In consideration of the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s impact on certain styles of horror manga, I feel one field that’s under explored with Grand Guignol archival efforts is the history of drawn depictions of the group’s work. While I've found from my experience it’s impossible to figure out what the absolute “first” for any sort of publication related to the troupe could be, I do believe this counts as a candidate for one of its earlier artistic renditions. Complete Review Tokyo Grand Guignol + Suehiro Maruo: Mercuro by Yutaka Hosokura. Featured in an issue of June dated to May 1985, it doesn’t only precede Not Osada’s manga renditions but also the drawn illustrations that accompany the review for Lychee Hikari Club in June’s March 1986 issue. The coverage of the play itself is rudimentary, providing a rough synopsis of its most prolific set pieces while also praising its black comic gag-focused style alongside some compliments to the cast. The art is the definite focus here with its renditions of Mikami’s introduction and the play’s infamous Methods of Dance chestburster operation scene.
Much like the ZOAR Tokyo Grand Guignol interview, it solely acknowledges Mercuro in the context of Maruo’s manga when it lends just as much to certain incidents that Ameya described from his childhood. From everything I found, Ameya himself didn’t see public recognition until after Galatia’s performances. Many of these early write-ups were solely focused on aesthetics, especially with the June publications which commonly highlighted the physical appearances of the actors. While Ameya approached theater from a varied range of theories including audio remixing and deriving a unique anti-romantic catharsis of distorting human interaction to cold unnaturally mechanical forms (said catharsis seemingly coming from a certain dissonance he described feeling toward the advanced nature of humans in contrast with other animals, see his interviews in the second issue of Madness and the sixth issue of Eater), these aspects of his work were rarely covered then and only started to enter public discussion with M.M.M. Skin and his performance art.
An especially elusive (and fairly mysterious) production photograph of the Tokyo Grand Guignol. It was known to have only been printed in two sources, one was an advertisement for the troupe that appeared at the end of the 1985 mondo shock magazine Witches Sabbath and the other was in Shimada’s opening statement for the Silver Star Club special on noise music. Despite being taken on the set for Lychee, going off the broken window blinds in the corner that can be recognized in stage photographs of the 1985 Christmas premiere, it seems to more closely resemble a short ten minute scenario the group performed at the start of Auto-Mod’s final concert in 1985.
"A metallic tribal beat reverberated out from a darkened stage, said percussion being the rhythm to the song “Fuel to Fight” by the London industrial art collective Test Dept. To the tune of the beating, a shirtless demon with its hair slicked back (Kyusaku Shimada) slammed on a barrel like a drum. Towering in a tall white tutu, a drag queen ballerina (Kennosuke Yaguruma) whipped at the back of a lurching humanoid that resembled Frankenstein’s assistant (Norimizu Ameya). Eventually, a group of boys in school uniforms attacked a woman (Naomi Hagio) in a scene that seemed to form into a prototype of what would eventually become Lychee Hikari Club." - From the third part of "When the Flyers Came to Town", published by Roadsiders Magazine
Most of the known images from the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s Galatia Teito Monogatari. Despite its titular connection, the play has virtually no relation with the Teito Monogatari series. By the time of its conception, Ameya and Tagane had already conceived a unique play titled Galatia, and Ameya reworked the play into a loose adaption of the series after being offered a grant by a publisher of the Teito Monogatari series. On Ameya’s own admission, he only read a rough synopsis that mentioned the destruction of Tokyo as a central plot point.
A sort of black sheep in the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s body of work with its notable lack of coverage, Galatia is in many ways a prototype to Lychee that also doubles as a loose Maruoesque reimagining of the first Godzilla film in its themes and sound design. Set in the household of the Shirai family, it follows the efforts of a mad Nazi scientist named Helmut Shirai to create a machine that would alter the climate of Japan. He openly despises the humid weather that Japan is known for, spending his days inside a freezer to avoid the smoldering temperatures around him. His machine is nearly complete, but he needs a unique fuel source, one that isn’t gasoline or electricity. That’s when Yasunori Katō, a youthful imperial army general, visits the Shirai household to tell Helmut about Doctor Akihiko Hirata. Described as being an expertly skilled yet humble pioneer of the sciences, Katō believes that Hirata had already created the exact fuel source Helmut is seeking. Helmut and Katō conspire a plot to abduct Hirata through a tea party between the Shirai family and Hirata family, their agreement being underscored by a sinister piano stinger from Robert Wyatt’s soundtrack to The Animals Film.
