The Boredoms: Vision Creation Newsun

BY SAM FRANK

The Boredoms used to operate in dimension-zero, spazzing in a hardcore blot. They moved on to straight-line drones and 2-D trance-oscillations, culminating in 1998's Super ae and its "Super Going": 12 minutes of one riff and one Krautrock drum tattoo, driving fast, straight and long; getting swerved off the expressway by a twitching, drunken mess of nonsense chants, mix FX, and cut-ups.

Vision Creation Newsun is equally geometrical—so much so that its track titles aren't words but a circle, star, heart, arrow... Like "Super Going," it takes two dimensions of musical space as its starting point. X-axis: that three-drummer one-guitar-riff tattoo again, but now looser, psychedelic, even tribal, to go along with Yamatsuka eYe's dreadlocks. Y-axis: eYe himself, credited with "mix, vox, synth, samples, turn table, open reel, vocorder [sic], computer, electronics, edits," as well as two overdubs and two (re)mixes.

Out of all this extra-musical muck, eYe molds the Boredoms' music into something physical and hyper-textural, embodying it as fully as any sound can be. Essentially, Vision Creation Newsun is a trance-rock album, but the trance comes from repetition's inverse: constant change, both logical and not, even as the music pushes irresistibly forward. Birds and frogs chirp and croak; Yoshimi's precise drumming tip-taps its way from stereo-left to stereo-right; circular guitar vamps mutate into metallic stomps; full group chants begin as opaque percussion before opening up into daylight-bright sun worship, only to withdraw back into the shadows. Despite the Yoshimi-led onslaught, there's an incredible amount of space within the mix's richness, but those gaps only become noticeable when eYe abruptly fills them or yanks even more away from their blurred edges.

Indeed, Vision Creation Newsun continually calls attention to its ever-emerging shape. Small-scale textural ruptures, like the digital decay that dusts "[Star]" or the vocoder that squiggles eYe's voice on "[Two Circles]" agglomerate like peaks and valleys. But there are also precise, larger structures that lie hidden like tectonic plates. Some tracks are divided almost exactly in three like pop songs or classical dramas—but here, the cues are almost entirely self-referential: the return of a leitmotif melody or rhythm or vocal, a doubling or tripling of the beat, a jump-cut tape edit. "[Two Circles]" revisits "[One Circle]" but as the Kraftwerk pastoral to "[One Circle]"'s teeming-jungle, dirty-hippie mania.

On an even larger scale—like continents—Vision Creation Newsun is divided in two halves, four tracks of mostly ecstatic celebration, four of mostly quiet meditation, each song and each half flowing into each other like rivers and oceans. Finally, 30 seconds of silence, and a ninth-track coda with an actual title (in Japanese): just a digital fuzz-bath, hand drums, a writhingly vocoded "in the sun," and two out-of-phase versions of the same riff playing tag. It's gorgeous, and its gorgeousness reflects back on the epic that preceded it, as eYe strips the mix down to the pure form underneath the forests and highways.

There's more, then, to Vision Creation Newsun—to eYe's achievement—than just a series of variations on Super ae's themes. In creating a full album out of this one piece, densifying and compacting his earlier work, then building a world on this unified aesthetic, one that pushes forward and side-to-side but also up and down, in and out, eYe has created something truly special: music in 3-D. (Birdman)

—Sam Frank

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