New Sonic Dimension of Awesome part 2

On to the show. The venue was the Liquid Room in Ebisu. By far it was the most professional club I have been to and the first that had a true venue feel. Everywhere else had a more bar/club feel to it, but here they had fencing in front of the stage (completely unnecessary as the crowd was extremely polite and there was no moshing to be found) and a superb light show.

The first band was called Nenem. They were a post-rock quintet with a truly smooth sound. Due to their jazzy rhythm section, spacey organs, and the bell-like tones of the guitars, I couldn't help but compare them to the American post-rock legends Tortoise. There were some pretty trippy visuals of organisms in space and Tinkerbell being projected on a screen behind the band for the whole set. There were even times when the songs seemed perfectly synced up to the images.


The second band (pictured above) was called Cro-magnon. This band really surprised me. There was a drummer, a bassist/guitarist with what seemed like several pedals on the floor and on a stand, and finally a keyboardist with two glorious looking Nords (one of them was a Nord Lead). To explain my previous comment, when it comes to electronic music instruments, I am kind of a tech nerd. I can relate several signature sounds in electronic music to the names of the instruments that produced them. It was for this reason that I flipped out a bit when the band suddenly came out of their jazzy intro. The drummer suddenly started hitting a foot pedal that emulated the Rolland TR-808 Bass Drum and the bass player reached up to his stand and triggered a TB-303. I was suddenly listening to an acid-house concert. To blow my mind further the band switched to funk, and then switched once again to acid-jazz. I got my dance on. This is for sure.


To follow Cro-magnon was a heavy group ironically called LITE. When the band started off, I was a little apprehensive. The began with a series of intricate riffs that had the sound of a metal band. I am not a big metal fan. However, the group gave me a pleasant surprise when they took on a much more math-rock tone. Still heavy as hell mind you, but the intricate part relations, time signatures, harmonies, and sonic density allowed the band to really offer a lot.

After the set a curtain went up. I made some friends in the crowd. Particularly a wildly fun, inebriated fellow who made sure that I called him Yuki-chan (the chan is a cute suffix usually used on small children and girls) and an American who turned out to be from Vassar and on the same program as one of my friends from high school here in Tokyo.


Boris was amazing. I don't really know how to describe what happened. There was smoke everywhere. The music was like a somehow serene explosion that never died down. It was utterly beautiful and very loud. Yuki-chan was hugging people and throwing up the "rock on" hand sign. A salary-man was headbanging along to the foreboding pace of the music. The set was mostly their bread and butter of absolute epic noise-rock and drone. They kept it quite slow for the whole set, which is only surprising because they have been known to play some hard and fast stuff, like what can be found on their album Pink. On the whole, this was definitely the best Tokyo concert so far. My ears were ringing in ways they have never rung before.