The awesome Acid Mothers Temple
Greg Kot, Tribune music critic.

For those who think they no longer have the capacity to be overwhelmed by music, consider Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. The Japanese quintet's performance at the South by Southwest Music Conference two years ago was enough to dash even the most jaded hipster against the rocks of their seen-it-all complacency.

Here was a band that extracted space-trucking noise from chasms of near silence, tucked folk melodies inside screaming guitars and squalling synthesizers, and channeled the droning tonalities of Eastern throat singing while playing at crushing volume levels. The band flaunted more hair than Foghat, more volume than Blue Cheer and nearly as much speed as Hawkwind.

Trouble was, that awe-inspiring visual and sonic spectacle couldn't fully be appreciated on any of the band's albums. Their recordings were a mess, frankly--a sometimes gleeful mess, but a mess nonetheless, and difficult for all but diehards to sit through. Now there's "Mantra of Love" (Alien 8), and it marks a turning point for the band, one acknowledged by founding guitarist Kawabata Makoto in an e-mail interview. "On this album we prioritized the idea of song," he says. "You could say that we have changed from our previous focus on chaos and drones. But we have always had a `song' element in our music, and this album has just provided us with a chance to change that focus."

"Mantra of Love" consists of only two tracks, but they bring a previously unheard coherence and clarity to the band's aural delirium. The 30-minute "La Le Lo" opens with a long section of melodic, almost soothing wordless chanting and scatting by singer Cotton Casino, before the backdrop of sitar, guitar and analog synthesizer overtakes her. A dervish swirl of instruments builds in volume, speed and intensity before collapsing. The 15-minute "L'Ambition dans Le Miroir" is the chill-out after the frenzy, with Casino's voice and Higashi Hiroshi's moonscape keyboards drifting serenely out of earshot.

It's a culmination in many ways of a 10-year ride that began in the mid-'90s, when Makoto put together an array of outcast musicians called the Soul Collective, which morphed into Acid Mothers Temple.

"I had searched high and low [since 1978] for a record that combined Deep Purple-style hard rock with Stockhausen's electronic music, but hadn't found anything like that. So I decided to make my own," Makoto says. "That dream only became reality when AMT was formed. As we have played together we have slowly discovered that kind of music that we should be playing. I describe that music as `trip music'--but in a different sense from psychedelic rock."

The Soul Collective has some similarities to the communes of the '60s. It was forged, Makoto says, out of necessity, as a musical sanctuary of sorts for artists ostracized by Japanese society. "There is no work for us and we have rejected virtually all types of social responsibility and obligation," he says. But Makoto is not trying to re-create some hippie experiment in socialism. "My experience of living in hippie and beatnik communities only filled me with despair," he says. "They were no more than a smaller version of society, and they contained all the problems endemic in society at large. I became disgusted with the ideological hypocrisy of the ecology movement. Our only slogan is, `Do whatever you want come what may. Don't do whatever you don't want, come what may.'"

In the "don't" category for Makoto are chemical enhancements, even though the music sounds like it could've been made under their influence. "I tried all kinds of drugs when I was younger, mainly because I wanted to know what they could show you," he says. "But I have absolutely no need for them anymore. Drugs can provide you with a clue, but to find the `answer' you need to progress through them to the next stage."

The next stage, apparently, is in music that combines extremes of beauty and chaos. In that respect, Acid Mothers Temple shares a certain aesthetic with a handful of Japanese bands such as the Boredoms, Ghost, Ruins, High Rise and Fushitsusha. What's in the homeland's water that produces such boundary-pushing music?

"Not just Western music, but all kinds of culture are imported into Japan," Makoto says, "and the Japanese excel in the compression of sensory and intellectual data. When we were in our teens there was little information about rock music available to us, so many of us developed our own elaborate imagined fantasies about this music. I, for example, saw some photos of Pete Townshend and I imagined that in performance he played his guitar entirely with that swinging arm movement. Or I would look at all the amps and imagine that the distortion he played with was caused by all the amps being played at maximum. Those kinds of misconceptions have a played a great part in the formation of our performance styles."

The awesome Acid Mothers Temple, Chicago Tribune, May 28, 2004 Friday