Every member of the international avant-garde ensemble Nazoranai is a lifer and a legend, or at least one in the making. During the last four decades, the Japanese multi-instrumental improviser and vocalist Keiji Haino has emerged as one of music’s most restless spirits, bastardizing rock and noise, folk and jazz to create an idiosyncratic expressive lexicon. His mysterious persona—suggested by his all-black-everything clothes and omnipresent shades, and sealed by his love of koan-like poetry—adds to a sense of mystique that’s increasingly rare. Though the guitarist Stephen O’Malley is best known for the colossal drones of Sunn O))), his pursuit of pure tone has taken him from the psychedelic smog of KTL to the malevolent metal of Khanate; those one-note jokes about Sunn O))) don’t at all apply to O’Malley’s larger oeuvre. And Australian drummer, guitarist, and programmer Oren Ambarchi has developed a fascinating fluidity, meaning he’s as capable of pristine pop as he is corroded rock, precise techno programming as he is ruptured sound design.
The gravitational pull of Haino’s storied career is so strong that Nazoranai has often felt like his project—the elder musician’s power trio, buttressed by an unlikely rhythm section. The band’s first LP, a strange self-titled 2012 beast, was a clear combination of each member’s characteristic sounds. Its slow lumbers, for instance, felt guided by O’Malley, its more devilish gyrations anchored by Haino. Two years later, the trio spliced together four sides of chaotic and enthralling noise-rock, with moments of exploration into the unknown led by Haino’s keening screams. This trend comes to a head on Nazoranai’s third and shortest LP to date, Beginning to Fall in Line Before Me, So Decorously, the Nature of All That Must Be Transformed. A two-side live recording captured at Tokyo’s intimate SuperDeluxe in 2014, Beginning finds the full force and finesse of Ambarchi and O’Malley now behind Haino, a puppeteer who directs the trio through waves of anxiety and eruption. The result is a demented joy.
Beginning is best experienced at high volumes and close to the speakers, conditions that approximate the atmosphere of its original live setting. All three players are very busy during these dual 23-minute improvisations, rarely sitting still or laying back. When you’re surrounded by the action, you can intuit their interaction, as if you’re enjoying a spirited conversation between strangers speaking an imaginary language.
The first side begins with a murmur—twinkling bells, sporadic drums, a low-key rumble from an amplifier. It is an invocation for Haino, whose arrival with a shrieking hurdy-gurdy immediately escalates everything else. Haino has been playing the hurdy-gurdy for decades, steadily releasing a series of solo improvisations in the wonderfully titled series “The 21st Century Hard-Y Guide-Y Man.” But it’s still a special, scintillating thrill to hear the instrument in this context, howling out like the irascible ghost of Tony Conrad or a string quartet that’s finally tired of Haydn and sailed headlong into the abyss. At various points, Haino sustains menacing drones as the rhythm section thrashes beneath him—or he slices into their fray, zigging and zagging between drums and bass. At this album's best, the brittle wail of the hurdy-gurdy becomes a ping-pong ball, rapidly batted back and forth by O’Malley’s slow pulses and Ambarchi’s impatient energy.
The second side flows out of the first, with Ambarchi and O’Malley simmering as the hurdy-gurdy gradually recedes into the distance. The rhythm section lingers here for a moment, waiting for Haino to suit up for the next act. Suddenly, sharp splinters of electric guitar drive into the patter and, again, seem to activate the rest of the band. They growl and rumble through open-ended noise-rock, dive-bombing into deep passages of dissonance, each somehow more extreme than the last.
And then, near silence arrives in preparation for the finale: Haino speak-singing, this time in English, his voice a permanent scream. “No one can change anything,” he shouts on repeat. “I keep on changing. You can change—just you!” It’s strange to hear Haino in the role of self-help coach, a surprising spot of human vulnerability woven into his mystical veneer. It serves as a command; Ambarchi and O’Malley explode, leaning into their instruments with abandon. For the last six minutes, they have the force of Mats Gustafsson’s The Thing or Albert Ayler’s Bells-era band—pure paroxysms of sound, digesting a lifetime of listening and delivering it in ecstatic, urgent fashion. It is the peak at the end of a slow climb, an exit rendered in delirious unison.