Through the subsequent scenes, it’s slowly revealed that the fuel source is actually Galatia, a robotic doll Hirata created for his baby sister, Miharu Hirata. Miharu has down syndrome, and Akihiko created a unique formula that causes the doll to operate from her chromosomes. Akihiko is protective of his sister in a manner that can be read as both wholesome and potentially sinister in motives. He allows the Shirai family to brutally torture him in attempts to keep Miharu’s connection with Galatia a secret, eventually resulting in Akihiko’s death when Helmut puts a special device over Akihiko’s head that renders his biological essence to a bloody pulp. The play ultimately wraps on a chaotic bloodbath. Successfully taking Galatia away from Miharu, Katō and Helmut prepare to activate the weather machine before an unexpected reunion ensues between the Helmuts and the Hiratas. Miharu recognizes her doll in the weather altering device, and upon her throwing a tantrum, Galatia brutally slaughters nearly the entire cast. It’s implied that Galatia becomes an even greater machine upon activation, with the stage going black as the room is filled with the sounds of booming machinery, titanic hisses of steam and the collective wails of the protagonists. With the aftermath eventually revealed, Katō emerges as the lone survivor, welcoming the viewer to what he calls the "new imperial capital" as he activates the weather altering machine, bringing forth a new ice age.
While it never received the same written coverage as its peers, Galatia is the only Tokyo Grand Guignol play that can still be experienced via an archival audio recording that leaked sometime in the 2010s. It’s through this recording that the prominence of sound design as both an atmospheric and thematic device in the TGG’s works can be observed, no doubt a product of Norimizu Ameya’s history as a sound designer. While the script tells one story, the use of sound effects and music bring out a unique undercurrent that morphs what first appears to be a nonsensical black comedy into a postmodern kaiju story about post-war sentiments reverting back to imperial nationalism. It’s kaiju in the way of Maruo in that there’s no concrete monster in the story, but rather a monster hidden between the motives of the characters that are featured. Akihiko Hirata is directly modeled after the real life Akihiko Hirata’s role as Doctor Serizawa in the first Godzilla film. While partially baked in camp through its subsequent sequels, the original Gojira from 1954 was a serious take on life after the atomic bomb. References to Gojira are spread throughout the sound design in a manner that references both the camp of Showa period tokusatsu iconography and the history of imperial era bloodshed, from the sound of Godzilla’s footsteps underscoring the scene of Katō and Helmut plotting Akihiko’s kidnapping to the use of a distorted version of Godzilla’s roar when the two prepare their first torture session to interrogate Akihiko. Akihiko could arguably represent Japan after its disbandment from imperial ideology whilst Helmut and Katō both directly connect back to Japan’s imperial history, Katō being a Mishimaesque fascist and the Helmuts being introduced sitcom-styled to the tune of a Nazi anthem. Akihiko speaks of Galatia in a manner that calls back to Serizawa’s views of the Oxygen Destroyer, fearing the horrors that would come from such a device being given to the wrong hands. And the Oxygen Destroyer itself even makes a brief cameo in the play as a comedic prop. Considering the rise of neoliberalism Japan was seeing at the time of the play’s run, the idea of an attempt to separate from fascist history collapsing to make way for a second wave of authoritarianism is oddly foretelling.
A photo spread of backstage stills from the original 1984 premiere of the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s Mercuro as it was printed in the rare subculture magazine ZOAR. Out of all the materials I’d come across in my TGG research, ZOAR is easily the closest publication I found to a fanzine, with the contents being rendered in classic xerox print. The magazine was released around the same time as Mercuro’s original run and features an interview with Ameya and Maruo, one of the few occasions the two crossed paths in text form despite their collaborative history.
