in April of 1969. One original member, Wakabayashi, was involved in the Japanese Red Army hijacking of a flight to North Korea, known as the Yodo-go incident, and because of Mizutani's own connections with the Red Army, the group's gigs became more infrequent and clandestine. They didn't record much in the studio, and the only music of theirs to come out on vinyl at this time was one side of the double-LP compilation Oz Days Live, released by Oz Discs in 1973. In fact, Les Rallizes kept going throughout the '70s and '80s without releasing a thing, and then suddenly they put out three CDs of archival recordings in 1991, and a video the next year. Of these, the double CD/LP '77 Live highlights them at the top of their form, with 10- to 20-minute tracks of intense guitar feedback and drones over repetitive rhythms and heavily distorted vocals.

Les Rallizes played their final gig in October of 1996, nearly 30 years after their inception. All their albums were released in very limited quantities and are extremely difficult to find, with collectors grabbing them immediately when they show up in stores and catalogs. Because of their reputation for secrecy and violence, as well as the difficulty in tracking down their recordings, Les Rallizes Denudes have taken on an almost mythic status.

by Rolf Semprebon, allmusic

Between August 1980 and March 1981, Les Rallizes Denudes (or The Naked Larryz, as the long-lost acetate they are rumoured to have recorded for Virgin Records in the mid Seventies dubbed them) played seven concerts in and around Tokyo. Never officially released, illicit nth generation cassette copies circulated in Japanese fan circles for many years, attaining a whispered, holy Grail status amongst initiates to the Rallizes cult, high quality soundboard versions were finally released by the secretive Univive label in 2005. Three of the best of these concerts are collected on Double Heads, all recorded at Yaneura, a small club in the teeming neon teen shopping mecca of Shibuya in Tokyo. Together these three concerts comprise a singularly pivotal moment in Les Rallizes Denudes' development - as well as some of the most glacially psyschedelic music of their long career.

By the late Seventies, already a dozen years since their formation in Kyoto in late 1967, Rallizes were very much a group out of time. The politically engaged commune and hippy rock scene that had sustained them through the late Sixties and Seventies had slowly dissipated like a patchouli haze in a stiff autumn breeze. The Oz venue, the group's long time base of Tokyo operations, had closed down in September 1973. Several ex-Oz staffers continued to be involved with the group in management or musical roles (Doronco, the bassist on these recordings, for example, had worked the soundboard at Oz), but the wider student revolutionary and beatnik communities that had supported Rallizes' strenuously anticommercial stance was now fractured beyond repair. Equally illustrative were the events at one of the last of the big outdoor counterculture festivals, the third Twilight Glow festival (Yuyake Matsuri), held in August 1976 at a ski resort near Kanazawa. With the first day of the two-day event rained off because of a typhoon, the bill was in chaos. Rallizes were due to headline on the final day, but their set was brought to an ignominious end after just twenty minutes as the curfew for getting down off the mountain approached and the promoters were forced to turn off the power. Out of time then, in more than one sense.

The musical Zeitgeist was changing too, as the expansive jams of hard and progressive rock gave way to no-wave and the urgent, explosive mantras of the "Tokyo Rockers" punk bands like Friction and Mirrors. Rallizes needed to transform their sound once again if they were to continue to engage with the present. It was clear that the wider musical culture had become less tolerant of internalized baroque excess. Who needed hugely loud thirty minutes surrealist trips with obscure, Cocteau-inspired imagery and the wafting scent of incense when the future was slashing, sweaty three-minute situationist sloganeering? Musing on the group's September 11, 1980 show at Yaneura, the reviewer from Young Quitar magazine, his lip doubtless curled up into a studied punk sneer, pointedly decribes Mizutani was being dressed like "the little prince from the Kingdom of fag".

At this time, Rallizes were playing as a trio. Second guitarist Takeshi Nakamura, who played on the classic 1977 recordings, quit in 1978. Dictatorial frontman Takashi Mizutani tried to take the opportunity to transform the group's sound by adding a new guitarist, preferably one more fully plugged into punk energy. But his approaches to couple of notable punk guitarists, including Lapis from Friction, were angrily rebuffed. But towards the beginning of 1980, Mizutani finally found his man and one who caused more than a few raised eyebrows. Fujio Yamaguchi (known to one and all as just Fujio), with his black British father and Japanese mother, had lent a rare scent of exotic authenticity to Japan's nascent rock scene since the late Sixties, first with Group Sounds band The Dynamites and then following their split on New Year's Eve 1969, with the legendary shambolic proto-punk glam blues group, Murahachibu. As well as looking the part with his wasted looks and tangled, grown-out afro, Fujio was a ferociously accomplished guitarist - elegant, emotional and with a real sense of excitement and danger to his lead lines. Mis sojourn with Rallizes would last just a single year - seven concerts and a handful of recording sessions (most notably in September 1980 at the Mars Studio in Kunitachi). But eventually the group proved too small to contain both Mizutani and Fujio's egos, and Fujio quit immediately after the March 23, 1981 concert.

But the music left behind by this short-lived incarnation is fascinating, Fujio's technical facility often sees him floating lithe, smeared blues lines against the disruptive squalls of feedback magicked up by Mizutani. On the whole though, the music created during this period, in both the studio and live is somehow bleak, cold, isolated, resistant to structure and meaning. The aggressive white heat of the earlier Seventies performances has dissipated, leaving behind a deep-frozen atomized husk floating weightlessly in the cold depths of space… an aching, nerve-exposed downer after the rush has ended. Throughout the mood is magnificently languid, weary, enervated - perhaps a deliberate reaction against the wired, frenetic tension of contemporary Tokyo punk. On tracks like "Deeper Than Night" (Yoru yori fukaHu) and even the normally poppy (well, at least as poppy as a fifteen minute feedback epic can get) "Night, Assassins' Night" (Yoru, ansatsusha no yoru), the bass and drums crawl at a radically slowed down, near dub pace, as Mizutani's voice, heavily shuttered with echo and delay, intones each syllable with a deep staccato weariness. A similar approach to the vocals can be heard throughout - the atomized focus on the blank enunciation of individual syllables militating against emotional involvement and at times even comprehension. It's as if the group has decided to carve out a new terrain (geographical, temporal, linguistic, climactic, musical) that will more fully represent their distance, their refusal to engage - indeed, their sheer out-of-timeness.

Rosa Bryndis Einarsdottir

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Les Rallizes Dénudés - Double Heads (2011) [6CD Box Set] Re-up

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Les Rallizes Dénudés - Double Heads (2011) [6CD Box Set] Re-up

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Les Rallizes Dénudés - Double Heads (2011) [6CD Box Set] Re-up

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Les Rallizes Dénudés - Double Heads (2011) [6CD Box Set] Re-up

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Les Rallizes Dénudés - Double Heads (2011) [6CD Box Set] Re-up

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Les Rallizes Dénudés - Double Heads (2011) [6CD Box Set] Re-up

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Les Rallizes Dénudés - Double Heads (2011) [6CD Box Set] Re-up

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