JA Seazer / JA Caesar / Tenjyo Sajiki
Sky Station Tenjyo Sajiki : Den'en Ni Shisu (JAP,1974)*****
" This is not really like they described this with a kind of "Magma weirdness" etc. The Uniqueness of this item lays in the highly emotional performance, much more than in any other Japanese item I heard before outside the dark song oriented music. This still is close to this song oriented scene, and from there it is highly original in its core. It is the most emotional Japanese item I know myself.
Track 11 has orgasmic choir and fuzz guitar, drums. The liner notes are completely in Japanese so I don't know the titles. Tenyo Sajiki was the theatre group of the an underground film-maker Shuji Terayama with the picked out of the street hippie J.A. Caesar as its composer. First and 6th track are children choir with drums, piano, electric bass, violin. Highly recommended to the (“naturally”) open minded. It's amongst my favourite Japanese releases. It’s a soundtrack to his 1974 film “Death In The Country”.
Described as a fictional autobiography, it tells of a sensitive adolescent poet who later becomes a film director, who dreams of running off first with a neighbour's wife and then with a travelling freakshow. The film follows a subtle subconscious logic. And it shows the search for the true self trough underlying emotions and desires of the main character. The performance was done by youngsters who suffered from the state’s pressure, and found herein a refoundation of their true inner nature of self-expression. More than just being reactive the music takes all valuable elements of the past and present and refocuses them into an renewed innocence and emotionally rich level. Because the theatre group had the impression of some kind of reactive refuge against a bourgeoning society in those days members were more than once interrogated. P.S. Folk singer Kan Mikami participated with an emotional singing."
"The early '70s in Japan are often painted as an era of political and artistic disillusionment. On the one hand, the state rode roughshod over widespread opposition by renewing a mutual security treaty with the US, forcibly purchasing farming land near Tokyo for the construction of a new airport and stamping down hard on student occupations of universities. In the face of the implacability of state power, the protest movements' fluffy dreams of peaceful revolution were viciously scalpel-sculpted into new and violent forms by Red Army hijackings, lynchings and hostage taking. The sense of confusion and lost innocence was further emphasized by teenage thrill killers, coin locker babies and the bizarre coup d'etat-cum-public suicide of novelist Yukio Mishima. Against this background Japanese youth music began to discard the perky Western imitations of the Group Sounds boom and the college folkies, and slide into more appropriately brutal forms of self expression. Folk turned angry and personal, while rock groups like Las Rallizes Denudes, Flower Travellin' Band and Keiji Haino's Lost Aaraaff discovered bad acid, dissonance and heavy electric blues.
Some of the most exciting and evocative music of the time, however, was born out of the avant garde theatre groups that had played such a central role in the '60s ferment. One of the most important was the Tenjo Sajiki Company (its name taken from Marcel Carne's wartime occupation fantasy Les Enfants Du Paradis), formed by poet, film maker, boxing fan and all-around agent provocateur, Shuji Terayama. Renowned for Living Theatre-inspired audience participation happenings and extreme street theatre designed to shock the bourgeois, by 1970 the group had already become a haven for runaway teens, and a focus for police investigation. Terayama was canny enough to realize that co-opting their music was an ideal way to hijack adolescent energies, and he consistently used heavy amplified rock to jump-start his chaotic, socially critical acid operas.
Heard today, even independent of their lyrical message, they're astonishingly powerful as pieces of music, deploying huge Magma choruses alongside juggernaut organ, guitar, bass, drums and fully out-there vocalizing. The pick of this bunch is the soundtrack to Terayawa's 1974 film Den-en Ni Shisu (Death In The Country). Described as a fictional autobiography, it tells of a sensitive adolescent poet who later becomes a film director, stuck with his neurotic mother in a rural northern backwater, who dreams of running off first with a neighbour's wife and then with a traveling freakshow. The film's fractured narrative of awakening sexuality and severing of parental bonds is captured in hallucinatory imagery and an equally ambitious soundtrack by J.A. Caesar, which binds the whole film together with a subtle, subconscious logic.
The deployment of disparate elements in an all-consuming flow, which works even independently of the images, is masterly. The familiar psych guitar, organ and choral chanting are heavy enough in places -- as on the disc's definitive reading of Caesar's massive and haunting 'Wasan' -- to approach Sabbath levels of dense pounding, and there's also a frighteningly visceral vocal turn from folk singer Kan Mikami. But the score also sees Caesar expanding his instrumental palette, scoring some tracks for sideshow brass band or gently plucked guitar, weeping violin and chant. The weird intervals of his sparse, medieval-influenced melodies linger in the memory with the force of nostalgia for a past not directly experienced. It's an amazing performance: from street hippy who'd never picked up an instrument to film soundtrack composer in five years. Caesar's soundtrack for Den-en Ni Shisu lost out by a single vote to Toru Takemitsu for the best film soundtrack of 1974." -- Alan Cummings, The Wire.
