from Ongaku Otaku No. 4

High Rise

“High Rise Boxed”

10-CD Box Set, La Musica Records, LMB 001-010

 

The black lace wrapping the boxes of CDS from La Musica Records, like a drag queen’s fishnets, contains, conceals and tantalizingly reveals.  The music’s brutality in combination with this sultry, feminine quality suggests a succubus or maybe a siren’s call, though from Greek mythology the appropriate metaphor is definitely Pandora’s box, since these otherwise innocent cardboard containers, once opened, wreak unspeakable havoc and are almost impossible to close again.

 

La Musica’s product line epitomizes the low-budget, low-production-quality, low-fi aesthetic, and these box sets are the epitome of La Musica’s offerings.  The boxes themselves are plain, white cardboard with black-and-white labels pasted on.  The gold-colored recordable CDS are all unremarkable and identical, like La Musica’s cassettes.  Indeed, the collector is faced with an insoluble dilemma: to deface these works with labels or to risk losing track which is which.  Perhaps it’s best simply to take out only one at a time.  I wake up in a cold sweat at night after dreaming that I put five of them in my CD changer.  They are stored in plain jewel cases, labeled only by white, rectangular stick-on labels with the titles typed on.

 

Each set is accompanied by what the domestic Japanese La Musica catalog calls “shiryo” or “materials,” ten or eleven photocopied sheets on A4-sized white paper bearing track titles, credits, photos, illustrations, etc.  They are folded perfectly in quarters to fit snugly between the boxes and their lace covers, like thousand-yen notes tucked between garter and thigh.  Without the aid of a CD player, these fetish objects are almost worth the price already.  But insert one CD (at a time, remember?) in your stereo, and the psychedelic night ride begins.

 

High Rise was originally known as Psychedelic Speed Freaks, from the initials of which the Tokyo record label eventually took its name, and some of the band’s material has been released under the original name.  The Tokyo heavy psych trio comprises La Musica head Asahito Nanjo on bass and vocals, Munehiro Narita on guitar, and usually “Dr.” Ujiie Euro on drums.  In Euro’s absence, the drum position has in eerie Spinal-Tap fashion been filled variously by Ikuro Takahashi, Pill (Ogreish Organism), Koji Shimura (White Heaven, Mainliner) and Shoji Hano. 

 

To express the essence of High Rise in words is difficult and probably impossible in the space of a sentence or two, but the band’s current name is taken from the long out-of-print J.G. Ballard novel, so think of the character of Vaughan from Ballard’s Crash, but on a motorcycle instead of in a car: not necessarily sinister, but certainly dangerous, thoroughly unwholesome and impossibly intriguing, with a deep-seated death wish, hurtling down the highway at night at inconceivable speeds—remarkably sober—but without lights or a helmet (Warning: do not play this music while driving).

 

The greatest value of the “High Rise Boxed” set is its temporal breadth.  The recordings range from 1984 to 1996, and the number of CDS and tracks has allowed Nanjo plenty of time to dawdle along the way.  La Musica’s previous “Encyclopedia of High Rise” five-cassette document provided a sample of their development, but its relative brevity prohibited extensive exploration of each time period.  The current opus’ expanse permits the listener to tarry in individual years over the last decade and a half and smell the sakura blossoms on the sonic cherry trees.

 

High Rise improvises around fixed “concepts,” according to Nanjo in a 1996 Opprobrium interview.  These concepts, such as the manic “Pop Sicle,” which for simplicity’s sake I must call compositions or songs, recur throughout this box set.  The repetition has a blurring effect, but it also highlights divergences and illustrates the development of individual songs.  As a case in point, on the “Tour 91” CD the introspective “Euchrist” track is essentially the same composition that appears as “Orange Desire” on the “Psychedelic Speed Freaks 84-87 Live” CD in this collection and as “Sanctuary” on “Dispersion” (PSF 1992, re-released on Squealer and La Musica).  And though it also appears as “Eucharist” on the “Trip 92 Live” CD in “High Rise Boxed,” it is not the harder “Eucharist” that appears on “Dispersion” and elsewhere, including the “High Rise 86-88 Live” CD in this box set.  In the “Tour 91” version, Narita’s guitar solos—at least two in the same track, lucky listener—positively break down and cry in abject loneliness as the bike’s motor revs for that final, fatal jump off the cliff.  The mortality is so palpable in this piece I want a stiff drink each time I hear it.  In fact, this entire CD is a standout for its harsh, buzzing edge, which may have resulted from something as trivial as a loose cable.

 

While the progression of High Rise’s core repertoir occupies the vast majority of these discs (and in fact some such development is also audible in the “Encyclopedia of High Rise” collection), the listener is also treated to some uncommon moments in the early years, such as “Christ Beckons” on the “High Rise 86-88 Live” CD.  This track’s uncharacteristically rapid chord progression echoes a punk past as well as suggesting an alternate future for the group.

 

The rare sidebars in this collection may illustrate the band’s probing progress, like Thomas Pynchon’s Father Fairing in V., having given up on humanity, navigating the New York sewers to minister to the rats.  High Rise’s overdriven, amps-to-the-ceiling hard rock sound, with like-minded Japanese bands such as Keiji Haino’s Fushitsusha, has led an exploration of psychedelia’s less familiar subterranean and nocturnal territories in search of souls to save.  In the dark it’s hard to see, but it’s so much easier to hear.

 

The sound quality is remarkably constant and good, especially considering the age of some of the recordings.  The exceptions are usually on the positive side.  Particularly the “Heavy Speed Sonic Live 93-94” CD, which differs only slightly from High Rise’s recent “Speed Free Sonic” disc on Paratactile (which appeared this summer, so La Musica’s claim that this box set does not overlap other releases was true when their catalog came out at the beginning of the year), is one of the best quality High Rise recordings available.  As evidence of their debt to Blue Cheer and Gaseneta, the overdistorted, respectively American and Japanese bands from the sixties and seventies, the sound levels on all the discs are characteristically stratospheric, the feedback overwhelming, and everything is mixed so high as to be not merely fuzzy but frankly shaggy.

 

Some of the best High Rise volumes do indeed appear elsewhere, particularly in some of the other La Musica box sets.  But perhaps in the end that is one of the most satisfying (indeed, comforting) aspects to this band’s work, if one of the most frustrating for the collector.  Thanks partly to Nanjo’s fastidious recording habits, High Rise and particularly La Musica are incredibly prolific, so no matter how hard you try to find it all, no matter what lengths you go to, no matter how much you buy, it seems, there will always be more High Rise.  For that matter, La Musica has a new fifteenth anniversary “High Rise/Psychedelic Speed Freaks Live” box set available already (“for manias”—count me in).

 

Most of the flood of High Rise, however, flows only by direct mail order from La Musica or sometimes from other distributors, for example Eclipse Records in Arizona.  Further, these box sets are all editions of 100.  So to finish on a down note, do not look for this box set at a record store near you.

 

—Jimmy Dee