What Do You Want, You Giant Gemini Weirdo
Boredoms—Super Are (1988/ Experimental Freak Rock)
Hello internet pals of music. There are some new really cool changes coming to this newsletter soon, but here’s a song from the legendary Japanese music freaks that I can only hope will hold you over for a bit.
Music is the most amazing thing humans have ever achieved. Sorry, futurists but we really peaked when we as species figured that one out.
Some people may point to technological advances as our greatest achievement, and sure—without them, humans would never have come together in station with each other, built societies, amassed wealth or anything remotely similar to what anyone reading these little scratch marks on a screen understands as the rhythm of life surrounding them.
Others may point inward and say that understanding emotions, or creating relationships to each other, or that understanding the heart, but also the mind, will mark our peak…you know, human consciousness.
But for me, it was the moment we made music. For one, it required us to place ourselves in relation to the world around us. So, we harmonized. With the elements of nature, with the other living creatures around us, with each other, and then with ourselves. We created instruments, first using our bodies, then using the bones of animals whose meat sustained us, all the way into the digital age where now I sometimes make weird droning digital signals on my little laptop and upload it to Bandcamp for you to listen to (no, really).
Corny as hell, but music really is everything.
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And because of that, we can use music for so many purposes. From expressing our emotions about the indescribable crush of heartbreak, to signalling that our little stupid computers have powered on, music can really do it all, hey?
Often, it may seem like I’m sending these out stuck in the nostalgia trap, that gooey little place in our hearts that renders blind to all the wonderful mysteries we can currently behold. I mean, I do just always want to hear something new. I don’t dislike new music, and I spend hours a week reading about and looking for it. But often, hearing something new is as easy as hearing something undiscovered, or with new ears—what’s the saying about never crossing the same stream twice?
Sometimes, music is about the utterly amazing catharsis of a bunch of people coming together and making all this sound.
Boredoms was that. Over and over and over.
I first became fascinated with them when I heard ‘Soul Discharge’ over the stereo while record shopping at Austin’s Sound Exchange (it may have still been called Record Exchange at that point). I bought it immediately and everyone I played it to found it annoying and inaccessible. They played at a club I lived down the street from, although maybe I was no longer living down the street and I couldn’t go because of a dumb $5.25/hr job and the only person I knew who did go was this kid who’d moved from Flower Mound to Austin and was obsessed with Japanese culture, an otaku who also loved punk rock weirdo shit.
Boredoms went on to do some truly amazing music, and also some truly amazing performances, like the whole 77 BOA DRUM thing, where they pulled together 77 drummers (like Glen Branca’s guitar orchestras but more primal).
This song has only feeling. Like all Boredoms music, feeling and nothing more. It doesn’t require thinking, or to have anything thought about it. Only feel.
This may not be for you today. Or ever. Not all of these SERMONS! are going to connect with you. They’re just about me trying to connect with you, through the all-encompassing glob of every single achievement of humankind that is music.
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Ironically, the only time I ever saw Bardo Pond was at a record instore, doing an acoustic set...
Great lists of sonic punishment there. I have tried to see Acid Mothers a few times, for plans only to fall through, and I've never seen Mogwai but know their legend. Personally, my ears suffered their first round of damage in my teens, seeing My Bloody Valentine together with Dinosaur Jr—I was actually in tears later in the night, and they didn't stop ringing for a week. Now they ring all day and night, but what a glorious noise it all was. Seeing MBV again in 2008 (with earplugs), I got giddy at the familiar feeling of my nose hairs vibrating to the air push of sonics.
Glad you gave the Boredoms song it's full eight minutes! It's a challenge, maybe (unless you love them like I do), but the way it shapes is a reward, because by this point in their career they had mastered their method as a band. And I love what a left turn that song takes!
Music you can feel.
This was a new one for me. I had no idea what I was in for as I listened to the entire 8+ min. The meditative drone that opens the song's first 3.5 minutes gives no clue to the head-punishing assault of white noise that follows.
Three of the loudest concerts I have ever seen were Bardo Pond, Acid Mothers Temple, and Mogwai. Bardo Pond, whose heavy drone psych can be a delicate, slow-burn groove but almost always explodes into a ferocious whig out of epic proportions.
I saw Japan's Acid Mothers Temple in 2001 and they were incredible. I think, back then, they were still a 20+ member band, but several were turned away from UK Customs. They not only physically filled the stage, but sonically, the room was suffocated by the sounds they created. I dragged two friends along, and needless to say they never went to another gig with me!
When I saw Mogwai, I think it was on their "Happy Songs" tour, and I knew very little about them. I was standing about midway back in the Brixton Academy. When they erupted into their guitar frenzy. I honestly thought the venue and my head, were going to blast off into outer space.
All three gigs may very well be the reason for the slight hearing impairment and minor tinnitus in my left ear! But all three concerts were also astonishing, and I loved them because I FELT them!
I had a similar experience just now listening to 'Super Are'.
The power of any art is that it can make its viewers and listeners think and feel entirely different things. I totally hear where you are coming from with this post! Cheers for sharing your words and Boredoms with us!