In the interview, Maruo does much of the talking while Ameya interjects with short comments, such as Ameya’s interest in science fiction around childlike characters when Maruo mentions his intentions to incorporate science fiction in his manga work. Maruo’s work would indeed see a distinct stylistic shift by 1985 with stories like Fake Electric Ant and Electric Ant (the latter of which was included in both Paranoia Star and the 1985 magazine Suehiro Maruo: Only You, which features a similar science fiction slant with its concluding section being a digest version of the script to the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s Galatia Teito Monogatari). It's to note that during this time, despite being a sort of former protégé of Juro Kara who was just gaining independence with the founding of the TGG, in publications Ameya seemed to more or less be an addition to Maruo's already established underground stardom. Mercuro is only given a passing mention at the start of the interview as an off branch Maruo was taking on. Between this and the heated defense Ameya would write for Maruo's work in the short essay "Maruo's Caligraphy Pen", Ameya was essentially depicted as a lackey of Maruo's until the Tokyo Grand Guignol gained its own distinction sometime after Galatia.
In relation to the Tokyo Grand Guignol as well, they briefly discuss how the casting of the plays reflects the aesthetics of Maruo’s manga before Maruo goes into a tangent about his open regret in choosing to act, citing both the TGG and his prior collaborative work with the Golden Theater. It’s a sentiment he seems to still hold to this day, expressing a clear embarrassment with his connection to the Golden Theater. He openly dismisses his own acting as being unintentionally comedic, describing himself as being “caged off” from the rest of the cast. The interview concludes on the group discussing Maruo’s preference for soda water over alcohol before Maruo implies that he refuses to allow himself a means of relief from his stress or negative emotions for the sake of his art. The interviewer asks him something to the effect of “are you self-deprecating?” before they conclude somewhat abruptly.
In a later 1985 interview in a joint publication of Peyotl Workshop’s Silver Star Club and Yaso, Maruo would elaborate further on his views of Ameya and the Tokyo Grand Guignol. In relation to Mercuro specifically, Maruo gave his shared sentiments with another actor from the troupe in how they both felt Ameya and Kikyo Tagane clashed in ideologies. While some audience members considered this clashing to be one of the integral traits of the troupe, Maruo saw it as a detriment. He liked Ameya’s rough sensibilities, praising the use of mercurochrome in the story and playback of Public Image LTD’s music in the opening. In regards to the script by Tagane however, he would refer to the subplot around Mikami’s search for his sister as being "worn out" in how it represented a sentimentalism that he disliked, wishing that the story focused more on the teacher’s mission to roboticize his students with mercurochrome. Ameya’s past affiliation with Juro Kara would go on to be discussed as well, Maruo praising Ameya again for his independence from Kara. He'd differentiate the two by stating how Kara would use the word “赤チン” (Akachin) to describe mercurochrome while Ameya instead uses “マーキュロ” (Mercuro).
Today I celebrate another cycle of spinning around the sun in the cold nonsensical washing machine that is the universe. I was technically born just before midnight, but we still celebrate the whole day anyway. It's my 27th cycle, I still have many more until I should be ready for the dryer.
A quick behind the scenes look of the Tokyo Grand Guignol work I was doing this past year.
These are all original publications that I either used as reference or digitized for my ongoing research. My goal is to eventually have as much of it digitized as I could personally manage. Much of the Tokyo Grand Guignol archival material out there has been kept in collector spaces, with this effort I've gone out of my way to hunt down as many materials as I could to make available to the public in my free time, need it be through scans, photos or transcriptions. In that way I hope to eventually compile a sort of digital museum/library for angura fans who are interested in Norimizu Ameya's early work, put alongside my own analyses of the plays from the perspective of a person interested in political and avant-garde art.
