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Inner journeys

A triptastic double bill for the post-psychedelic crowd
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By Darrell Jónsson
For The Prague Post
March 5th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Japan's Up-Tight offers an Eastern synthesis of Western rock music styles.
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Up-Tight

Primordial Undermind
When: Saturday, March 8, at 8
Where: Chateau Rouge (Jakubská 2, Prague 1-Old Town)
Tickets: 200 Kč, available at the door

As Observer Music Monthly critic Simon Reynolds recently observed, “There’s realms and realms of triptastic Japanese music that deserve the wider world’s ear.” A good place to start is this weekend’s show at Chateau Rouge featuring the Japanese band Up-Tight. With the Vienna-based electric nomads known as Primordial Undermind providing support, the evening promises plenty of rock ’n’ roll moments often referred to as “psyche.”
With roots in misty ’60s psychedelia, psyche may seem an odd favorite for the post-baby boom crowd known as Generation X. Even more baffling is that the Japanese have taken to the form with prolific fervor. Yet, as Primordial Undermind’s Eric Arn, an experienced traveler of the U.S. and European neo-psyche scenes, observes, “It is really the Japanese who are able to take all of these influences, digest and combine them, and spit them back out as something vibrant and immediate. They’ve been doing it since the beginning, too — look at [the ’60s and ’70s Japanese bands] Flower Traveling Band, Les Rallizes Denudes and Fushitsusha.”
As for Up-Tight’s spot in Japan’s ongoing sonic swirl, Arn says, “Up-Tight stands up tall right in line with Fushitsusha, High Rise, Acid Mothers Temple, Overhang Party, Boris, Marble Sheep and the other current masters.”
For this road show, there is a refreshing lack of musical peppermint candy. As Arn matter-of-factly states, “I don’t care about pop songs with a lot of flange and reverb, and lyrics about marshmallow underwear. I really don’t care for the Grateful Dead or the whole hippie jam vibe, either. To me, psychedelia means anything that evokes the complete overwhelming state of mind obtained with psychedelic substances or meditation, chanting and fasting.”
How each of these groups reaches for emotive peaks while avoiding an overdose of patchouli differs considerably. While Up-Tight intersects with the darker industrial grunge of psyche, Primordial Undermind prowls the genre’s expressive jazz-folk threads. Both approaches share those distinctly looser, yet often more satisfying, structures that separate psyche from its post-’60s siblings ambient, grunge, metal and punk. One reason for this, in Arn’s opinion, is that “Psyche employs the best parts of all these genres, but operates with less limits and conventions. So there are more possibilities.”
Since the band’s early ’90s beginnings in Los Angeles, Primordial Undermind has recorded five CDs and moved through San Francisco, Austin and Boston. Though the group is now based in Vienna, each of those cities has left its musical mark. “The ghosts that live in each place make an impression,” Arn says. “In L.A., it was finding super-cheap Love, Seeds, and also SST records; in Boston, Twisted Village and Mission of Burma; in San Francisco, all the obvious ballroom stuff, plus the Thinking Fellers and Caroliner Rainbow; in Texas, the Elevators, Butthole Surfers and Charalambides; in Vienna, the amazingly vibrant avant-garde and free jazz scenes.”
There’s no shortage of free jazz on Primordial Undermind’s 2006 release Loss of Affect (on Portland, Oregon’s Strange Attractors label). The CD starts slow, with an impressionistic mix of woodwinds and percussion. The rest of the nine tracks meld modal acoustic guitar and other acoustic surprises with electric hard-rocking elements. Working with a similar knack for dynamics, Up-Tight’s latest, a 2005 live recording titled Lucrezia (on Osaka’s Alchemy Records), decorates crescendos of distorted meltdowns with moments of ponderous oceanic relief.
Together, Up-Tight and Primordial Underground should make for one of this month’s more colorful rock ’n’ roll gatherings. Despite their different backgrounds, the bands share a singular quality that, as Arn notes, “for certain folks, produces states of mind that are highly attractive and addictive.” And, wherever the fans hail from, Arn adds, “They make up the tribe.”

Darrell Jónsson can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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