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from The Wire, April 2007 Michio Kurihara “I used to love the visible orange of the sun before it sets, the changing gradations in the colour of the sky after it sets. When I was seven or eight I used to play in the alcove of our old house. The room was west-facing so the setting sun used to shine directly into it,” remembers guitarist Michio Kurihara, backstage in Mallorca, when asked about the inspiration behind his recent solo album Sunset Notes. As the memories well up, he continues, “I remember the warmth of that amber light as the happiest hours of my day. There was a small glass ornament in the room, about ten centimetres long with a triangular base. I loved to play with it like a prism, holding up to the light of the low setting sun and projecting gorgeous seven-coloured rainbows on to the wall. It was a game I never got bored of.” Sunset Notes is the first solo album from Kurihara, offstage shy and self-effacing, onstage a resourceful and wonderfully expressive electric guitarist who for over twenty years has provided the amped up riffs and kaleidoscopic solos behind a clutch of the Tokyo psychedelic underground’s most rock-accomplished units. Scene legends like YBO2, White Heaven, The Stars and Ghost have all benefited from his gifts, though Kurihara has always preferred immersion in the group-mind to solo grandstanding. Still, those expecting a heavy, heads-down rifforama from his debut were wrong-footed by Sunset Notes’s elegiac dynamics and its lyrical, primarily instrumental evocations of memory, time, nature, regret and the cosmos that arced back to his childhood interest in optics. Twilight is a motif throughout the album, with each track given a date and time of sunset, which Kurihara suggests listeners should use to better induce, “a sense of the seasons, the feel of the air, the smell of the wind…” Those with almanacs of astronomy would be well advised to check the stars for each date too. For Kurihara sunset never provokes negative emotions, rather for him it is a time that intersects with memory and nostalgia, replete with beauty and a certain desolate loneliness. It’s a record that fascinates in its resolutely unfashionable stance, from the sense of careful song-craft, and the wistful warmth of its vintage amps and lovingly hand-built effects, to its concern with subtle emotions reflected in lyrical encounters with the natural environment (appropriately some of the booklet photos were taken around Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond). With one track inspired by the sound a higurashi evening cicada late in the season at a lake near Kurihara’s home in the more rural far western corner of Tokyo, some of the album’s inspirations can seem positively archaic, echoing eighth century poetry and Sei Shonagon’s tenth century Pillow Book. Elsewhere they are resolutely personal and often linked to Kurihara’s childhood interests – half-hidden references to amateur astronomy and entomology, the science fiction novels of Ursula le Guin, Philip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury, Smetana’s symphonic poems and Robert Wyatt are woven through the fabric of the album. But behind the seeming randomness lies a clear sense of purpose, as Kurihara elaborates, “there are important things that we all feel when children but forget in adulthood. I wanted to create a free, positive sound palette that would enable people who hear the album to reconnect with those important memories.” Remarkable throughout Kurihara’s career has been his staggering control of guitar tone, a similarity he shares with his hero, the late John Cippolina of Quicksilver Messenger Service. He has the gift of being able to laser-tune the tonality of his guitar lines, needling them into the finest gaps in a group’s sound, sometimes thin and corrosive-hot, other times exploding in pyrotechnic showers of meteorite feedback. The overlooked taut acid-punk glory of The Stars’ most recent album Perfect Place to Hideaway showcases both modes to perfection - on “Subway” with its mind-blowing single tone vibrato solo and the hugely satisfying nitro-glycerine crunch of “Ice Blues”. In Mallorca, on stage with long-term collaborators Damon & Naomi, another facet is revealed as his guitar drapes itself elegantly around the vocals, its sinuous lines, arpeggios and washes perfectly harmonized to the emotional tone of the songs. “Tone is very important to me,” Kurihara agrees, “though it’s never calculated. I try to fix a tonal range and approach that works with the specific singer or group, then that leaves me free to work on the emotional infusion appropriate to each song… With Damon & Naomi, warm tonal colours and a lot of reverb with a slightly delayed response time seems to work well, while with Stars it’s a colder tonal palette, dry, with no reverb, quick responses and a sense of punchy solidity.” Tone plays an equally important part on his recent and unexpected collaboration with drone-metal kings Boris, due for release on Drag City in May. In a piece of fateful synchronicity that echoes with Kurihara’s childhood memories and the rare circumzenithal arc he saw while recording his solo album, Boris’s Atsuo chose to title the album Rainbow. The effects of fate seemed to stalk the creation of the album, which Kurihara describes as being like “a chemical reaction, some kind of sympathetic resonance between us, miraculous in its own way.” While Kurihara and Boris are a generation apart, both had long been aware of the other’s work and all it took was a record company suggestion to bring them together. While the record strays away from the expected sludge drones into thoughtfully constructed song territory, Kurihara comments that Boris’s sound was concentrated largely in the lower frequencies, leaving plenty of room for him in the upper area. Surprisingly, they chose not to go straight into the studio, and the album was instead built up from an exchange of overdubbed tapes. Not that you would ever guess from the finished album, which rings with the disinterested affinity of a true group. Self-effacing to the last, Kurihara smiles, “when that sense of a great ensemble suddenly appears, I feel such a rush of unequalled joy.” |
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