live/SuperDeluxe/SANHEDOLIN

- - - future addendum / i may as well put this down once again,. the date of event was august 21st for the compulsive record keepers out and about.
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On tuesday we managed to get out the bloody door and through the silly heat to make it to a concert in groove-spot Super-Deluxe, where there are things like the pecha kucha nights, in the gaijin and swish-nippon packed region of roppongi. We got off at the wrong station, or the wrong exit, it was probably my fault, but we emerged into an impressive blue-lit expanse of high-rise and chrome and rows of escalators in the outdoors night and after five minutes found an actual street where we began our navigation.

Super Deluxe is a basement space, bare concrete walls &tc, the drink prices finally remind me I am in Tokyo. Some techno type people were performing when we got there, there was a guitarist too and it was an inept over long thing with no real direction and certainly no climatic head rush moment. About three people were vaguely dancing but they turned out to be friends with "the band"
- mio opinion: "They were bit boring, floating lost sounds without any thought behind."

Various groovy people pass by. The band oninko are next, we had seen them before in some tiny place with humiliating toilet facilities, they are three girls and do a sort of naive meandering punk music that is very charming, actually


Sanhedolin 、サンへドリン　- which appears to refer to the Sanhedrin, 'an assembly of 23 judges Biblically required in every city' quoth wikipedia(apparently they were the ones who wanted to execute mr jesus) - is a drum bass guitar trio. It is a recent group, and seems to have been formed after fushitsusha became a duo before quietly vanishing. Its purpose in the haino pantheon appears to be a confrontational assault on the typical features of rock music. Compared to fushitsusha, who always seemed conscious of their performance as a ceremony, Sanhedolin are anti-ceremony - the one hour only performance is telling of this, but also the way the bass and drums operate, at first setting up rhythms with the expectation that haino will follow along, but instead he ignores or deconstructs them within seconds. Songs still appear, as the bass and drums attempt something supportive. They become like a mirror for a while. They don't know what's to come . . .



Mio reports that oninko sing about things like lost socks that were really good socks, and now they are lost

The sanhedolin concert started like a sort of well meaning thing, the guitar was doing delayed fuzzy euphoric tones that extended into an upbeat rhythm from bass and drums, everyone seemed happy.

There is a certain petulance in the performance, lots of adjusting of things mid-song, much like Mark E Smith, but keiji haino didn't start playing anyone else's instruments. (saw the fall live one time when mr smith stumbled over to the keyboards and started doodling, while his wife the keyboard player patiently stood to the side. He also likes to fiddle with all the amps)

It ended in the guitar being discarded and a shard of vocals being looped and keiji haino on his knees beside the effect pedals like a little boy building up into the longest prolonged scream I have witnessed in live music. The bass and drums had stopped and just looked a bit worried. After a while of extreme vocal noise loops with live interjections, the gig was signalled as over by a nod of haino head.

Mio reports that the last decipherable sung lyrics were かたはついていない "nothing has been solved yet"