Nam Myo Ho Ren Ge Kyo

Album review

First the title: Nam Myo Ho Ren Ge Kyo is the central chant of Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism, a distinctly Japanese form of the religion that is 750 years old; it is practiced in a most orthodox manner at the foot of Mount Fuji in Japan, and is named after its founder, Nichiren Daishonin. What this has to do with the music is, in a sense, key -- though the Acid Mothers have used Buddhist symbols in the past. This entire album is a single track, a little over an hour long, and begins with meditative placement of a pair of gongs. The guitars by Kawabata Makoto and droning bass of Tsuyama Atsushi enter just under the two-minute mark, as do the high-pitched synth sounds of Higashi Hiroshi and drummer Shimura Koji playing a trancelike beat. The band begins its chanting -- with new female vocalist Kitagawa Hao joining the fray. The tune, as with other Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. releases following a similar aesthetic, unfolds gradually -- very gradually -- but gains in intensity as it does. In fact, this is one of the few Acid Mothers albums that goes through all their different phases in a single cut, from slow, smoldering spaced-out psychedelia to hallucinatory freakout to textured ambience to free jazz to acid rock burner before winding back down into silence. Despite the staggering size of the band's catalog, and its many excellent releases, this one is up there with the best of them.

© Thom Jurek /TiVo