Fushitsusha ( 不失者 ) - Live II (1991)

| Avant-Garde | Noise Rock | Experimental Rock |
| Psychedelic Rock |

Rock music has been forced upon me for nearly 40 years now. Over that time, a lot of favorite bands and albums have, of course, come and gone. All of that changed when I heard this set by Fushitsusha in the early ’90s. It’s easily the most interesting, challenging, non-commercial, creative, soulful, heavy and outward-bound music made on an electric guitar that I’ve ever heard, and I seriously doubt that anything will be able to top it anytime soon. It just makes all other guitar music sound silly. Like the previous volume, Live II also comes housed in an all-black, mini-LP-style gatefold jacket, except the inner sleeves this time are non-CD-scratching white cloth and the booklet is just super-deluxe: small, striking, abstract line drawings and Japanese lyrics on ultra-textured black paper. Very nice, indeed. Keiji Haino must’ve got ahold of a few dozen more effects pedals, an overdrive unit, and a couple of additional full stacks since the first Live set was recorded, as Live II is far more abstract, wide-sounding and black-hole-bound than it’s predecessor. Plus, like 99% of Haino’s music, it’s all recorded live with no overdubs.

Opening up disc one, Godzilla stomps your city into a dusty pancake with supremely heavy, dissonant and overblown riff-damage that’s completely drowned in unrecognizably dense fuzz / psych arcs, exploding with electric sound-splinters that just obliterate you. Some of Keiji Haino’s most harsh vocal attack weaving through the din isn’t much more inviting. This mood is continued on the next song, although with somewhat less of the almost comical heaviness. Track three is marked by occasional sour note tinning with lost vocal murmurs and the most other-solar-system-sun-staring lead blisters imaginable. Avoiding cliché at every turn, Keiji Haino’s heavily-effected, other-planetly, aluminum guitar abstractions shrinkwrap your head, cram it into an oil drum and coax your mind out with the most beguiling, smelted space-winds.

Another very spare, four-note bass waft opens the next song, accompanied by quiet guitar plucks and beautifully piercing vocals. Eventually, gentle guitar arches and strums rise into a melodic, sky-reaching apex to a slow fade out. On track five, another simple bass and drum wobble is interjected by overloaded guitar blow and other moments of floating vocal quietudes, ending with a maelstrom of noise funnels. The disc is closed out with a very strange web of shrill, organ-like clouds floated along with more lost-planet vocalizations. Six tracks, 73 minutes of way unearthly soundwaves.

Disc two continues with seven tracks and 74 minutes of the Fushitsusha onslaught. Opening with a very quiet, simple, melancholy bass line with drum ’n’ cymbal washes, Keiji Haino gently splashes the most ethereal guitar chimes, eventually coalescing into rising volume with soft vocal wet naps. After opening with a twisted feedback festival, track two comes to a sudden stop then veers into an abstract area of the most intense guitar flail of all time: severe, reverbed ice curtains rain down all around and cut into your head like frozen glass slivers from all other dimensions—just unbelievable. Next, a very unusual (for Fushitsusha), fast-paced bass and drum section rapidly supports plenty of garbled grate-guitar that could easily propel your next aerobics class. The following two songs feature Keiji Haino solo on guitar and voice—track four sporting plenty of sour guitar aches plus vocal chants and five heading in a much more placid vein of singing with chiming electric notes.

Following that is a very thick, muted, bass-heavy noise tornado with super sore-throat vocals completely blowing your house to bits just before rocking out near the end—barely prepping you for what comes next. The set is nonchalantly capped off by the most mammoth garage-psych track slopped with the highest arcing lines of splintered guitar mangle ever to disturb an air molecule. As the bass and drums rock simply on, 1:48 is where the exhilaration really begins: just the most full-on, forehead eye-projected wail-breakload that completely destroys and constructs merely the best rock song of all time. When the guitar maelstrom rejoins the rhythm section at 12:58, it drives the biggest electric orgasm ever straight home—just before a few way dissonant, dying dinosaur breaths shudder everything to a halt.

Catalog: PSFD-15/16 (P.S.F. Records)
Album Overview on Arcane Candy
On Last.fm
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