Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso UFO Offer a Psychic Ride Through the Stratospheres

Psychedelic music comes in a variety of lysergically altered shapes and forms. There’s the kind of swirly sound-collage pop constructions epitomized by the Beatles’ psych phase and the groups on the recent Nuggets II box; there’s the long, outstretched mercurial jamming of improv stoners like the Grateful Dead and others; and there’s the heavy all-out thunder-dunt of malevolent behemoths like Blue Cheer and early Black Sabbath. There are also the mantra-like drones of Spacemen 3 and My Bloody Valentine. All of these artists demonstrate ways the drug experience can be applied to music.

Then there’s music that replicates the drug experience itself–music that is so far out it wouldn’t make sense unless one were under the influence, or at the very least had been there enough times to still feel the wobbling chromosomes once in a while, as a kind of a reminder of the void. This is music so extreme that, upon listening to it, you feel as if you’re tripping even if you’re not. Japan’s Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso UFO, who are playing this Sunday as part of the CMJ Music Marathon, fall into this id-destroying category. As I told a friend of mine, trying to describe the Acid Mothers’ music: "It will make you feel as if you’re losing your mind."

How else would you describe it when a group lays out such sprawling vistas as La Novia and New Geocentric World, two recent albums by the collective (and admittedly the only ones I’ve heard). These two works are such prophecies of state-of-the-art psych consciousness that they may be all one really needs. However, like the indie mavens they are, Acid Mothers have a virtual flotilla of legit, semi-legit and, in some cases, severely limited-edition wax. Like a lot of "underground" collectives, the group has pretty much documented every stage of its multifaceted existence and by all evidence it’s been an amazing journey.

It all began in the late 60s when, as a youth, the 36-year-old de facto "leader," Kawabata Makoto, was first exposed on the one hand to the tumultuous sounds of Karlheinz Stockhausen and on the other to the strange vibes of the UFOs he thought were encroaching upon our earthly existence. Like a lot of psychedelic immortals, Makoto saw the saucers, and one notices a heavy extraterrestrial preoccupation within Acid Mothers’ music.

Speaking through a translator, Makoto says: "All the music I play is an attempt to recreate the sounds I hear from the cosmos (by which I DON’T mean God), but with AMT there’s something more–some kind of special power that always exists in the group itself. Everything, from our own limitations to everything beyond them, gets pulled along by this power. But I have no idea what this power is."

So you mean space is the place?

"Now I can hear very clearly the sounds that I thought were messages from UFOs when I was a child. For me, ‘absolute music’ can only be the performance of a heavenly orchestra I once heard in a dream a long time ago. In this dream, the orchestra played many bizarre instruments which I have never seen, and their sound was like nothing I have ever heard. They repeated short and simple melodies over and over again, but the sound was unbelievably beautiful. If I myself were ever able to perfectly reproduce the performance then I would stop playing music entirely–I would never need to play it again."

Many visionaries, musical and otherwise, have been haunted by their dreams. In the stoned circus that is Acid Mothers Temple, the music seems to exist in a perpetual, maddening dream state. The aptly named "Space Age Ballad" on New Geocentric World is one of the weirdest and most otherworldly pieces of music I’ve ever heard, capable of furrowing into that strange region of the id where previously only dreams–and, on some occasions, drugs–have penetrated. Compared to this stuff, other so-called "space rock" practitioners like Gong and Pink Floyd sound weightily earthbound. In fact, in terms of "psychedelic," very few opuses even come close to matching the completely mind-destroying aura of this LP.

In the Acid Mothers’ case, comparisons to the early Germanic hippie-prog commune groups are not entirely unfounded. "You’re Still Now Near Me Everytime" comes the closest of anything I’ve ever heard to conjuring the same demented crab-boys-jumping-all-over-the-face-of-Uranus atmosphere of Amon Duul II. Like those early psych-prog pioneers, Acid Mothers Temple lives communally, but Makoto is careful to point out that the collective isn’t a classic "commune" in the sense that they share no fundamental group ideology.

"Over a decade ago," he says, "I became involved with a commune of Japanese beatniks and hippies, but the whole left-wing ethos didn’t really sit right with me. The members of Acid Mothers Temple have several houses all over Japan, and each of us is free to come and go between these houses."

He adds that the band: "…all totally loathe any kind of dubious ‘magical’ or ‘esoteric’ vibe."

Perhaps the key thing to remember is that Acid Mothers Temple is a punk band as well–despite their penchant for trippy soundscapes and their ubiquitous beards and long hair, their approach is always aggressive, never passive. They’re either usurping your mind and upsetting your whole base of gravity with their evocative, undulating dream-pieces, or they’re bludgeoning you over the head with stampeding train rides like the amazing "Occie Lady," which sounds like the great lost outtake from the Stooges’ Fun House if they’d kept the "Psychedelic" part of their name. Makoto’s whole Ron Asheton/Leigh Stephens approach to the guitar on this track proves he’s no generic space-noodler or tranquil mood-music inducer.

The other album I’ve heard by Acid Mothers Temple, La Novia, actually came out before New Geocentric World and is available as an import on the English Swordfish label. It’s perhaps an even more amazing document than the mind-destroying NGW, but in a less bludgeoning way. The music on La Novia is in the realm of such psych-folk practitioners as the Incredible String Band, but whereas those folks were fey and wimpy with their dance-around-the-maypole fancy, Acid Mothers are steely eyed and cerebral and wickedly alien-sounding. On this album, the vocals play a big part in the unsettling atmosphere–the somber chanting of the chainsmoking female Acid Mother, Cotton Casino, and bassist Tsuyama Atsushi, conjures holy realms of traditional Japanese mountain music mixed with droning avant-garde textures. The title cut is a 40-minute opus that begins as a kind of Stooges "We Will Fall"-type chant before evolving into a swirling saber dance featuring skeletal acoustic embellishments and ghostly strings, all based on the most simplistic kind of folk melody. It’s a masterpiece that would sound great sandwiched between the recently excavated John Cale Sun Blindness Music and the shimmering Parlor Tricks and Porch Favorites by current folk-psych titans PG Six on some sort of heavenly mix tape. Then there’s the caterwauling presence of the perhaps autobiographical "Bon Voyage au LSD," another track that builds to a thudding "Sister Ray"-style climax.

Is this the "absolute music" of which Makoto speaks? In any case, it’s a psychic ride through the stratospheres you wouldn’t want to miss. Just the thought of these Jap kooks all lined up onstage with their hairy heads a-twitchin’ is worth the price of admission alone. In the meantime, prepare to be transformed, since hearing Acid Mothers Temple for the first time is as life-changing an experience as hearing, say, the Velvet Underground, Stooges or Ramones. Make no mistake: despite their folk and avant-garde forays, Acid Mothers are a rock band first and foremost. As Makoto testifies: "I think rock is different from all other musics because it’s impossible to classify it into a simple musical genre. Rock is a way of life, a belief, a way of thinking." He adds: "I make no demands on my music. All I try to do is faithfully reproduce the sounds that I receive from the cosmos."