Keiji Haino |
Cameron Jamie was telling me about BB, his raw 2000 documentary film of backyard teen wrestling that has a perfect complement in its sludgy metal Melvins soundtrack. The California-raised, Paris-based artist had befriended the band in the early ’90s, when he saw their music empty a hall except for him and a sound guy. “Any band who can drive an entire audience out of a club,” he said, “is always a good sign for me.”
He prefers to screen his videos with a live band, so the recorded soundtracks for the cycle that’s playing at MIT’s List Visual Art Center (every day through July 8) are a frustrating compromise for him. To get the full furious effect, I went see Japanese noise-rocker Keiji Haino play live with Jamie’s 2004 video JO at the List a week ago Thursday.
Indie-music fans in hoodies and beards were waiting to get into the subterranean theater. So were Asian kids with long straight hair, artists, and comparative-media-studies professors. Signs warned that Haino is “VERY LOUD.” Earplugs were free.
The show began in darkness. Haino chanted a series of ghostly moans; those and the votive candles lining the aisles made it feel like a séance. JO is a rumination on patriotism, with footage of a Joan of Arc pageant in Orléans, French right-wingers laying flowers at the foot of a Joan statue in Paris, and a Fourth of July hotdog-eating contest in New York.
Haino proceeded through mysterious plucking, ominous vibrations, chimes, turbulent strumming, Godzilla thuds, and rumbles. It sounded a bit like a slasher-flick score. He deployed 13 pedals to loop and layer the noise, building jet-engine blasts. He went silent while Jamie’s camera panned down a stout fellow’s jacket embroidered with a list of dozens of eating-contest victories. The seated crowd chuckled.
I never got a good look at Haino — from where I sat at the back of the hall, he was a jerky blur with a big guitar in the darkness below the glowing screen. His lopsided, stumbling sounds fell into rhythm with the hotdog-eating shots. He retched and snarled. When the film ended, he continued to play in the dark, charging into a buzzing squall. Then a few tentative strums, and silence, except for the buzz of amps.
