88 Boadrum
Japanese noise geniuses the Boredoms have always been the exact opposite of their name. Main mastermind Yamantaka Eye first did pure noise as a one-man band Hanatarash. I’ve heard that stands for “snot nosed,” as Eye often had allergy problems - which, plus medicine, would make him space out a lot. So I heard. Hanatarash is puuurrrre noise, in the realm of Merzbow and the Incapacitants, using pedals to blow out deafening feedback with strange underlying rhythms. Live he would let the sound max out as he smashed things. I’ve seen footage of him throwing big oil drums into the audience and smashing anything in site. Stories include him driving a back hoe into a club and knocking down a wall, and jumping around with a chainsaw until it hit his leg.
The Boredoms were the next step for Eye, a more traditional setup of a band but the team made unusual songs, with Eye not really singing in any language as much as the entire band making up their own musical and vocal sounds. They went from (less harsh) noise with song structures, eventually to more drifting ambience in longer songs, to various setups like tribal drum influences. Always completely fresh with each album, like you were being taught what sound could be.
So when the Boredoms organized 77 drummers to play on 7-7-07 last year - made perfect sense. Last week they upped it to 88 drummers, playing 88 minutes, on 8-8-08, with a group in Brooklyn and a group at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, which i went to.
Audibly, it was, of course, amazing. It sounds simple in a lot of ways, but you’ve just never heard that much drumming at one time. (Sorry USC, this even blew away your “Tusk” cover.) The waves of sound and beats were different depending on where you were in the crowd, and the echoes kept going. Beats seemed thought out, led by the Boredoms, and often you thought the drummers were directly in sync when different layers appeared coming from different areas of the circle.
Visually it was even better. The waves of drummers moving seemed more complex than you would have expected. Started slow, got going, then explosions of fury. The giant circle of drummers around the Boredoms on the center stage became a nice zoetrope of movement, sometimes in perfect unison, sometimes a wobbly set of dominos. It was blurry at times, and you were lulled into expecting what was next. But then all the sticks moving and the beats hitting you just stayed….pleasurable.
You Tube has many many cool videos, from the close up of a few drummers, also fascinating, to a wide shot of the circle. But its all small moments. Pro cameramen were running around, hopefully for a DVD release. No matter where you watched the performance from, you couldn’t have the same experience as others, side to side, front to back, always seeing half of the circle, and different parts of the Boredoms. All while Eye led as conductor, while hitting a homemade(?) eight-neck guitar with his stick. Noise is pretty structured after all.