An excellent shot of Ai Takano, the timekeeper for Japanese psychedelic ‘group sounds’ band The Carnabeats. The band was well-known for their numerous covers from the catalog of English rock band The Zombies.
 
As I’ve said before, of the many excellent aspects of my “job” here as a writer for Dangerous Minds is that I get to share things I love with all of you groovy readers. As I’m a huge fan of Japanese art and culture my show and tell for you today is some prime sounds from little-known Japanese psychedelic and garage rock bands from the 1960s and 1970s. I can say with complete confidence that you’re going to want to carve out some time to listen to The Voltage covering Sam and Dave’s “Hold On, I’m Comin’” and The Spiders’ out-of-sight riff on John Lee Hooker’s 1962 “Boom Boom” as well as original jams from some of Japan’s lesser-known vintage rockers.

The Voltage was one of many bands associated with “group sounds” (or simply “GS”) music genre in Japan and the band demonstrated a strong affinity for classic Motown, recording numerous musical homages to artists like The Temptations, Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett throughout their career. Though I’m a sucker for bands putting their own unique spin on vintage hits, I always love digging up different sounds from around the globe that mirrored more famous genre-defining moments in better-known geographical locations. Such as Japan’s vibrant interpretation of the psychedelic and garage rock movement that was flourishing in the 60s and 70s in the United States. Though it’s a little difficult to imagine a happening psyche-rock scene in Japan without the proper party-favors (drugs were and still are very illegal there) you’d never know that the bands you’re about to hear in this post were kicking out groovy, LSD-free grooves such as The Flowers (who later became “The Flower Travellin’ Band)” like their rambling fifteen-minute instrumental from 1969 “Opera Yokoo Tadanori Wo Utau” that gives “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” a run for its money.

Like you perhaps, I’m also a huge fan of the super-psyche rock trio, Speed, Glue & Shinki that featured the wizardry of guitarist Shinki Chen who before he even turned 21 was already commonly referred to as the “Japanese Jimi Hendrix.” The band itself at times also channels one of my other beloved heavy metal staples, Black Sabbath so it’s no wonder I can’t get enough of them. As I’m quite sure that you’re going to dig the shit out of the bands in this post I’d highly recommend picking up the 2015 release Kaminari-Nineteen Japanese Garage Monsters or The Definitive Collection of Group Sounds (Japanese Garage & Psychedelic Bands) 1965-1971 released back in 2000 that contains a staggering 122 songs from several of the bands included in this post. And though I’ve written about them previously on DM, I don’t want to get called out for not including The Mops so I included the fucking impossibly heavy track “Illjanaikada” below along with many others and some sweet vintage images of what it looked like to be a rock star in Japan all those decades ago.

Dig theFUZZ!
 

Speed, Glue & Shinki.
 

The Dynamites.
 

The Spiders.
 
More after the jump…

Meet The Mops!
 
Back in Tokyo in 1966, four high school kids formed a band they dubbed The Mops. Originally The Mops (Mikiharu Suzuki (drums), Taro Miyuki (guitar), Masaru Hoshi (or Katu Hoshi/guitar), and Kaoru Murakami (bass) were just instrumentalists who were digging hard on surf rock grooves. But that all changed when they were exposed to the sounds of bands like Jefferson Airplane and The Doors. When drummer Mikiharu Suzuki’s brother Hiromitsu joined the band as their vocalist, things really got fuzzy in all the right ways for The Mops.
 

Psychedelic Sounds in Japan
 
Within a year, The Mops were playing gigs all around Tokyo championed as “Japan’s first psychedelic band.” Their live shows quickly became known for their elaborate lighting and the band’s guitar sounds got monumentally fuzzier. The Mops grew their hair out and would often blindfold themselves in order to simulate the effects one might experience while tripping balls on the 60s drug of choice, LSD. (To this day, drugs are next to impossible to score in Japan due to their harsh drug enforcement laws.)
 

 
In 1968 The Mops released their first full-length record, Psychedelic Sounds In Japan. In addition to the band’s steller original songs on the record, The Mops also covered songs from The Doors (“Light My Fire”), a couple of Jefferson Airplane hits (“White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love”), and two tracks from The Animals (“San Franciscan Nights” and “Inside Looking Out”). Not only does The Mops cover of The Animals “Inside Looking Out” completely rule, it’s sung so fantastically by Hiromitsu Suzuki in English that it’s nearly impossible to discern the band’s Asian origins. 

I believe that most of you reading this will dig the shit out of what you are about to hear.
 

The Mops cover of The Animals “Inside Looking Out”
 
More top of The Mops after the jump…

 
Today I lay before you two LPs by possibly the same artist (nobody knows for sure who these people are !) from mid-70’s Japan that I’ve long felt represented some of the strongest home-made psychedelic music ever made. I give you my ever-effusive compatriot, Eric Lumbleau of the mighty Mutant Sounds blog to illuminate further:

These mid-‘70s releases - by interconnected musicians about whom nothing is known - represent two of the highest peaks of Japanese psych-prog weirdness. Brast Burn’s Debon is an intricate con catenation of cascading sleigh bells and hand drums, windswept Himalayan acid atmospherics, bottleneck acoustic-guitar twiddle and Damo Suzuki-like mantric babble. All of the above is held aloft by a synthesist with a terminal case of pitch wheel woozies and is strategically embellished with outbursts of tumbling bass drums, spiraling flutes and recorders, and some exquisitly hallucinogenic electric guitar. Coming on like an eternal cosmic caravan, the whole damn thing is soaked in a higher-key music of the spheres vibe. Yes, Brast Burn are indeed the real goods, and they will suck you into a hypnogogic reverie. Karuna Khyal are, by contrast, an altogether more psychotic proposition, quite capable of inducing frontal lobe fatigue in those lacking a hardy constitution. Great monolithic slabs of damaged, half speed Beefheartian swamp dirge, replete with squawking, overblown mouth harp, collide with undulating waves of Throbbing Gristle-esque electronic distortion, as the group stridently trudge across your neuroreceptors and eroding your sanity. Attempting to reconcile the contents of those disparate dispatches is a losing game. If there ia any thread connecting these excursions, it’s in the mantrically intoned vocals that wend their way through both of these outings; though the volatility of the vocal delivery on Alomoni 1985 renders even these ties tenuous. Suffice to say, both of these forays into the outer reaches of sound are perched near the zenith of radical innovation.

It’s true, rock ‘em loud !
 

Brast Burn - Debon SIde One
 

Brast Burn - Debon Side Two
 

 

Karuna Khyal - Alomoni 1985 Side One
 

Karuna Khyal - Alomoni 1985 Side Two