November 15th, 2024 marks the 40th anniversary of the inaugural performance of the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s Mercuro at the Art Theater Shinjuku. While it isn’t fully complete yet, now feels as good a time as ever to share here the current progress of my new translation of Mercuro, an updated “text adaption” as I put it that crosses the full script from June Novel with details that were given through photos, video footage and recollections from audience members. The reason for this is to account for the fact that Mercuro wasn’t a literary play, but an Artaudian experience Ameya conceived in efforts to override what he saw as being a wordy pretention in contemporary theater, his direction even being described before as a sot of "destruction" of Tagane’s writing. Judging Mercuro by just K. Tagane’s text would arguably be missing half the picture, so I’ve done my best to account what I imagine from the evidence that exists what Ameya’s half would've been like to maintain a decent balance.
The first act of the play is fully available in two parts for free on my Substack, the second act is still in progress and will be steadily serialized as I finish enough progress on it:
- MERCURO (Text Adaption) : ACT 1 : SCENE 1
- MERCURO (Text Adaption) : ACT 1 : SCENES 2 & 3
The process has been a difficult and laborious one in consideration of not just the scarcity of original materials, but the lack of publicly available media as well. Much of Ameya’s direction is not just in the actors, but the handling of visuals and sound design as well, calling back to his influences from Artaud’s more viscerally ritualistic view of theater as a practice. While a handful of songs are known to have been featured, there are still many gaps in between of not just how the songs were sequenced, but how Ameya would’ve edited them as well. A full video recording of Mercuro’s original run (not to be confused with the abridged 1985 Mercuroid TV performance) exists, but it is only in the hands of private collectors.
Despite the hurdles throughout my research, through a combination of artistic dedication with what could best be described as obsessive stubbornness against the odds I was able to track down all the materials I could. Special thanks goes to Yu Hirayama of @suikazuraofficial (known for their music compilations, the subculture magazine FEECO and the Steven Stapleton biography Nurse With Wound評伝) for personally providing a copy of the Mercuro volume of June magazine and the Roadsiders article The Time That The Flyers Came To Town. I recommend anyone with an interest in subculture to look into his publications.
After three years of nonstop work, I’m happy to finally release my newest music project, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Listen to it now on Bandcamp or YouTube:
BANDCAMP - YOUTUBE
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion was part of a set of albums I spontaneously began production on in early-2021. Amidst my ongoing noise experiments a set of specifically constructed concept albums came to mind, and I have since devoted most of my musical output to fine-tuning said albums to make sure they get as close to my intended visions as possible. Three Figures ultimately materialized as a 40-minute medley that varies between noisy post-punk and bizarre musique concrète explorations that were conceived in homage to an assortment of artists from the early 20th century. With the years of work and experimentation that went into the final outcome, Three Figures is currently my most elaborate music project to date.
Recording for the album was split between both private at home recording sessions and the numerous live concerts I performed between 2021 into 2023, if you were at any of those shows it’s likely that you saw certain elements of the album form in real time, as I used numerous stems from my live sets to further flesh out the album’s sound.
Bandcamp purchases come with a digital booklet that dives into a few of the album's Bataillian influences.
Bataille Is Dead (The Shelling of Reims): July 7th, 2024
"Bataille’s Granero was a somnambulist like Cesare, a figure that is held simultaneously between life and death. The real Manuel Granero died on the 7th of May, 1922 when his eyes were gouged out by the bull. But for Bataille, who was only able to get a distant view of Granero’s death, the young bullfighter became a mangled idol who manifested the excesses of being..."
This illustration alongside an assortment of other Bataille-inspired sketches are featured in the accompanying booklet for my upcoming industrial noise album, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. The album will be coming out this Saturday on the 10th on my Bandcamp and YouTube.
Today marks the five year anniversary since the original release of Kafka's Supermarket.
