Rovo at Tonic

Rovo Tonic (July 20) 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.