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From Makato Kawabata of the sprawling Acid Mothers Temple collective,
who feels that his music is assembled by God, to Eye of Boredoms, who
believes his percussive beat-orgies are fueled by the forces of the
cosmos, the Japanese psychedelic underground is littered with a
litany of amazing souls making the most amazingly spiritual music.
It's not hard to see a whole range of disparate disheveled performers
as all channeling grand power through instruments used as tools of
divination, from Chie Mukai's weeping, wailing kokyu, to Kan Mikami's
weathered roar, to the howling guitars of Keiji Haino and Shizuka.
Each artist seemingly stays open to grander forces whose expression
comes through them, then comes like the most vivid explosion — a
burst of artistic incandescence emanating from a human who demurs the
attention this glow attracts, leaving the light lingering only as a
shining testament to the power of the human spirit and nothing less.
Nagisa Ni Te, the partnership of Shinji Shibayama and Masako Takeda,
make music that is just as spiritual in its scope, but more
restrained in its environs. Rather than summoning grand forces from
far-off dark distances, the pair explore their musical spirituality
in the space between them, their evocations of such daggy notions as
the-joy-of-being-alive taking place in very actual, tactual
environments. For Nagisa Ni Te, these forces come not from some other
unseen cosmos, but from right here, in the shared moments of their
day to day life. Shibayama has called Takeda his "muse," and he means
that in the most sincere sense. Every Nagisa Ni Te album features
Takeda on the cover, and every single song is, to some ends, an ode
to her. With an English translation of the lyrics in the booklet of
this American release of their fourth album, Feel (with a
reissue of their first, On the Love Beach, soon to follow),
this notion becomes inescapable. But Shibayama's devotionals are
hardly the stuff of baby-baby-babys; the album's dawning moment, the
majestic mellotron-fluttering opening track "The New World,"
commences with the proclamation "It's all right, you keep telling me,
your soul can light me up anytime." But, with Takeda's role in Nagisa
Ni Te having gone beyond muse to greater musical involvement over
each successive album, she herself sings this, the devotional written
to her by Shibayama — essentially singing such devotion back to
him, like a returned vow. Takeda also plays guitars, bass,
percussion, and all manner of organs across the set, layering much of
the music around Shibayama's ecstatic guitar playing, his nimble
fingers doing everything from playfully plucking a 12-string acoustic
to lighting up the night sky with soaring solos. While the most
psychedelic reaches of his playing may conjure up grand thoughts, for
the most part Feel rarely strays from the insular intimacy of
its musical union. It's as if Shibayama and Takeda are holding hands
on their own island's love beach, gazing out at the strength of the
waves, but feeling as if all their strength comes from the other hand
they're holding. Or, as they sing on "We": "Every day we fall in
love, and share the same time. Deep as the first day, but never the
same."
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