Japanoise: a field guide to a scene that was assembled by mail

In 1989 Ron Lessard of RRRecords, working out of Massachusetts, pressed a Hanatarash demo cassette onto vinyl without waiting for the master tape that Yamantaka Eye intended to send him. Wrong tape, wrong idea, record out anyway. Noise fans have been telling that story ever since, usually as a joke about how nobody involved could read anybody else's letters.

It is also the whole genre in one anecdote. A tape crosses an ocean, gets misread on arrival, and the misreading becomes a record that other people then treat as canon.

The name came from outside

David Novak spent years in Osaka and Tokyo live houses and came back with an argument that still annoys people: Japanoise was not a scene that existed in Japan and then got exported. It was produced in the traffic. Cassette trading, mail order, zines and small-run vinyl between Japan, Europe and North America built the category, and recordings were what created the sense of what a noise performance was supposed to feel like, rather than the other way round.

The word itself is foreign cargo. Novak's sharpest point is that the framing forced Japanese musicians to treat themselves as Japanese, as a category, for the first time. Nobody in Osaka in 1984 was forming a Japanoise band. They were making noise, and a bunch of Americans decided the nationality was the interesting part.

Osaka, and the emergency staircase

Hijōkaidan means emergency staircase. The group formed in 1979 around guitarist Jojo Hiroshige, with lineups that have swung between two members and fourteen, and it is the closest thing the scene has to a centre of gravity. Hiroshige also runs Alchemy Records out of Osaka, which put out Hijokaidan, Incapacitants, Masonna, Hanatarash and Merzbow at various points, so a large chunk of what circulated abroad in the 1990s came through one man's label.

That one is a late Hijokaidan album on the British label Cold Spring, and yes, the title is a Led Zeppelin joke about their own name. Which brings up the thing outsiders get wrong most often: this music has a sense of humour. Hanatarash, the project Eye ran from 1983, once destroyed part of a venue by driving an excavator through the back wall, and got itself banned from most rooms in the city. That is not nihilism. That is a prank with a machine rental.

Tokyo, and the discography as a wall

Merzbow is one man, Masami Akita, working since 1979 and named after Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau, the house the dadaist filled with junk until it became architecture. The parallel is not decoration. Akita has released well over 500 recordings, and in 2000 the label Extreme put out fifty of them in a single box.

Pulse Demon was recorded in Tokyo across October and November 1995 and came out in May 1996 on Release Entertainment, a sublabel of Relapse — a metal company whose other business that year included Neurosis. That is how a fuzz box and no overdubs ended up in the hands of teenagers who had come for death metal. If you have heard exactly one Japanese noise record, statistically it is this one.

The two men with day jobs

Incapacitants started in 1981 as a Toshiji Mikawa solo project, alongside his work in Hijokaidan, and became a duo when Fumio Kosakai of C.C.C.C. joined in Tokyo. Kosakai calls what they do "hard noise", a straight-faced nod to hard bop. They aim for noise with no musical intention in it at all, which they have now been failing to achieve, gloriously, for over forty years.

Operorue came out in 1995 and opens with a track called "Postal Savings & Postal Insurance". Mikawa worked at a bank; Kosakai worked for a government office. Their song titles are full of the paperwork, and their day jobs are the reason they barely toured: Incapacitants did not play outside Japan until November 1999, at a festival in Wels, Austria, eighteen years into the project. Hold that next to the idea of noise as an international movement.

The wing that went pop

Boredoms came out of the same Osaka air in 1986, with Eye carrying over from Hanatarash, and they are the reason a lot of people found the rest. Pop Tatari landed on Warner Music Japan in 1992 and on Reprise in the States the year after, which is a genuinely deranged thing for a major label to have paid for. By 1994 they were on the Lollapalooza bill.

The later Boredoms records swap violence for repetition and drum circles, and the Super Roots series is where that shift happens in public. Melt-Banana, formed in 1992, took the other road: keep the speed, sharpen the songs, tour everywhere forever.

What travelled, and what that did

Here is the detail that makes Novak's case better than any theory does. Masonna's Frequency L.S.D. first appeared in 1998 on Alien8 Recordings, a label in Montreal. A Japanese noise record, released in Canada, later reissued by an English label, now sitting in your streaming app under a genre tag invented by American record collectors.

The same period had a parallel underground that got filed next to it abroad and does not really belong there. P.S.F. Records, run in Tokyo by Hideo Ikeezumi from his Modern Music shop from 1984, released Keiji Haino, Fushitsusha, High Rise and Kousokuya: psychedelia and free improvisation, loud but built on completely different intentions. Foreign distribution flattened both into "weird Japanese stuff", which is exactly the flattening Novak was writing about.

How to actually listen

Volume is not optional; at low volume harsh noise turns into a hiss and you learn nothing. Length matters too, since these records work on duration, and twenty minutes in is where the ear stops looking for the song and starts hearing the shape.

And they are not interchangeable, whatever the tag suggests. Merzbow layers and sculpts. Incapacitants sound like two people shouting into a collapsing wall with no plan for getting out. Hijokaidan is a group performance with a vocalist in it. Masonna is short and violent by design. If somebody tells you all noise sounds the same, they have heard one record, and it was almost certainly the one that came out on the metal label.

If you want the machine-made cousin of all this, our industrial guide covers the four different genres hiding under that one word, and the aesthetics of failure picks up where the distortion gets quiet and digital.

Rate the records above, or come tell me I have Hijokaidan and Incapacitants the wrong way round. The comments are open, and this is a scene that has always run on argument conducted at distance.