Les Rallizes Dénudés - Naked Diza Star (2013) [3CD Box Set]

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Les Rallizes Dénudés - Naked Diza Star (2013) [3CD Box Set]

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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

The bass slows to a agonized crawl, the same handful of notes slammed repeatedly through the icy squalls of guitar feedback and distortion, like a lunatic drawing a circle on a page till pen tears through paper. There's a paradox here: how the simple marking of time can create the sensation of its absence. The brain's need to seek pattern, development, and resolution is short-circuited, overwhelmed, overcome. In retrospect, much of Les Rallizes Denudes methodology aimed at creating this sense of a timeless psychedelic now: the half-hour guitar solos, the endlessly circling bass lines, the psychedelic light shows, the overwhelming volume. All aimed at obliterating the audiences' sense of time and space, blasting away the walls between dimensions. Into that timeless nowhere, leader Takashi Mizutani's affectless vocals could then croon his Husymans-esque epigrams of dreams, drowsing, angels, vertigo, chasms and fissures, the night, the shadow, the crepuscular dawn, that bittersweet bleed from dream to wakening, …

On first impressions, the group's approach seems to vary little, live shows were marked by the same clutch of songs, and the uncanny agelessness of Mizutani's visage. Yet change was never absent from Rallizes' music - glacial in pace perhaps, but always present. Naked Diza Star, originally released as a three CD set by the Japanese label Univive in 2006 provides us with the best opportunity to observe this change. Supposedly compiled by Mizutani himself in response to a journalist's request for a career overview, Naked Diza Star draws upon a clutch of the group's best performances from the seventies and eighties. The earliest dates back to November 1973, when the group were just beginning to feel their way beyond their garage band roots; the latest to May 1987 when their approach and mystique was already fully developed.

Highlights are many. The band really began to establish its distinctive identity from late 1973 and 1974, as songs like their classic concert-closer "The Last One" and "Enter the Mirror" started to appear in their sets. This was also the period that Mizutani began to assemble the arsenal of equipment that would come to define the Rallizes sound - the Roland tape echo, the Electro Harmonix Big Muff and Blackfinger compressor, and the arsenal of homemade effects boxes that he used to such individual effect. The versions of "White Awakening" and "Memories are Far" from the April 1975 Hana Matsuri festival are both blissfully laidback. However, shortly after this festival, drummer Shunichiro Shoda and bassist Mikio Nagata both suddenly left the group.

They would be replaced by Shime Takahashi (who had previously drummed with Keiji Haino's early free-jazz inspired unit, Lost Aaraaff) and ex-Zuno Keisatsu bassist Hiroshi. Takahashi would only remain in the group till November of that year, but the three tracks included here with this line-up (recorded on November 3,1975 at Meiji Gakuin University) show just what Hiroshi in particular brought to the group's conception.

His bass created a still, ultra-heavy centre that would ground the chaos of Mizutani's guitar - an approach that would come to define the Rallizes sound from this moment on. Older tracks like "Field of Artificial Flowers" were radically reworked, while the mind-obliterating live acid-jam of "Ice Flames" from this date is simply astonishing - an explosive, howling storm, rumbling with an agonized slowness that seems to rest on the verge of stasis.

Takahashi was replaced on drums by Toshiro Mimaki, aka Sami, thus taking the group into the classic line-up that would record the '77 Live double album. Sami had a far heavier touch on the drums than the jazzier approach of either Takahashi or Shoda, steering the group in a more consciously heavy rock direction than before. The tracks presented here from the July 25,1976 show at Yaneura (a live space in Shibuya, Tokyo), and August 13,1977 at the Yuyake Matsuri give a glimpse of the group at their peak, as well as the shift from the chaos of the 1976 shows to the tauter control of the 1977 ones.

The final disk contains a selection of recordings from the post-Fujio Yamaguchi 1980s era. Yamaguchi's sojourn in the group (for more information see the Phoenix Records releases Double Heads and Mars Studio) lasted just one year, a year that saw the white-heat of the 70s recordings replaced by chill narcotic headspaces. The 80s were a period of retrenchment for Rallizes, the group stripped back to its bare bones, digging deeper and deeper into a strange jittery stillness. Frequent line-up changes saw them frequently reduced to a trio (and on a couple of occasions, even a duo), with occasional months without a single gig as Mizutani tried to find and rehearse new members. For a couple of shows in late 1981 they added a saxophonist, Akira Fujii, two tracks of which can be heard here. There is a lighter, bluesy touch to the group's sound on these tracks, with tempos tending more towards the medium than in previous periods. The highlights of this final disk are the final two tracks from May 1987 at the Rokumeikan in Tokyo. The drummer is Yoshio Kuge, a Tokyo post-punk stalwart who had played with Pungo and Orquestra del Viento (and later with Maher Shalal Hash Baz) - and by far the most technically accomplished drummer ever to play with Rallizes. The ludicrously propulsive bottom he brings to "Field of Artificial Flowers" is utterly un-Rallizes yet utterly jaw-dropping all the same.

Rosa Bryndis Einarsdottir

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Les Rallizes Dénudés - Naked Diza Star (2013) [3CD Box Set]

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Les Rallizes Dénudés - Naked Diza Star (2013) [3CD Box Set]

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Les Rallizes Dénudés - Naked Diza Star (2013) [3CD Box Set]

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Les Rallizes Dénudés - Naked Diza Star (2013) [3CD Box Set]

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