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Rating: I have listened to hundreds of free jazz records, sometimes feeling moved, sometimes getting angry. Even the most hostile music can just be boring. But rarely have I felt fear, that sensation that sends a shiver from your legs up to your neck. This is what you experience during nearly two hours of this mysterious object, crashing from another dimension into our ears.
Kimio Mizutani emerges from the sewers of Tokyo after ten years of oblivion and solitude, showing the world all his scars, his paranoias, and his darkest nightmares. In this improbable trio, the only common thread is the stripping down, the brutal game, the exhibition of a profound human experience in contact with arcane demons buried in the mind.
Doyle's tenor sax burps and erupts, madly, shoulder-barging into Toyozumi's rhythm section, cold and martial, so much so that the two alone seem to carry the corpse of jazz on their shoulders.
But the black hole is elsewhere. Mizutani's guitar is on another planet. Forget free jazz; instead, take the sonic excursions toward nothingness of Rallizes Denudes, mix them with a life lived underground in complete solitude, and you have liquefaction, the invisible bridge under which the whistles of Kaoru Abe and the political threats of the Rallizes still echo. Explosions of feedback that seem to recall obscene industrial noises, chilling silences, screams from the darkness.
Then Doyle switches to the flute in the satanic "Love Heal," dotted with anguished echoes of shrieking guitar and traversed by a kind of electric tremor. At a certain point, Mizutani's voice, hoarse and funereal, resembling that of a medieval devil, sobs from the darkness, emitting laments from the torture chamber, transforming the piece into a slow and relentless journey through the fog, between moments of absolute stasis - which genuinely send shivers down your spine - and ecstatic screams. The audience in the hall applauds timidly, as if they are afraid of displeasing Mizutani. The sensation is of being overwhelmed, as if at any moment Mizutani could pull out a knife and slit the throat of someone present at random.
If Doyle is luciferian, unstable, and incendiary, Mizutani, however, is shabby, defeated, liquefied, in a perpetual state of anxious wakefulness. It seems like a sound without direction that at times becomes a whistle, a hiss, a screech, a scream, a drone, a lava eruption, metal. If it were a sax, I'd say Kaoru Abe after electroshock. It sounds like a man who hasn't slept in ten years, in a perpetual state of confusion. And yet it's rock, deadly monstrous and trembling like that of the Rallizes, though shabby and completely lost. The pieces are long or very long, held together only by Doyle's breath and Toyozumi's drums, which are nonetheless two wild animals, so don't think the thorns are only on the Japanese's head. At times it may even seem that Mizutani was invited to be the understudy, and even that he didn't have much desire to.
Then comes the blast. "I'd Live In Her World, Then Without Her In Mine" begins with a timid post-bop pretext that soon dissolves into a guitar-based genetic mutation between the godzilla sound of High Rise and the laments of Jandek around their electric period. A race to the absolute, a psychiatric snapshot directly from the mind of a veteran, one who, amidst accusations of terrorism, smear campaigns by critics, and years of solitude, seems to have made music solely through his nightmares and disasters. I even suggest that the original message may only be shriveled to the typology of instruments used and that everything has been skillfully orchestrated by someone who wanted to "exploit" - allow me the term - Mizutani's psychological fragility to expose all the worst ugliness. It almost seems as if this clattering trio uses jazz grammars as a mere pretext to let Mizutani rage in front of an audience of human guinea pigs, a sort of freak show where the sicker and uglier you are, the more it amuses and sells more tickets. A gun to the head of good taste, a real free disaster, conceived and played just before sinking back into oblivion and disappearing into Tokyo's underground.
For some, an expressionist masterpiece, for others, a vomit, and for others still, a new path towards different dimensions. For me, Mizutani will remain in legend, halfway between a Jesus Christ of the sewers and an asylum inmate, human and too human, too strange for this world. I know, however, how important these experiences are, because when we gaze into the abyss that is others, it is that abyss that gazes into us, revealing the truth.
Handle with caution.
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