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Rating: Toda Fusao and Yamazaki Maso are also (among other things) respectively, one the owner of the most amazing record store in the world, Freak Scene, Osaka, and the other the manager at a record label whose mere name sends shivers down your spine (I won’t even write what Alchemy, with the placid Maso(ch) as head of sales, specializes in, and pity on those who haven’t even bought a sticker from these guys).
Given the chance to enjoy some rest, they would certainly choose a tropical oasis, where they could sip prestigious long drinks in sultry lounge bars with a promiscuous appearance, or perhaps just enjoy the infinite glass sea at sunset, listen to the waves crashing and then lose the vanishing point.
The night would open like an oyster, revealing its lunar pearl amidst sizzling funky parties, dusty exotica sets, train rides with old James Bond Themes, and high sexual propulsion beat songs.
Perhaps. But in Japan, one never laughs.
Therefore, the harsh carpenter, though disguised as a sixties orchestrator, hides away for the holidays on an Easy listening record and suddenly delves with moog drill excavations, pure desolation landscapes for cinematic sci-fi keyboards, Drum und Drang Harmonia AAG mush, pre-sputnik Russian electronics, and various buzzing distortions.
If we could combine opposites in a mental category, then perhaps we’d be able to understand if the dentist’s drill fits on funky-Cibo Matto from “Mondo Nude Mode” or maybe explain how the apparent initial tammuriata in “Groovy Spacy '70” could then degenerate into a setting that first invites Pharoah Sanders for a couple of blows and then pushes him off the stage with plunder vibrations, ultra-low frequencies, synth explosions, and Stockhausen’s helicopter fries.
The combo between Maso's isolationism, here just a bit more refined than the usual bastard noise, and the persistently horrid faux-rhythms (“Pulse on Pulse”) angers and excites, unless one is simply exhaustedly cheering on “Insect Voice” and “New Dawn for Crystal Planet”, little more than a minute where the mere resonance of one of the world’s most hardcore musicians is a non-spatial echo that leaves knees trembling.
Conclusions, two:
The first is that it would be wise NOT to begin listening to Masonna with this, thus making the mistake of thinking that it's somehow possible. Masonna is not possible unless you know what you’re getting into.
The other is that the idea of entrusting the keyboards of Arthur Lyman's exotic and colonial orchestra to Masonna’s meteoric distortions (“Hypnosis”) is a madness so reckless that it can be perfectly logical and “almost” coherent, which must be rewarded and revered regardless, even if the result is a noise cannon shooting confetti balls for the parties of the future.
Between the "Satanic Mass" by La Vey of Edoardo Vinello in trip jungle-ecstasy, Japan is the place, long live freedom!
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