Rovo at Tonic

Rovo is
a new group fronted by Yamamoto, the great guitarist of the Boredoms–like
Marilyn Munster, he’s the "normal" one–along with a skinny
dude with James Dean hair named Katsui Yuji, who plays the electric fiddle and
is in another band called Bondage Fruit. They released Imago, an album
of very intense trance-meets-drum ’n’ bass stuff, two years ago on
Sony Japan. The album caught on at KUSF in San Francisco and was recently released
domestically by the San Fran-based Incidental Music label. (There’s a brand
new one, SAI, on Warner Indies Japan.) Their American debut had all the
markings of a major underground event: John Zorn hovered by the door, making
sure the band got in (most didn’t speak much English), and the stage was
covered with expensive microphones, apparently to record the show for future
release as a live album on Tzadik.

The sound
was perfect, not an unusual thing at Tonic, but here it was so perfect
that it felt like being present at the birth of Dark Side of the Moon.
It began with the tinny rustle of high-hats from both drummers, Yoshigaki Yasuhiro
and Okabe Youichi, and a faint flush of Tron-like noise from the synthesizers–two
of those, again, played by Masuko Tatsuki and Nakanishi Koji. Everything was
hooked up to digital delay, echoing in computerized, mathematical perfection.
The grid was completed by Harada Jin’s bass; Yamamoto and Katsui mostly
just contributed color to the screen patterns. A lot of it sounded like the
atmospheric noises on dance tracks–blips, snaps, backup parts and digital
obbligatos–circling around without the primary thrust of a beat or a melody,
and without the focal point that would have been provided by that madman Yamatsuka
Eye.

Ten years
ago, the Boredoms were a musical manifestation of cartoon violence, all rapid
crash and smash, compressing a dozen songs into the space of one-half. What
they played might have been the most insane music ever made. Now the Boredoms
are a wraith, spreading out tiny threads of music over an extremely long period
of time. It’s easy to see the shift as totally centered around Eye’s
absence but Rovo, like OOIOO, Boredoms drummer Yoshimi’s new band, is another
glimpse of the Boredoms’ crazy universe in miniature. As a friend said
after the show, when you see shit like this you think American bands are just
lazy.