Belle Antique Tenjyo Sajiki (J.A.Caesar) : Shintokumaru (JAP,1976?)***°°
"A theatre piece which sounds like a combination of no theatre, orchestrated theatre music, opera and an outsider's rockconcert. Although the voices by actors are not always singing 100 % correct during the complete piece, it is too original to deny. The combination of elements, koto, operatic singing and heavy rock is at the best moments very impressive."
Sky Station JA Seazer : Saraba Hakobune (JAP,1984)****'
This is indeed, like the description I have read before a more relaxed approach, with musical composer's maturity and clarity blending with great skills and with an ear for rhythm/sounds ideas from a whole range of ethnical associations (Spanish guitar / Middle Eastern / Peruvian / filmic passages / opera / tango / contemporary classical music), while driven through Japanese folk music ideas and a few pro-Western film music associations, mixed with small connecting parts of tempered avant-garde.
An album to keep a life time, reissued beautifully with a mini double LP sleeve.
http://www.forcedexposure.com/artists/seazer.ja.html :
"Another rarity is this original soundtrack album to Terayama Shuji's last movie with music by JA Seazer (Tenjo Sajiki, JA Caesar). Released in 1984, it was Terayama's last completed movie and Seazer's last contribution to his visionary and reactionary world. Saraba Habobune's soundtrack is just stunningly beautiful, far removed from Seazer's trademark bombastic scores. Instead it ventures into more pastoral and almost meditative psychedelic realms filled with traditional string plucking, eerie flute, shahuhachi flirtations, esoterically floating beneath-the-surface female Orff-like choruses and ethereal shamanistic sense of poetry that create memory flashes towards a forceful nostalgia of a past not directly experienced. The whole is endowed with beauty and an austere intimacy spiced up with occasional echoes of circus side show callers that seem to recall aspirational surges out of a concealed depth of former delinquent activities. A deceptively intense, casual in feel, yet meticulous in its musical detail and lyrical transmigrative eclectic beauty. A true astonishingly beautiful and ear-filling piece of consummate art that is so hard to come to terms with. Housed in eye-popping hard cover mini-LP styled gatefold sleeve art, complete with reproduction of the original inserts."
Sky Station Tenjo Sajiki :
Throw Away The Books, Let's Go Out on the Street (JAP,1970)****'
"Typical of the company's early, crazed style is the recently reissued Throw Away The Books, originally released on their own label in 1970. Confusingly, there is a film soundtrack of the same title, but this is the extremely rare original theatrical version and contains entirely different material. Subtitled 'A High-Teen Symphony,' the performance centers around untrained adolescents reading out their own tortured, angry (and in one case, stuttering) texts and poems. Their stories of family disintegration and mother-hate, dreams and hopes for the future, and love songs to teen murderer Norio Nagayama and Mick Jagger are set to an attractively rough and ready pounding psych-rock soundtrack largely composed by organist Kuni Kawachi. Kawachi had been a member of pioneering Prog group Happenings Four and his brooding organ riffs feature throughout. As well as heavy rockers like the great opening 'Lets Go Ornette', with its ripping fuzz lead, Orff-style choral chants and motorbike effects, Kawachi was also capable of delicate, folkish pieces ideally suited for some of the company's outstanding female vocalists, several of whom developed successful singing careers outside of Tenjo Sajiki. Also of note is a track composed by a young design school dropout, Shinjuku street hippy and winner of a nationwide longhair competition, by the unlikely name of JA Caesar (Tenjo Sajiki also had its own Sinatra and Salvador Dali). Set to a simple handclap rhythm, Caesar's tale of the panhandling life possessed a subtle melodic strength and depth that hinted at the minor keys of traditional folk song. Caesar soon came into his own, composing all the music for Terayama's performances and films for the next decade, and finally inheriting the remnants of the troupe after Terayama's death in 1983." -- Alan Cummings, The Wire.
Comparable to the brilliant fave of mine, ‘Den'en Ni Shisu’ (1974), this album dates from four years earlier, and is like a movie picture, as music, on its own. Starting and ending in an operatic and theatrical way, with fuzz guitars and psychedelic organ, this sounds like a collection of stories told and sung by different voices, with backing choruses of another variety of voices, like a crowd where each individual keeps its distinctive voice, even when singing together. This gives a very unique and powerful expression, which has communal as well as individual strength. There are a few folk songs, with delicate guitar, poetic and natural, bar songs with a smooth bar rock band, or outbursts of emotions, with fuzz guitars, drums and organ and backing choir. Each voice has its story, sad and as if having only one time to tell about the deepest cries from the soul, and each character sounds as if they have a real life to tell, whether in nature, on the street, in a bar, or in communal anger and panic. Highly recommended! Amongst the best operatic theatre rock album.
