Violent Onsen Geisha

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The most radical formal gesture in Shocks! Shocks! Shocks! is not any single noise burst or sample collision but the refusal - sustained across the entire cassette - to settle into a genre. Violent Onsen Geisha is Masaya Nakahara, a Tokyo-born artist who has described himself as someone with no musical talent, and who produced, precisely because of that declaration, some of the most restlessly inventive sound in the Japanese underground.

Nakahara founded the project in 1987, and this cassette - released in 1989 on Vanilla Records - was his best-known early statement. Where Masonna worked through pure feedback and distorted voice, where Incapacitants sought the abolition of musical intention, Violent Onsen Geisha operated through collage - kitsch television samples crashing into harsh noise, T.Rex riffs interrupted by drone, absurdist structures that vacillate between deadpan comedy and genuine menace. AllMusic described him as "one of those musical entities that defy categorization." Sonic Youth and Beck agreed enough to bring him on tour. At the height of his music career Nakahara published a debut novel in 1998 and went on to win the Yukio Mishima Award in 2001, becoming as significant a literary figure as a musical one.

Shocks! Shocks! Shocks! is the distillation of that practice at its earliest and most raw - playfully irreverent, structurally deranged, and harder to escape once entered than it has any right to be. A milestone of the Vanilla Records catalog and a cornerstone of late-1980s Japanese noise. Original Vanilla Records cassette. Vanilla Records, Vanilla Records-4.