May 14 - Do You Like Disco?

"If you were going to be jogging in a few hours, what's the last thing on this menu you'd want to eat?"
"That would be a very difficult question, sir. But I would have to say the chicken masala."
"Great, give me that, a nan, and a Kingfisher."
"Very good, sir."
I'm at a curry house in Akihabara, Tokyo. Just downstairs is Club Goodman, a live house where very soon I will be seeing a concert featuring four different line-ups of Acid Mothers Temple, Japan's premier psychedelic noise freakout collective. I jogged here from my apartment about five or six kilometers away. After it is finished, I will jog home. I've now added jogging as a mode of transportation, and why not? It's faster than walking, great exercise, and running through the streets of Tokyo never fails to make me love this city more than I already do.
And the run here tonight was great. Unseasonably cool for May, weaving in and out of salarymen, school uniforms, and sidewalk cyclists to end up in Akihabara, where I added otaku and maids to the role call of Tokyoites I had to juke my way through to get here. And I look forward to doing it again on the way home.
But first, Acid Mothers Temple. When I get to the club, the chick in front of me is wearing nothing but a black leather bikini. This can only be a good sign.
By the way, I've come here alone (Not that I'm foreshadowing me hitting on the bikini chick, because I'm not, OK? OK?). My girlfriend isn't into Acid Mothers Temple, and I didn't put the hard sell on her or any of my friends because--how do I say this without sounding like a dick?--they're not for everyone. They're loud, like jackhammer having angry make-up sex with your ear loud. And they're hard and they're dark, and their music is churning and out there and sludgy and coarse and demonic. And they're almost impossibly prolific, having released more than 40 albums in the last 10 years. And they rock.
Tonight's show is billed as four separate acts--Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Cosmic Blues Band, Acid Mothers Temple and the Cosmic Inferno, Acid Mothers Temple SWR, and Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso UFO--but it's really one group. Throughout the night, different members of the AMT collective--a jumbled Manson family-esque hodge podge of outlaws and freaks--rotate on and off the stage, and the music never stops. Muddy psychedelic blooze segues into droning kraut rock that builds to a deafening assault of white noise before giving way to a single, dreamy, beatific acoustic guitar solo that gradually leads into a searing noise rock odyssey to the outer reaches of the stratosphere. It goes on like this for three and a half hours straight.
And when it's over, after head Mother Kawabata Makoto has destroyed his guitar and the rest of the group have left the stage and guitarist Tsuyama Atsushi has come back on to sing auld lang sayne in Japanese before saying goodnight, after all that, the applause is kind of muted, but it's not because the audience is disappointed. I've been to a lot of shows. And the audience dug this one. They're light on applause because they're exhausted. It's been a monster of a show.
I go back upstairs and out onto the streets and run home. I hope the chicken masala doesn't turn out to have been a bad decision.