"This is a limited reissue of the ultra rare privately released Tenjo Sajiki record Baramon. This identical reissue dates from 2003 and was released in a tiny edition of 500 copies, which sold out in a matter of weeks. But about the music: 'Some of the most exciting and evocative music of the early '70s in Japan was born out of the avant-garde theatre groups that had played such a central role in the '60s ferment. One of the most important was the Tenjo Sajiki Company formed by poet, film maker, boxing fan and all-around agent provocateur Terayama Shuji. Renowned for Living-Theatre inspired audience participation happenings and extreme street theatre designed to shock the bourgeois; by 1970 the group had already become a haven for runaway teens, and a focus for police investigation. Terayama was canny enough to realize that co-opting their music was an ideal way to hijack adolescent energies and he consistently used heavy amplified rock to jump-start his chaotic, socially critical acid operas. By 1972, Baramon saw J.A. Seazer and Kuni Kawauchi (of the Happenings Four and Kirikyogen) splitting the compositional scores on a bizarre musical manifesto for sexual liberation. So far so Hair, but rather than a tribute to free love, Terayama instead composed an eloquent plea for the liberation of the sexual underclass suffering discrimination, in the form of a 'gay revolution.' It wasn't Terayama's first engagement with the Tokyo queer scene -- one of the earliest plays he wrote for the Tenjo Sajiki was a vehicle for transvestite actress and chanson singer Akihiro Miwa, who was rumored to have had a dalliance with Yukio Mishima. Baramon's opening is a blast -- a densely narrated and impassioned call to arms set to a Nazi military march that links sexual second class citizenship to imperialist social control and warmongering. Featuring the actual voices of numerous smutty, cross-dressing scene queens, the record's content was deemed so subversive that it was only sold under the counter of Tokyo gay bars. Like a biker backstage at the Cage Aux Folles, fuzzed out guitar riffs and heavy swelling organ-based psych rock tracks rub shoulders with the lachrymose ballads and tawdry, mascara smudging chanson still favored in certain Shinjuku nighteries.'" - The Wire, Alan Cummings.
This album for me was a disappointment. Its publication was forbidden at the time of its release, and even when I don’t understand it’s lyrics I can understand why. It starts with a Hitler speech in the background (probable he was telling us that we should get rid of Jews and homosexuals, but I could not really understand it well, during a simultaneous Japanese proclamation). This is with clearly homosexual/ trans-sexual-related spoken word all over the place. At some point traditional Japanese music takes the shape of a kitsch brass band. All of this is clearly deliberately shocking while making publicity for a world of fake things associated with transsexuality. Like I have experienced before in music, when such people do make a publicity stunt this is often over the top, making me think that homosexuality at certain stages might be related with a disease of the mind, more than it is just related to a different hormone balance that changes a person’s personal taste and sexual preferences. This is nót my generalised conclusion about homosexuals, but a presentation like this makes its acceptance maybe even worse. The few musical ideas that come across can’t compensate this enough for me.
I saw a few fragments of movies of the director, and I realise he has tendencies to look for teasing confusing moments on the edge of shocking and acceptance, with some deeper intelligence behind it but also a certain randomness?? It is sure that he more often mobilized street people with little future to do something more creative with a certain communal energy.
Many parts with contributions of spoken word fragments (mixed sometimes with restrained singing) in this release, but this contributes to the atmosphere and keeps the strong musical understanding and expressiveness of this album, which sounds like an, almost literally, to follow a movie turned into a musical concept (separated from the original movie, it has a life on its own). First released only privately, I think it has all the uniqueness and trademark of the makers (the film maker as well as the composer and vocalists) that makes it worth checking out, to share this experience. Starting and ending with a very beautiful (children based) choir arrangement leading a for the movie important musical theme, most of the album is like the story and vision of two people, first as a male solo voice, then meeting and with interaction (with laughs and all) with the sea environment, then as a female voice led story (spoken word and song related), with its own melancholy, and then again with each person's vision. Elsewhere they sing beautifully and reflect love together with a bit of acoustic guitar. The acoustic guitar and mouth harmonica are accompanying more than once. In between you can hear a small classical music fragment (composer??), there's also a bit of harpischord accompaniment (with or without orchestrations) and a few completely other musical styled songs, like a foxtrot and a 60s post-rock'n roller. The second 60s rocker has use of sax, organ and harmony vocals. And there's also a slower smooth melancholic arrangement with flute, vibraphone, double bass and drums and some orchestrations. One of the oddest fragments in between a part where the filmic collage dominates over the song expressions is a very odd vision of a telephone conversation with surreal crazy reactions not really like laughs. I gave it a few listens and list it amongst the classics of Japanese music. Vocals were by Carmen Maki of Blues Creation and of Kuniko Ishii. Remastered mini-LP sized reproduction.
