an unlettered concordance
of the music of keiji haino

unrecorded recordings

index of unrecorded recordings

• introduction to unrecorded recordings
  
  
• the twenty-first century nickel-y harp-y man
• keiji haino & derek bailey: songs 2
• alouatta sara orchestra
• keiji haino, tony conrad, pauline oliveros & ellen fullman: ultimate drone 2000
• keiji haino presents the ethnic stringed instrument of north america
  
  
• closing to unrecorded recordings

introduction to unrecorded recordings
In this section, I review a few Haino albums that have never been recorded and, as such, do not exist. Please excuse the necessarily liberal interpretations, as I have no source material with which to work.

In August of 2004, Haino played a couple dates in Norrkoping and Stockholm, Sweden. While there he purchased a nyckelharpa. I waited patiently for the nyckelharpa to make an appearance in a Haino performance. It took less than a year. On the evening of May 5, 2005, Haino played an entire concert (9 songs) for nyckelharpa and voice at Golden Gai, Tokyo Shinjuku, Uramado. It was only a matter of time until an official nyckelharpa release appeared. Here it is.

The nyckelharpa has a very crisp sound with a clear resonances. As the name suggests, it is a kind of harp and can make the trademark harp trill, which it does very infrequently in Haino's hand. Based on my primitive understanding of the intstrument, it appears that it is intended to be played with a bow, like a violin. (See the wikipedia entry. Regardless of convention, Haino eschews the bow and plays the instrument with his fingers, like a guitar. Thus the instruments sound very little like the classical or folk nyckelharpa pieces that one can find, for example, on youtube. The nyckelharpa makes a melodious music, even in Haino's hands, which are capable of extracting dissonance from the most unlikely sources.

If one were to make a psychedelic video based on track 1, there would be a diamond rain falling on to a placid, reflective lake. Each time a crystal struck the surface, a circular ripple would form and diminish in time with the decay of the resonance of each plucked string of the nyckelharpa. The freaks in the audience would be catatonic within their acid-induced hallucinations. Whoa! From behind the green mountains in the background, a blue moon would rise. The man on the moon would begin to croon a soft lullaby. Oh, the freaks, seated on the floor, would wrap their arms around their knees and cry. Some would huddle together. A few would be unable to take it and would rush sobbing from the room. I would want to tell them that it was just a movie but I wouldn't want to disturb the transcendental experience for everyone else.

The last track is a 27 minute nyckelharpa tour de force. There are four eyewitness accounts that the instrument began to smoke and actually exploded just moments after the final piece was completed.

Despite numerous suggestions to the contrary, Haino did choose to title the album, The Twenty-First Century Nickel-y Harp-y Man.

In 1997 the first officially released duo of Haino & Bailey, drawing close, attuning --the respective signs of order and chaos, featured both musicians playing guitar. In 2000 the second release, songs, featured Bailey on guitar and Haino exclusively on voice. This third release in the series changes the roles yet again and features Haino on guitar and Bailey exclusively on voice. For those familiar with the work of Bailey, they will know that Bailey on voice is nothing new, although prior to this release Bailey himself provided the musical accompaniment. The enigmatic short story, The Appleyard Files, (INCUS, INCUS From The Store CDR1, September, 2001, cdr) is a great example, in which Bailey narrates over guitar accompaniment. In other examples, of Bailey's voice work, he reads letters, provides an audio response to letters or simply curses birds.

In this work, over Haino's guitar accompaniment, Bailey reads a letter from a young fan of improvisational music, which I shall reproduce here.

Track 2 is titled the response, which is also reproduced below.

Track 3 is a hysterical narrative in which the inimitable Mr. Charlie Appleyard runs into a black smear called Execration that Accept to Acknowledge, with, as they say, hilarious consequences.

On August 28, 2004, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo hosted a performance, which included Mamoru Fujieda and Keiji Haino playing individually to the musical accompaniment of Homeogryllus japonicus (Japanese crickets), later released in 2006. In this the sequel to the album, Fujieda and Haino again join forces with the animal world to produce a sonic nature documentary of unprecedented obtuseness. Their collaborators: howler monkeys, specifically Bolivian Red Howler Monkeys (Alouatta sara). Howler monkeys make a haunting, inhuman howl, as can be heard in numerous clips on youtube, especially this video and this video. No lesser man that David Attenborough provides a brief opening narration, introducing us to the purpose of the howling. In the first disc there are two half-hour studio tracks, in which Fujieda and Haino provide accompaniment to live, unedited recordings of Howler Monkeys. Fujieda's accompaniment are compositions for string quartet in the vein of Patterns of Plants (Tzadik, TZ 7025, 1997, cd, usa). The lilting, organic melodies provide a delicate geodesic dome in which the howls of the monkeys reverberate. In the second track, Haino provides guitar and voice. Sometimes he barks at the monkeys and sometimes he sings soothing chants in the gaps between their howls. In all cases, his breathing has been synchronized to that of the monkeys and the resulting collaboration fits like a lock and key. The guitar is surprising tame for the wild accompaniment, more in the vein of Mazu wa iro o nakusouka!! than anything else.

The second disc is the live disc, recorded in the rain forest in Bolivia. Again, there are two tracks, each roughly a half hour in duration, the first featuring Fujieda with the howler monkeys and the second Haino with the monkeys. Of course, since they are in the jungle there are a million other animals also contributing to the sound track, including a variety of tropical birds and singing and clicking insects. This disc gives new meaning to the term ambient environmentalism. Fujieda breaks out the electronics, powered by a portable generator (you can hear the hum in the back), and plays live and unrehearsed with the monkeys. Haino has brought the sruthi box. The steady drone of the instruments complements the erratic howling of the monkeys. This is a release that I had imagined would be coming out any day for well over a decade; it seemed so perfect and inevitable. When it finally came out, there was no disappointment in the final result.

