Vajra (Mikami Kan, Ishizuka Toshiaki, Haino Kenji)
While Kan Mikami’s early work is emotionally as well as rationally structured, as typical for the early 70s, I am a bit careful with later works. But I assumed his band Vajra must have given them some conceptual structure at least more than a voice thrown like a lion in the wilderness/desert. Only later I realized this involved the avant-guitarist Kaiji Heino which was another figure who solo, could be a bare, nightmarish, challenging and also a demanding artist to listen to...
The music has improvisation in sections and with different foundations. The first track, “The Sky Looks Green To Me” is textually & emotionally driven, a rather kind of song-improvisation, while the band plays a guitar-looped psychedelia, with additional wilder “fluting” electric guitars in the background, and rather free jazz-based but correctly stimulating drums. This sounds as if old Japanese opera or folk story singing is combined with a going-weird Richard Pinhas style, but a bit more avant-garde, with convincing emotional expressions leading the story and the tension, and with only briefly a second vocalist coming in, like a confirming second opinion.
The second track, translated as “Japanese Cola is Sweet!“ is much more avant-garde, with weird guitar contra-composing Fripp-ed flipped additions, and a bit of contra-drumming or regain rhythms, with the attention of an experienced jazz drummer, but a few times against the vocals, which are always great. It finds its space, and spontaneity against the avant-garde. I can only understand the word “coca-cola”. It is a bit on the edge of what I find focused enough because it is on the edge of becoming random, it also has something of Captain Beefheart’s guitarists going more weird here, and it keeps my attention of sympathy only just enough, because it seeks ideas.
Good to have after this a quieter core with “normal” guitar chords, or a more “normal” song next, ("Monkeys Don't Pray") even when Keiji Haino’s guitar adds weird harsh effects, this keeps itself environmental, so fitting, noisier background descriptions with its own emotional effect of distortion. Somehow it becomes like an inventive industrial skeletal construction, sometimes a bit under construction with industrial noise, around the emotional song of Kan Mikami.
Track 4 ("Mandala TOOT (H)”) are 3 voices singing a capella in a coldly echoing environment. Track 5, “Sound Deadening” has a core of moody guitar chords which invent a landscape in an experimental way. Kan Mikami’s voice sings over this like just another instrument, very much completing the abstract landscape, very clever. This is so organic and logical 11 minutes are over before one realizes.
The even calmer closing track "Playing Wounded--For Musashi” contains avant-piano with vocals, bit of drumming, and then contemporary acoustic guitar.
With all the unusual experimentation, it is in fact on the second track which demands at first a little bit more effort and attention. But in general I must admit the group is extremely gifted in creating new sounds with actually rather strong and convincing ideas. This was Vajra's fifth record