I need to mention this re-release from one of my favourite Japanese projects. This is comparable to the album of Tajoyo Sajiki’s “Shintokumaru”, which is the same group led by JA Caesar. Also this is another live concert on stage, which can be considered a kind of rock opera, like a modern progressive alternative to the old Japanese opera if you wish. Included are a lot of actors singing, and a rock band. The score must have been written somewhat a day or a night before it was needed, so it also has a consistent musical theme which is spread over a couple of sessions. It is much more like an energy which builds up again and again to Wagnerian proportions with a lot of emotionality as if some people’s lives were at stake not to have expressed this.
The first track starts with a long groovy rock repetition (drums, organ, bass) with operatic singing like a kind of YaHoWha or hippie singing, with half singing but rather aggressive responses or shouting like a storytelling on stage with a few laughs. It creates in fact immediately a kind of unique theatrical atmosphere. This tracks ends with experimenting windy electric guitar distortions filling up spaces on stage echoing deeply into the background. This leads to the second track with a bit of sitar and complaining vocals and a humming choir. These humming voices become like a religious humming. The actor starts to interact and laugh madly. Gongs, deep drum and flute and later organ accompany further emotionally expressed almost filmic conversations in Japanese. Not leading too much in details, I will then say that most of the score then alternates between a couple of tensions. There are tracks with group singing, building up with emotion and then with the rock band with wild electric guitar. Other parts are calmer led by male or sometimes female vocalists, getting into a kind of discussion with responses full of emotionality. And also Kan Mikami sings twice a song with acoustic guitar, an emotional bluesy voice, also responded by the group with shouts and handclaps. Accents of slow progression are expressed with gongs, electric bass and deep drums mostly, the organ builds up the repeated themes to bind/wind the themes and emotions together. Women only sing some group chorus parts first. Shouts and almost aggressive emotions are all part of the play. A very unique experience. I wonder how the movie by the surreal, enfant terrible avant-garde filmmaker fits with this.
1000 numbered copies only. My copy is nr.838.
I am not sure what the relationship is with Kokkyo Jyunreika (1972?), an album from 1972 which I have as well but which I never reviewed as it didn’t surprise me that much compared to all the others. But I will tell you what this is. It is a 2 hours and 20 minute rock opera. The musical themes are kept simple, to allow improvisation, an increased input of power and emotionality. The basic section is bass, drums, electric guitar and organ and either a female or male lead vocalist. Whenever the female vocalist adds power it is through emotionality and through an operatic strength to which the band responds with rock power and somewhat in pushing up the speed and loudness. There are parts left for the organ to moodily improvise or the electric guitar to burst out. At one time it receives a hard rock aggression. Flute and piano parts are there as well. A background choir adds theatrical effect in singing. A Japanese folk tune is used in the themes as well. And somewhere, a children choir replaced the choir. Two parts show English lyrics, like the summing up of countries. Later on a voice shouts “I have no country. But that’s all of a clue in English we get. One must take the time for the album, to be dragged into all its emotion and power. Very good !
Also this album is a convincing rock opera with quiet and heavier emotions, swelling with themes. It starts, after an elephant’s blow, with timpani, brass and female choir a bt like “Atom Heart Mother”. The conversations of voices start from introductory spoken words to provocative and teasing conversations, aggressive and emotional, while returning themes on drum/electric guitars or organ with heavy rock or in moody sessions alternate such theatrical sense. On one moment we hear the loud snoring of a person, with arpeggio’s of piano, emotional screams, turning to another theatrical heavy rock theme. Further on there’s a more meditative part too on harp and flute with spoken word, later on a piano theme with acoustic guitar. One of the theatre-rockier parts has shouts of voices included. Another convincing musical concept and band with a unique expressive, operatic sound.
This album for a big part still uses the formula of simple repeated musical themes with nice combinations of instruments, going from nicely rocking to heavier moments, the use of some emotionality in the singing and some theatrical rocking aggression. There are parts with circus-like walzes with trombone and gypsy violin. Different than before is that I keep getting the impression some bigger part of the album is studio works on keyboards, while the band performance is added later. It misses a bit the challenge and the surprise. Some themes are beautiful but still I start to get the impression lot’s of it I have heard somewhere before. The big concept falls a bit apart further on and becomes even a bit chaotic near the end. Still worth hearing but not amongst the most essential works of J.A.Seazer.
