White Heaven
Out

Immersed with oxygen tanks in those dark and briny depths, in the density of that dashi broth; among marine creatures with even alien profiles, among marinated mackerel and salmon sashimi. With each flick of a fin on the surface, an oval shadow could be seen, shaped like miso soup and shabu shabu, and in the sky a light, perhaps a spaceship, perhaps a giant green tea ice cream. Cherchez le coupable! exclaimed the waiter, while in the room the first and usual suspects were falling on those 17 empty bottles of saké, when suddenly a diner pointed with a finger at that vinyl that had been spinning for hours on the turntable; Out! he shouted vehemently, while everyone, frightened and timid, rushed into the street... Meanwhile the ungraceful singing of You Ishihara, at times limping like Tom Verlaine, at times like Sky Saxon, and that offbeat music box evoked a bit of a rougish a bit greedy clandestine atmospheres and blows stolen from a Takashi Miike screenplay. These young Japanese boys met by chance in Tokyo in the '90s with many melodies in their heads from the West Coast, from Planet Jefferson Airplanes & Pink Floyd, a psych play that by a strange twist of fate became something very distinctive in the Land of the Rising Sun, with the support of a meritorious son of NN on the lead guitar who managed, like the greats, to make that ground tremble, starting from the MC5 and Sonic Youth stations, a rough stone album that improved with each listen, with musical planets and emotional dimensions just hidden beneath the surface, sounds and thoughts that were eternal marks drawn on the walls of cerebral memory. You can be Christian Democrat, Trumpian, or Bidenian, but it's not enough to pick up the signals of this explosive combination. You need to have a Venusian registry with an ascendant in the Planet of the Rising Sun to be able to capture that sinuous distortion of pre-Daydream Nation experimental guitars of Sonic Youth; that alien wall of sound coming from a foreign dimension; it's not enough in our flea market to bargain and barter a copy of Effervescing Elephant and Terrapine, two ounces of Baby Lemonade with a leg of Apollo Creed. On the other side of the Rising Sun, with all that frenzy of satisfying needs, that self-indulgent American way of life has lost the will not only to know but above all to make it, History.

The dogma of this reading and the measure of the hermeneutic impotence of the listener of the magical Nipposound of Out are measured with sounds that are incomprehensible for those who do not possess the key, from the dampened ones on that Uni Vibe pedalboard, from baroque effects of vibrato and echo, beyond fuzz and wah.. There are many influences in the album but none are truly perceptible, there are moments of New York underground rock from the '60s and '70s; glimpses of free jazz, chansons from across the Alps, contemporary classical music.

The last track, Out accentuates that impotence previously mentioned, of the traveler who grasps only an integral and not significant part of those Signs. The guitar merges in a solo where the fantasy flights of the West Coast of John Cipollina are masterfully blended with late-period Hendrixian virtuosity, with suggestions preyed from a Kurosawa film; that cult of the everyday exalted by that infinite hovering of the bending into the void.

This...is a White paradise.