#nazoranai

[noumenalroom-deactivated20221021]

[bubblesandgutz]

Every Record I Own - Day 428: Nazoranai The Most Painful Time Happens Only Once Has It Arrived Already...? 

There are bats on our street. 

I’ve started a nightly ritual of watching them catch bugs during twilight from my westward facing window on the second floor of my house. I’ll camp out on my couch, throw a record on, and watch the bats dive across our property as the last vestiges of daylight leave the sky. It’s a good time for close and attentive music listening. A few weeks ago I finally had my “a-ha!” moment with Spiderland during one of these twilight sessions, and these last few days I’ve been using this special time of the day to dig into some of the more difficult and abstract records in my collection in hopes that I could garner a better appreciation for them.

A few nights ago I pulled out this 2xLP by Nazoranai---a trio consisting of Keiji Haino, Stephen O’Malley, and Oren Ambarchi. I’d bought the LP several years ago around the time SUMAC was preparing to go to Japan for our first collaboration with Keiji Haino. I figured I should expand my knowledge of his catalog as much as possible, though at that point I was mainly fixated on the Watashi Dake? reissue and his recent collaborations with Jim O’Rourke and Oren Ambarchi.

For the uninitiated, Keiji Haino is a Japanese experimental musician. Since 1981, Haino has released a steady stream of solo albums, collaborations, and band efforts where he employs guitar, vocals, percussion, and a variety of exotic instruments to craft completely improvised compositions. In some instances, this yields a kind of atonal chaos on par with Peter Brötzmann’s free jazz masterpiece Machine Gun, in other instances it can conjure the creeping clangor of Nurse With Wound’s Homotopy to Marie. It can result in some sort of angry and frenetic psychedelia or, alternately, some stark and hypnotic dark drones. The fascinating thing about Haino is that he can make even the most disjointed, fragmented, and generally wrong sound seem musical, and you get the sense that nothing is off the table as long as it’s expressive and free. On The Most Painful Time, Haino’s gravitates towards long, broad swaths of sustained guitar notes bathed in reverb and delay while Ambarchi lays down repetitive tom patterns and O’Malley churns out a seismic rumble of low end frequencies. This sounds like something I should’ve latched onto immediately, but in the batch of Haino’s work I was ingesting at the time, this one somehow felt a little safer and a little less idiosyncratic. 

It probably didn’t help that I was likely answering emails or doing dishes during those initial listens. As I sat watching the bats the other night, the album had my full aural attention. The Most Painful Time was recorded live, and the recording quality suggests that the album was captured in a large, echoey venue with a bunch of room mics placed around the club. It sounds cavernous. The bass is almost indiscernible, though there is a lurching down-tuned groan that permeates the entire record. The drums do their best to punch through the murk, though the tonality of the kit is largely lost, and Ambarchi sounds like he’s trying to beat his way out of some thick blanket of fog. Above all this reverberating gloom, there’s Keiji Haino. His guitar sounds like it’s being broadcast across acres of barren fields and his voice howls like a beacon in a storm. 

The production might have been one of the initial obstacles to my enjoyment of the record, but taken in while watching the bats, it actually lends to the magic. The moments captured on The Most Painful Time sound really fucking loud... so loud that they could only be captured from a great distance. And while a lot of the fine details got lost in the chasm between the sound sources and the microphones, the overall effect is chilling. It feels dangerous, like the listener needs to keep a distance from the people crafting these poisonous drones. 

As with all improvised music, part of the thrill is listening to the musician interact and find their footing together. On The Most Painful Time, there is only a minimal amount of navigation, as the trio seems locked into one vision. Notes are used sparingly. The gelatinous blanket of reverb over the mix makes the entire record feel like a breathing, pulsing organism trying to find a harmonious place in a hostile environment. As I sat on my couch, it occurred to me that this is truly a nighttime record---its shadowy constructions aren’t meant for the distractions of daylight. And more than anything, it’s a perfect record for watching the bats come out. 

[musicmakesyousmart]

Nazoranai - Self-titled

Ideologic Organ

2012

[dustedmagazine]

Nazoranai — Beginning To Fall In Line Before Me, So Decorously, The Nature Of All That Must Be Transformed (W. 25th)

Expectations of heaviness just come with the territory when you have someone from Sunn 0))) in your band. Throw singer/multi-instrumentalist/shaman Keiji Haino into the mix and the equation goes exponential. The trio Nazoranai includes Haino, bassist Stephen O’Malley and drummer Oren Ambarchi. O’Malley is a full-time and founding member of Sun 0))), and while Ambarchi is not a full-time member, he has donned the ceremonial robes more than once on stage and in the studio. On past records the three men have delivered plenty of lumber. But while they ultimately bring the bronto-stomp on Beginning To Fall In Line Before Me, So Decorously, The Nature Of All That Must Be Transformed, it’s what they do to stave it off that makes this record so rewarding.

The album-length piece opens with an exchange of chimes and snare drum strikes, both purposeful but not particularly heavy. Over the next couple minutes Ambarchi adds more drums, but keeps the music sparse and strikingly shaped. While it feels ceremonial, it’s not attached to any particular tradition or genre. When O’Malley’s bass comes in around the three-minute mark, it’s more a felt presence than a moving part. Haino handles that function quite adequately. His main instrument on side one is a hurdy-gurdy, which he uses to trace long lines and quick trills that hang suspended over the evolving drum patterns and subliminal boom. 

The band remains in this mode for the rest of side one, wringing every bit of intrigue there is to be found and patiently ratcheting up the tension. Bass and drums find a groove, but neither settles for it. Ambarchi takes particular liberties, using his cymbals to crash against the tempo like incoming storm waves challenging a breakwater. Four minutes into side two Haino switches to guitar, and the storm arrives. But it’s not a relentless one; he blows and then throttles back, dropping away to a near-nothingness that his partners abet by pulling back even more. And only then, more than a half hour in, does Haino open his mouth. His voice is stern and choked, and it takes a moment for it to register that he’s actually using English to bluntly lay out how he keeps himself off the smooth and narrow path. After a moment of solitary confession, the trio finally lets fly the wrecking ball. Some say that good things come to those who wait, but if you keep your senses open, this LP delivers different forms of good throughout.  

Bill Meyer

[noumenalroom-deactivated20221021]

[zef-zef]

Nazoranai: A Documentary [Stephen O’Malley, Oren Ambarchi & Keiji Haino]

directed by: Ivan Weiss & Sam Stephenson

[radiophd]

近づくのが　歓びではなく　聖なる狂気と　呼ばれてしまうものも　やっと現れてきた not a joy to come closer but so-called a sacred insanity has finally appeared, by NAZORANAI // なぞらない

from the album NAZORANAI // なぞらない

nazoranai -- not a joy to come closer but so-called a sacred insanity has finally appeared

[coupdehaha]

Picked up a few records over at @bionicrecords this past weekend. They're killing it with all the eclectic choices. Too many great records just came out! Sennhet is the white one, Necro Deathmort the die cut one. #vinyl #vinylcollection #sennhet #necrodeathmort #bellwitch #unsane #friendship #twinpeaks #myrkur #theeffects #courtneybarnett #kurtvile #nazoranai (at Bionic Records)