Keiji Haino and Charles Hayward have spent decades twisting through rock’s byways, slipping between the cracks of punk, noise, free improv, prog, music concrete, and on and on. If the rock pantheon’s ur-texts valorize righteous authenticity, Dyonisian sexual liberation, and noodly virtuosity, these two are undaunted inversions, Jungian shadows to that mainstream triumphant myth. You can identify either of them in an instant. In the case of Hayward, a founding member of This Heat, it’s that deep, British melancholy that floats somewhere between the looming apocalypse and something unknowably personal. For Haino, it doesn’t matter what instrument he finds himself on—guitar, vocals, hurdy-gurdy—everything comes out blazing with a stark, quasi-demonic spiritual force. In their hands, the basic tenets of rock music become a vessel for something more tectonic.
A Loss Permitted, recorded live in 2016, finds the two jamming on the edge of oblivion. From the go, the session is defined by a whisper/roar contrast, with Haino’s guitar slicing near total silence with darting serrations. Caked in reverb, his initial volleys feel like decayed transmissions from a distant realm, both urgent and remote. Without wasting any time, he stretches far out to one edge of the spectrum, as if to alert you to the violence which looms behind every moment of restraint.
The duo then quickly starts messing with understated atonal gestures, which initially come off a touch rote. These function as a kind of window dressing for the more shattering forays to come, as if Haino and Hayward want to sketch some mountains in the background of their otherwise starkly contrasting landscape. The interplay is loose but confident, using some of the 20th century’s most well-worn avant cliches to help them along.
Haino spends a not insignificant portion of the session on the mic—singing, wailing, and convulsing in Japanese. His yowl at the opening of track 10 lands somewhere between Iggy’s feral bellows on Fun House and the more guttural invocations of death metal. Set against a backdrop of the lightest feedback and some very occasional punctuations from Hayward, it makes for one of the more unsettling and riveting passages, especially when he descends into a hissing whisper. There’s something inhuman about Haino’s throat-shredding cries, something beyond emotion. They don’t translate to anything as pedestrian as anger, anxiety, or pain so much as their own sonic necessity. Performers often describe themselves as channels for some greater force; listening to Haino draw out a piercingly high octave and then descend into writhing death throes might be as direct an expression of this idea as you could hope to find.
They aren’t on fire the whole time. There are sloppy passages and moments when they’re caught rummaging around just long enough for momentum to flag. The piano that winds through the set feels, at times, like a warmed-up leftover from the early-1970s European improv scene. But they always seem to pull it through, often led by Haino’s unabashed theartrics. His seething incantations, accompanied by otherworldly feedback groans, usher in a vital final run somewhere around the 30 minute mark. You can feel the energy coalesce, the players suddenly coursing with energy, like a pair of large cats prowling the stage.
The album closes with ethereal upper-register drones and a last dash of piano. Haino has stepped away from the microphone, but we can hear his cries in the distance, like a hermit wandering into the woods. A lonesome motif is sketched out on the keys, Haino lets out one last wail, and suddenly, mid-moment, the music evaporates. The last 20 seconds of the album are silent. You might expect applause, a “thank you” from Hayward, one last crescendo—anything, really, to let you know it was over. This moment may be the most affecting on the LP, the moment of uncertain dangling on the edge of a void. That’s where they took you, and that’s where they leave you.
