Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O.
Wake to a New Dawn of Another Astro Era

Those crazy extreme trip music creators of Acid Mothers Temple & Melting Paraiso U.F.O. have returned with a new record, recorded between the end of 2015 and the beginning of the new year and released last May 25th via Important Records.

To be precise, to define Acid Mothers Temple exactly as a 'band' would be a stretch. Perhaps the idea of a collective fits them better, given how it was conceived by its leader and frontman, guitarist and musician Kawabata Makoto (active on the Japanese music scene since the late seventies with Ankoku Kakumei Kyodotai aka Dark Revolutionary Collective). Inspired by progressive music and kraut-rock, he has over time defined a completely crazy sound that goes beyond any possible classification, surpassing the song form, where every piece configures as a long session of evocative and meditatively acid music, in ultra-psychedelic jams.

The collective organized by Kawabata escapes any definition. The Acid Mothers Temple are themselves more of a manifesto than a true band. Variable in sound as in the composition of musicians, they are hyperproductive; they must have released dozens of albums from 1995 to the present, and Kawabata promotes and is involved in a myriad of parallel projects. Consequently, the overall quality of their records is not always impeccable, and therefore the best dimension to enjoy their music becomes the live one, a moment in which you can be fully involved in this meditative and droning dimension and become part of a unique cosmic entity with all the other people present. Something that, due to this collective character, inevitably lacks when listening to the record within the confines of your own four walls.

'Wake To A New Dawn of Another Astro Era' has been defined by Kawabata as an important moment in the collective's history. It represents an inevitable renewal given the loss of the historic rhythm section due to Shimura Joji's departure in the fall of 2014 and after 17 years, that of bassist Tsuyama Atsushi at the end of 2015. In their place are two new recruits, Satoshima Nani and S/T, two young Japanese, a new generation that according to Kawabata’s words should bring new vitality to the entire project.

The album is practically the first of this second chapter of the band's history. Divided into three long tracks, which typically configure as real jamming sessions. The first, 'Force in the Third System', opens with a kind of big-bang of fanfares to unfold into a sort of slow and hallucinated chant, something with an obsessive character, before wrapping up with a 10-15 minute crescendo. 'Meridian Dimension / Lost Milk' is split into two parts. The first is substantially acid and noise, the second more meditative with a prolonged and insistent use of reverb until a total explosion of your head and the beginning of the third track, the thirty-three minutes of 'Nebulous Hyper Meditation', a triumphant, infinite, crazy acid ride between progressive and usual references to kraut music.

Kawabata is probably in his own way a musical genius or at least certainly a great musician. If he hasn't invented anything, he certainly has nonetheless influenced to this point a bunch of new bands and artists, and his music will continue to do so for years and years to come. This is evident. A witness to the Japanese musical tradition that so fascinated Julian Cope, he has renewed his country's musical tradition and managed to take it beyond Japan's borders and likewise open its borders to psychedelia in general. But is this enough to consider each of his records a masterpiece? I don't know. I don't think so. It probably doesn't make much sense to attribute a score or a particular value to each of this band's albums. They are just individual episodes. Evaluate them in this way, perhaps trying to listen to them by isolating yourself from everything that surrounds you and then seeing how it turns out.