What: Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O.
Where: RCC
Genre: Music
(Review by Sarah List)
Acid Mothers Temple is the core name for a self-described collective of outfits helmed by Kawabata Makoto, that spawned in Osaka, Japan in 1995. Each of the iterations has a slightly different line-up and musical bent, around a core of psychedelia.
Japanese entertainment culture really only has two settings – things that fit nicely into their societal structure, and things that require you to hold on to your hat because you never know exactly what you’re going to get. My plus one for this evening has a bit of a taste for psychedelic rock, and I’m keen to see what he thinks.
Acid Mothers Temple reverberates LOUDLY beyond the boundaries of Japanese norms, with Makato describing their music as an attempt to recreate the sounds he hears from the cosmos – something that he feels he’s only just becoming competent at translating into earth-bound music.
Shifting between seemingly chaotic noise to tight, focused funk, jazz and lilting sounds that conjure drifting movement through a molten liquid universe, the musicality of the members as a collective is hard to fathom. At times they are as raucous as Sonic Youth, as creamy as Cowboy Junkies, and as trippy as Jefferson Airplane (all great for people who are unfamiliar with the psychedelic genre and are curious for an easily sourced starting point) – but really there’s no other sound like theirs. Acid Mother’s Temple take you on a lucid psychedelic dream walk that’s tethered to reality, using driving bass lines and at times frenetic drumming.
The sound on the evening was not exactly as the band wanted – there was considerable frustration during the setup, and the Theremin volume continued to frustrate them throughout the set. Ultimately though it was an immersive, mind bending aural experience, and we are pretty lucky to have been able to host them here.
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