Thanks for joining me in the Vu, crew! I hope you enjoy it as much as Heathen Disco and that it’s transformative in what you pull out of a store near you, or from the deepest recesses of another store via Discogs or wherever. Good luck out there.
Next time I’ll delve into some more recent things missed out in past editions of Heathen D, 2024-25 stuffed in the seat cushions.
ONNA Last Live ’83 2xLP (An’Archives)
Onna was a Japanese psychedelic downer unit poised at this romantic, quasi-Gothic removal from decorum or withdrawal – the music on this collection, and on the Holy Mountain label retrospective CD from 2009 (which has some mild overlap with some of the live material on this gorgeous double LP set) certainly belongs both to the traditions of underground music of the day (Les Rallizes Denudes is an obvious nod) and to the bass-heavy toil of Faith/Pornography-era Cure. Given that both of those works are contemporaneous with Onna’s four-piece lineup here should not be lost on anyone; hold up their “Siamese Twins” against the sidelong closer “Never Seen a Light Like This...” and the comparison and local flavoring, enki traditions and dissociative repetition are of a piece with one another.
Much of this is likely to stem from frontperson Keizo Miyanishi, a primary figure in erotic manga who drew these folded bodies in waiting, flesh in splayed rosebuds like Schiele drew skeletal rakes, like if Robert Smith was the Guido Crepax of his time and place. Onna at this stage (October 1983, the final performance of this lineup) featured some future heavies of Japan’s psych scene; drummer Ken Matsutani would go on to form the increasingly hippie-ish Marble Sheep and the Run-Down Sun’s Children (and start up the venerable Captain Trip label) and their guitarist was national luminary Michio Kurihara, who’d leave this band to join YBO2, before learning how to wield lightning in essential units like Ghost, White Heaven and The Stars, and becoming a compatriot of Damon and Naomi on some of their best works, as well as Boris. Along with late bassist Yutaka Yasui, the quartet gets up to a heavy, forlorn expression of longing, Miyanishi’s mournful voice front and center, strumming the martial rhythm chords against Kurihara’s skin-rending feedback as the rhythm section slows to a crawl.
Essentialism gets the reissue and archival space to one-in/one-out levels of overcrowding far too often, and the A-tier material on here falls just outside the realm of the bands we remember most from this time and place, but it’s an important link, a singular sound, and the presentation– Alan Sherry’s always-incredible screenprinting job, cards and inserts galore (in Japanese, French and English) – wraps this up as some sort of ornate archival gift, which it is. If this is your first exposure to Japanese music of this particular stripe, get ready to be overwhelmed; if you’ve come here to pick nits based on what you know of the compilation, then here’s a prize for still being at it and holding such esoteric knowledge in the first place. For those in between, who can put things readily in perspective, you’ll fall under the spell of Onna’s loudest wail, and maybe look beyond this to the small handful of later lineups and releases out there.
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