remetheus

Here are five pieces of music.

1. "◯" (Vision Creation Newsun part 1), The Boredoms

The Boredoms started off making entire EPs of just screaming, but evolved into a mindblowing mix of psychadelia, surf rock, and Taiko drumming. And screaming. This is their masterpiece, a joyous explosion like the sound of a world being created (cf. "Victory over the Sun", 1913).

I couldn't find a good single-track rip on YouTube, so this is the whole album. "Oops." Press stop whereever.

2. "Asozan", OOIOO

OOIOO is the side band organized by Yoshimi P-We, the drummer from the Boredoms. (If you are a millennial hipster: Yes, this is the Yoshimi who allegedly battled the pink robots.) OOIOO usually offer a slightly more structured take on the Boredoms formula, mixing P-We's drumming with funk stylings. This particular track is a longtime frequent re-listen to me; it has a feeling like a dream. Something drifting close and away

3. "Super Are ", The Boredoms

This is from an album on which every song name begins with "Super".

If I were going to give someone exactly one Boredoms track to listen to it would probably be this one. I mentioned before the Boredoms combine a few different musical styles; this one basically splits them apart and showcases each of them one by one, taking time to savor each flavor, starting with Eno-ish 60s organs and ending with Taiko surf rock.

4. July 22, 2009 total solar eclipse, BOADRUM

In the 00s the Boredoms spent a while organizing increasingly complex performance art pieces involving very many drum kits, with the largest¹ being 88 drummers in a giant spiral in a Brooklyn park. In my favorite, they took a boat into the pacific ocean to perform this ecstatic noise ritual in the umbra of a solar eclipse. That's Boredoms frontman Yamataka EYE at the center, and Yoshimi P-We to the left; the dude next to P-We is Zach Hill of Hella and the Death Grips.

5. "kawasemi Ah", OOIOO

OOIOO released a new album in 2020 that was mostly alternate-version rerecordings of older songs, but one of the new tracks is this song called "kawasemi Ah" with a really good groove. My summary of this song is: kawasemi Ah

¹ I say here that 88 BOADRUM was the largest BOADRUM performance. Technically 111 BOADRUM, in Australia, was the largest, but I'm not counting it as such because not every participant had a full drumkit (most were just drumming on a cymbal).

There were six of these events, 77 through 111 BOADRUM, each a year, a month and a day apart on 7/7/07 through 11/11/11. In 77, 88 and 111 the number is the # of drummers; 9 and 10 appear to have been smaller indoor performances.