LINKS :
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rkIn6HgylM
- https://vimeo.com/345013851
LETTERBOXD : https://boxd.it/mB9W
MOON AGE 15 : DAMNATION (English Translation)
Moon Age 15: Damnation is a 1988 short comic by pseudonymous author Not Osada, who openly drew influence from the Tokyo Grand Guignol's work in such a way that can arguably give a loose insight to the TGG's mysteriously anomalous works. While only a slight window into what could've existed in Ameya's vision, each contemporary rendering of his world of gore-soaked medical equipment and rusted metal is valuable in what it represents. As mentioned in my prior Litchi essay, the fragments of the Tokyo Grand Guignol we have now are descendants of a cultural phantom, standing as shrouded windows to a strange intangible stage that's positioned somewhere between post-Maruo inferno, industrial subculture and decadent poetry.
While Osada’s manga featured notably grizzly and cruelly morbid scenarios, his stories were made explicitly for the shoujo market with a distinctly shoujo-influenced art style. Characters appear almost doll-like with their visual perfections, all while they’re often dismantled and reassembled in bizarre surgical practices by sadistic doctors. Much like how Zera expresses horror to seeing his own imperfect organs in contrast with his youthful appearance, our pristine victims share the same internals as any other slaughtered cadaver, all in a maddening spiral of narratives that contemporary readers often described as resembling descents to insanity. This fixation of the contrast between perceived beauty and grotesqueness is arguably traced back to the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s own works, with lines accentuating the youthful features of certain characters while audience members were known to fondly look back on the actors’ appearances. Litchi himself was described as being a “cute” robot despite the violence it was programed to carry out.
It’s possible that this collision is inherent to Ameya’s conceptual destruction of the TGG. A known detractor to poetic writing, he called on a romantic author to pen the screenplays to the TGG’s first three plays so he could “destroy” them in his direction. The use of beauty could arguably be a mockery of it, taking these idealized dolls and leaving them trapped in worlds of fascism and hospital rooms that are haunted by the stinging stench of antiseptics and blood. Plastic hospital drapes were used in place of stage curtains and autopsy films were shown to the wide-eyed characters, who spoke of pure blood and dirty blood, the antithesis of blood, mercuro. What is beauty a representation of in the Grand Guignol’s works with the prominent fascist leanings of the protagonists? Considering the perspectives of our characters where the Hikari Club and the deranged teachers and Nazi doctors are treated as protagonists rather than explicit antagonists, the plays could arguably be read as the decay of a self-convinced beauty under fascist rule. Songs of the pure-blooded ubermensch fading into silence as the singers all collapse, lost in their own delirium as they pump mercurochrome into their hearts and try to rationalize their own organs that resemble the internals of the so-called ‘landraces’ they rendered into lifeless meat. It’s the natural conclusion of fascism, a collapse that occurs in demented violence to the face of a denial of death.
I was originally split on publicizing my translation due to copyright-related complications, but after seeing the increasing gatekeeping of TGG materials at the hands of a rapidly growing market riddled with competitive spending and scalping, I feel obliged to share it to the public who (like myself) can’t afford to spend the now literal hundreds that are required to access angura ephemera that was meant to be openly available to the public to begin with. When originally finding this story, the book it was featured in was only 5 dollars. Now it goes for 60 to 200. That's ridiculous.
With all the preamble out of the way, the story is under the cut...
While I made my best effort to maintain accuracy to the source material in translation despite my practically nonexistent understanding of Japanese (my translation method is a Frankensteining of language learning videos, a Japanese to English dictionary from the Internet Archive and Google Translate with a lot of localizing and dissection in between), there are several details I feel I should note for the sake of transparency. One smaller one was the inclusion of the term l * lita. It was in the original text, and I was honestly very unsure of including it in my translation as it’s a term I’m personally icked out by. While I was ultimately recommended to keep the line as is for accuracy, I wish to state that it's a term I'm personally very uncomfortable with in what it represents.
