灰野/solo night live/高円寺showboat

This is a twice a year post-midnight live, one near new year, the second in May as a birthday celebration.

- Let me say first we did not see the complete live, there was a break at 5.30am which we took to be the end, and Mio needed to work that day, so we left, but now I have found that there was another 2 and half hour set, until 8.30am, and it pains me to think on what was missed. But then I recall that I had said to myself, I will watch this live, as a little self-interred tribute to a european blogging chap called Dirk, who died of cancer at the age of 19 in July. So the live we saw, early morning of 31st, curtailed, is appropriate to that life being curtailed, also. So should I feel somewhat better. Life anyway is a ghoulish pantomine with no assistance but what we uselessly dream of (tricks of the light). Let me read signs where there are none. Next time I will read them more promptly to prevent any resulting 苦しさ　.

I cannot imagine another art-form being as impoverished when related to the work of just one practioner of it. Anthony Braxton in an interview somewhere on the internet mentions post-ayler music, and this is how to consider 21st century haino keiji 灰野敬二. Post-Aylers advance and survive rather than become fodder for romanticism. So the interest is in the continual process of "what is new", also a survival, beyond a common borderline (early deaths, an easy-to-imagine list, place antonin artaud here) so it is a true post-boundary music, and anything happens.

Instruments used included shamisen, tone generators, air theremins, flute, hurdy-gurdy, drum machine. I say included. First was an acoustic guitar performance, of what turned out to be "born to be wild", sung in english. The lyrics that I could understand: "explode into space" , "I never want to die", and "I was born to be wild". Naturally if it was not for those lyrics it could not have been identified. I was struck by how the message 0f the song become far removed from its "cool 60s rebel" reading, and became a simple primal statement: "born / to be wild", not an anarchist statement against the moulds of civilisation, rather a plain declaration of man as thing of the world, we can call it: animal.

Tone generators switched on. There was a feeling like being at sea. This electronic side acted as bookend for the half of the live we saw. A very rich noise cascade that clearly rose into ecstatic moments, to break down and rise again. In between: drum loops for vocals and flute play, a very rugged shamisen session (which showed how things can accumulate in order to be powerful i.e. it can take time), bass loops, the hurdy gurdy.

Anyways, anyway, if only there is a next time, and I can ascertain when it properly ends.

- photos may appear here, I can't bear to look right now
- images provided by the more and more wonderful Joan Mitchell