Haino has been creating his own drones with the hurdy gurdy, tone generator and sruthi box for many years. When he teamed up with Yoshida Daikiti (sitar) and Sitaar Tah! (an orchestra of 20 sitars) for a live performanceat Uplink Factory, Shibuya, Tokyo on June 26, 2004, a person had a right to feel that such a consensus collaborative drone would not be equaled again. Haino employed the tone generator in the first hour and hurdy gurdy in the second, an absolutely stunning drone masterpiece, subsequently released in 2006. Unbeknownst to many, Haino had been actively collaborating with a variety of musicians, specializing in drones. For example, Haino joined Conrad on June 6, 1998, October 14, 2006, September 17, 2008 and three shows in late April, 2009. Haino joined Ellen Fullman for a collaborative performance on September 8, 2005. I am not aware of a previous collaboration between Haino and Oliveros, but they did both provide cds for the Driftworks box set, that contained a Nijiumu disc. Regardless, on this disc, Conrad's violin, Fullman's long-stringed instrument and Oliveros' accordion join forces with Haino's hurdy gurdy to created the highest density, most polyphonic, most deeply textured drone ever to emanate through the atmosphere of planet Earth.

To put this album in perspective, I need to tell a brief story. From 1992 to 1996, I was living in a boarding house in Minneapolis and the room I had was not a large room and I had a couple gigantic wooden speakers with fifteen inch woofers that I had built years ago and hauled around the country with me, whenever I moved. The dimensions of this room were such that if I played the song Turned To Stone from album Shame, Humility and Revenge by the band Skin (Product, prod 11, 1988, cd), a side project of Michael Gira (best known as the leader of SWANS), well the low frequencies in the song would reverbate in the room in such a way that when you spoke, the sounds waves carrying your own words were chopped by the sounds waves of the song. It was, I suppose, like being inside a resonator box at a harmonic frequency. It was similar to standing in front of a rotating fan and hearing your voice chopped by the rotation of the fan, except that there was no fan. The music took on a physical aspect because you could feel the vibrations moving through your own body. It was a bizarre effect all by itself but coupled to the rather sombre lyrics of Turned To Stone and gloomy intonation of Gira, it produced a bonafide transcendental experience that was not universally appreciated by either the other residents of the boarding house nor all of the visitors that came to my place. To aid in reconstructing an idea of the experience, I reproduce the lyrics to Turned to Stone here:

Shame, Humility and Revenge was a release that I had both on vinyl and on cd but it was necessary to play this track on cd only since the vibrations that filled the room would completely disrupt the ability for the needle to remain in a groove on the record. In the time I lived there, I certainly experimented with other low frequency recordings to see if I could replicate the effect. Specifically, I repeatedly tried different low frequency recordings by Lustmord, including, Heresy, The Monstrous Soul, and The Place Where the Black Stars Hang, but none of them were able to reproduce the effect. There was a very specific correlation between the particular frequency in Turned to Stone and the dimensions of that room. Since that time, I have lived in a variety of other places and I have not found a room that matched this frequency again.

The wonderful thing about ultimate drone 2000 is that, due to its polyphonic nature, it is capable of reproducing this effect in virtually all rooms, irrespective of dimensions. The resonating frequency cuts up not only voices in the room, but the other frequencies present in the music as well. It is also fully capable of dropping small birds out of the sky in midflight. Haino sings in "angelic voice mode" over the vibrations. While the explicit meaning of the lyrics are not completely clear, it seems a relative certainty that they are substantially more upbeat than the lyrics of Turned to Stone.

Haino's love for ethnic instruments is well known. The list of all the stringed ethnic instruments that he has performed on in public is impossible to compile. By ethnic, we simply mean that the instrument is identified with some localized region. The rudra vina, the hurdy gurdy, the nickelharpa are but a few of the ethnic stringed instruments that Haino has played. There are numerous other instruments of mideast and Indian origin. The lists of ethnic percussive and wind instruments are equally extensive and impossible to compile. One ethnic stringed instrument that has been notably absent from Haino's arsenal is the banjo, the single most identifiable ethnic stringed instrument of north america, but no longer. In this album, Haino remedies the situation and adds the banjo to his list of conquered instruments.

How many people play experimental banjo. There are probably 100,000 such people and I, in my ignorance, am the only person who doesn't know at least half of them. The only one I can think of is Eugene Chadbourne whom I saw in a pizza parlor in downtown Knoxville, TN. Did I love the performance? Oh, I liked the experimental playing of the banjo quite a bit, but I did not love the "protest song" lyrics. This was about 1998 shortly after a U.S. fighter jet had sliced a ski gondola cable sending 20 people plummeting 300 feet to their deaths. He had a jaunty protest song about this. Neither the banjo nor the protest song format particulary lent itself well to this topic. Oh, how I frowned over my pizza, in stern disapproval. Did you ever imagine me to be such a fuddy-dud? I am.

closing to unrecorded recordings
Yeah, I know. I made all this up. I hope you found it amusing. If not, oh well, oh well, oh well. The best laid plans of mice and men etc.

proceed to conclusion

all text copyright david keffer. distribution without consent is prohibited. contact the author.