The other note, which is the more prominent one in the final product, are the references to The Last Attempt at Paradise. In the original text the club members solely refer to their hideout as paradise and Eden, leaving a lot of excess space in the speech bubbles after translation when making the shift from Japanese text to English. The Last Attempt at Paradise was the name of S.P.K.’s 1982 live album that documents their set at the Off the Wall Hall venue in Lawrence, Kansas. Often considered one of their best concerts and a highlight of the industrial genre, the S.P.K. Appreciation Society of Sydney in their All The Way With S.P.K. / American Tour article describes the concert as being the group's “best performance to date”, further adding that they “Flattened (an) enthusiastic audience with massive P.A. amplification of FX bass regeneration”. This insertion wasn’t done at random, as the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s works were heavily engrained in the original industrial scene of the 80s. Both the 1985 and 1986 performances of Litchi began on a playback of the S.P.K. song Culturcide (from their 1983 Dekompositiones EP), and it was likely that use of the track that led to Not Osada’s early fixation on S.P.K.’s music.
At the end of Blind Beast, in a sort of reader Q&A Osada is questioned about some of his favorite music. At the top of the list he features the tracklist of the Dekompositiones EP and the track Mekano from their 1979 Mekano / Contact / Slogun single. Interestingly enough he states that he only likes those four songs from the band, following the text with laughter in regards to their remaining discography. I’m unsure if this means he was unimpressed with their noisier work (which would be curious knowing his liking of Mekano with how it originated from their earliest noise-adjacent album) or if he was directed to their later Machine Age Voodoo material and was alienated by it. In the same Q&A he also mentions the band Funeral Party, who featured specially commissioned art by Suehiro Maruo on their Dream of Embryo single. It's apparent that he also had a copy of the compilation album Vision Of The Emortion, as the list also includes C·C·Mekka and Ego'n Mole, who were both featured in the album alongside Funeral Party's only two other documented tracks, Das Sunde and Gears - Night.
S.P.K. references are sprinkled throughout this story along with Osada's other Litchi-adjacent entries. Aside from one of Zera's henchmen being named after the Mekano track, it's very likely that the frequent references to Eden are in homage to the lyrics of Mekano. The first lines of the track include the verses "One by one, odd to even. Break the scenes, rudely eden...".
Moon Age 15 was originally printed in 1988 as a two-part miniseries in the horror magazine Complete Collection of Horror and Occult Works - HELP, namely in volumes 5 and 6. While being an early work that derived from the TGG, it still wasn’t the first comic to adapt the Litchi stage play, with Das Blut : Blood and Eternal Girl preceding it with their 1986 publication in Osada’s debut anthology Night Reading Room, sharing the same year as the TGG’s early closure following creative conflicts between Norimizu Ameya and K Tagane (the group's author, who remains anonymous to this day). It’s to be noted however that while Das Blut and Eternal Girl were the first stories to feature the Hikari Club as antagonists, they are only tangentially related with Moon Age showing more distinct Grand Guignol archetypes (musings of the full moon, examinations of the Hikari club’s misogyny, idealization of technology, and even an early rendition of the Litchi robot itself). First kept solely as a brief serial, Moon Age was later reprinted in abridged form as a short story in the 1996 Blind Beast anthology.
While copies of HELP are notably hard to find and demand high prices, I was given an in depth view of both volumes that featured Moon Age’s serialization by a collector earlier last year. While the drawings are still the same on a rudimentary level, the length of the serialized version is notably longer than the later Blind Beast variant, with the HELP serialization being over 40 pages while Blind Beast’s is only 24. This was the product of the manga being entirely revised for Blind Beast’s print, with the layouts being drastically altered along with basic revisions of the line art. Certain scenes that would usually take 2 to 3 pages in the HELP version were condensed to 1, resulting in a unique tradeoff where one version feels unusually spacious in its framing while the other is heavily condensed and almost chaotic by comparison. It’s only a thing that springs on you once you compare the two variants, I saw the revised version first and originally didn’t pay any mind to it.
One thing that is certain is the polishing of the art. The brush work in the Blind Beast version is refined with a more elaborate sense of weight and flow while the HELP version is notably rough with the prominent use of rudimentary screentones. It reflects as a somewhat rougher variant of the art shown in Night Reading Room. It feels strangely digital, like it’s the product of early computer art. The line-by-line reuse of the decapitation scene from Eternal Girl being shown on the TVs further adds to the strange digital feel of the art style.
