Heavier Than A Death In The Family: The Noisy World Of Les Rallizes Dénudés

The very first time I listened to Enter The Mirror, the opening track of Les Rallizes Dénudés’ Live ‘77 bootleg, I thought my headphones were broken.  Then, after some time I came back for a second listen. I was sucked into a world of guitar feedback, noise, distortion and echo that was at the same time confusing, headache inducing and eerily beautiful.

Writing about this band is a very hard task, as music critic G.H. Currin notes: “Much has been said about a very limited number of Les Rallizes Dénudés facts – there are more rumors, fables and legends regarding the band than historical confirmations.” Their history is shrouded in mystery, no one even knows if the members are still alive to this day.

Formed in 1967 in Kyoto’s Doshisha university the band took its name by corrupting the french expression valises dénudées (empty suitcases), referencing the theater company Gendajki Genko and their use of made up french slang. Empty suitcases, pure appearances covering a lack of positive content, two meaningless words signifying a complete absence of depth through the very failure of signification. 

Japanese culture at that time was traditionalist, prude and conformist and the members of the band, influenced by radical philosophy and Marxist politics were part of the new Japanese underground, rejecting traditions and opening up spaces for their ideals one cacophonous guitar riff at a time. 

Their enigmatic and androgynous frontman, Takahashi Mizutani, was a student of french literature and sociology, an existentialist and a true aesthete; the few images we have portray him wearing total black looks, donning straight black hair, black sunglasses and smoking filterless Galuoises imported from France.

Their sound sticks out like a sore thumb in 60s Japanese music, while most bands were paying tribute to american rock n roll and rockabilly hit bands, Les Rallizes Dénudés listened to The Velvet Underground’s White Light / White Heat, Ornette Coleman, Django Reinhardt  and psych-rock bands from California. 

The result is something nobody else had done before: dark and hypnotic baselines and heavy, psych-funerary drums set the stage for the signature eerie, hyper distorted, ear melting guitar shrieks, all topped by Mizutani’s washed out, echo laden vocals. An album that perfectly encapsulates this sound is the aforementioned Live ‘77, regarded by many as their best work, especially in the super rare and even more extreme “extra violence” version. This particular style of music, known as noise rock, was extremely influential for many Japanese experimental bands after them, and also foreshadowed the shoegaze storm that hit the music world in the 90s with bands such as My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive.

Of course, not all of their music is like that, in some compilations, like Mizutani (1991), we find heart wrenching folk arrangements where Takahashi's somber singing is supported by the sound of electric guitar arpeggios and a xylophone.

雨は降り続ける

俺の最後の時まで

俺は雨の香りが好きだった

囁きの天使がお前に言うだろう

何もかも捨て去れと

夜の輝きのすべてを

お前の中心まで送り込む

夜よりも深く　闇よりも暗く

お前は戦い続ける

死と狂気をものにした

The rain's going to keep falling

'Til my final moments.

I loved the smell of rain.

The whispering angel will tell you

That you have to abandon everything.

The night, in all its radiance,

Sends it straight to your core.

Deeper than the night, darker than darkness.

You'll continue to fight

Death and madness.

Lyrics from 夜より深く (Deeper than the night)

For their performances, the band was inspired both by avant garde theater and Georges Bataille’s concept of limit experience, where a subject approaches their own limit through sensuous overload.  This idea was also interpreted by other musicians, especially by the american composer Glenn Branca with The Ascension (1981).

Their shows were total sensory assaults, where the insane volume levels and the mind bending feedback sounds were supported by the use of strobe lights and mirror balls; people who attended their concerts describe them as something closer to an acid trip or a mystical experience, ascension and transcendence through sound and light. Due to the strength and uniqueness of their live performances the band quickly gathered a cult following in radical circles at the time; it is only thanks to those passionate fans that we still can listen to their music today, as the band has not officially released any albums, all we have are live recording bootlegs. The band just played a handful of originals over and over, cult classics like “Enter the mirror” and “Night, Night of the Assassin” and their legendary, eardrum bursting closer “The Last One”, of which we can find many different versions scattered amongst the various unofficial releases.

Their bass player, Moriaki Wakabayashi, was involved in the infamous Yodo-Go Hijack (1970), where members of the communist Japanese Red Army, armed with samurai swords and pipe bombs, took Japanese Airline Flight 351 hostage with its passengers; the plane was landed in North Korea, where he still probably lives in exile. After the fact the band and its following got an increasingly bad reputation and their live appearances started to diminish drastically, with few sporadic shows throughout the decades and the last reported one in 1996.

Even if the group hasn’t existed for twenty years, they recently started to gain more widespread popularity in certain online music circles. The internet has made their material, which was known outside Japan only by music nerds and record collectors, available to everybody, ready to be made actual again.Decades apart these sounds still hold great power: in times where we feel lost in the daze of youth, paralyzed by the mundanity of everyday life, that’s when their music can resonate inside us, awaken us from perception, shock us into a state creation. And don’t forget to turn the volume all the way up!

For those young people – including you – who live this modern agonising adolescence and who are wanting the true radical music, I sincerely wish the dialogue accompanied by piercing pain will be born and fill this recital hall.

– text from late 60s’ Les Rallizes Dénudés concert flyers