Kamikaze

Ever since he launched his Bandcamp page, Kawabata Makoto has been on a tear, balancing copious new releases with archival material. Some of the best of the latter have been his uploads of tapes on Asahito Nanjo’s La Musica label. For a time there, it looked like Nanjo was releasing every session by his multiple bands (High Rise, Musica Transonic, Mainliner, Ohkami No Jikan, Toho Sara, etc.) – some of the best tapes were the Mainliner outtakes, of which Kamikaze is one, a rejected second album from 1997. Mainliner pushed spontaneous composition – or combustion – further than High Rise, with Nanjo’s foot-thudding bass and tranquilised vocals regularly wiped out by Yoshida Tatsuya’s unrelenting drums and, most notably, Kawabata Makoto’s excessive, time-space-warping psych guitar. The man is handy with a wah-wah pedal, that’s for sure, and the way he fluently slips between feverish note-spray and wonderfully stupid, Neanderthal rock riffs is pure joy.