Similar to Moon Age, Osada's other stories of the Hikari Club featured the members luring girls to their brutal deaths. In Eternal Girl the members bring in a student and film her mutilation for a snuff film that acts as the story's namesake, in Das Blut they corner another student to the woods where they hang her, and in Jinta Jinta they kidnap a student who bullied one of her classmates to suicide before trepanning her with a strange device that's somewhere between an electric chair and a drill.
Not Osada was very recently namedropped in the concluding essay of an English print of Kawashima Norikazu’s Her Frankenstein under the alternate Nagata Nooto anglicization of Osada’s pseudonym. Their name is a curious case as while there is a prominent written variant (長田ノオト), it’s seen numerous English iterations. In Osada’s own English signatures it is written as Not Osada (with the name apparently being derived from a German phrase), but other variants include Osada Nohto, Osada Nooto and Not Nagata. If I'm not mistaken, it could count as one of the first English acknowledgements of Osada's works in print.
A new album will be coming out this August on the 10th, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. In continual production since the start of the pandemic, the album is part of a duology of soloist post-punk albums in the classic industrial style. Recording for the album was split between numerous at-home experiments alongside the incorporation of stems and synth sections from my live concerts between 2022 and 2023. If you attended any of my concerts from the late-2022 to early-2023 period, you likely saw certain elements of this album be formulated in real time. It crosses elements of musique concrète and noise with artistic references to Francis Bacon, Georges Bataille, Octave Mirbeau and Yumeno Kyūsaku.
The album will be released on Bandcamp and YouTube.
I usually make my statements through my art since frankly I’m not fit for political discussion. It’s a factor I’ve always been told, speak through my art rather than my words. Art takes time though, and in a situation as urgent as the one we’re facing I do feel the essential need to make my stance known that I am against the ongoing genocide. The people who condemn the genocide are the same people who condemn the horrors of the concentration camps, they aren’t against Jewish people, they are against the actions of the military and Netanyahu because he is ethnically targeting a race in an ongoing act of colonialism, and the US military is only further enabling it. The treatment that peaceful leftist protestors have faced recently in light of their nonviolent activism is horrific and only shows how America is a warmongering military state driven by the profit made from violence. I am against colonialist violence, I am against war and the capitalist systems that encourage it.
Sticker is by Hazel Cline (hazelthetree on Instagram).
An assortment of recently drawn scenes from The God Machine.
While news on the film has been fairly quiet over the past few years, things have remained the same as ever behind the scenes. Aside from solo independent animation being a not-so-algorithm-friendly output, as mentioned in the last major production post there's only so much you can write about drawing the same characters and general locations over and over and over and over again. While production has continued over the years ruminating over the same general concepts, they have remained frighteningly relevant with the trajectory of the world. The brutality of war, the way people are left as cattle to the inherent genocide of capitalist structures, the need to cease all militarist colonialism for the sake of our future, the underlying struggle of the human spirit against brutality and horror.
The God Machine is a violent film but it’s not a film that glorifies violence. It’s instead as much of a rage-filled call for the countless victims as it is a reimagining of old myths for a modern era of nonstop systematic cruelty. Some think the horrors in history are a thing of the past when in actuality they’ve continued without any interruption, the war criminals just don’t announce their atrocities for what they are.
An assortment of production images from the original performances of Litchi Hikari Club, all of which were personally tracked down and digitized by yours truly. The flash photography images with the blue tint were from the original 1985 Christmas performance as it was documented in June Magazine, whilst the rest are presumed to be from the later 1986 rerun which omits certain details like Suehiro Maruo’s cameo and the original Christmas-themed ending. Some further information about the play’s history along with direct audience recollections can be read in my post regarding the Futurist parallels of Litchi Hikari Club.
Please credit with any use.
Please excuse the brief absence, the former half of 2023 was an intense period and after everything with that was wrapped I took a resting period through the latter fall and winter portion of that year. Work has continued behind the scenes as always, just to a quieter degree.
