Recorded live at Japan’s Laforet Museum on Christmas Eve 2004, the Boredoms’ Super Roots 9 takes the legendary Japanese noise outfit’s otherworldly music to a magnitude of epic proportions. The album features a single, forty-minute track, “LIVWE!!” performed by three drummers, a turntable, two CDJs, and a twenty-four-piece choir (the complete choral notation is provided in the album booklet). Experimental music at this scale can be a difficult listen, but “LIVWE!!” is worth the effort, taking the listener to the stratosphere with its otherworldly electronics, heavenly choral parts, and bursts of schizophrenic percussion.
The piece opens with an epic four-minute choral introduction augmented with twinkling percussion that blends the sound of a church service with psychedelic surrealism. Dreamy electronic sounds weave their way in and out of the texture while the drums slowly build in polyrhythms. By eight minutes in, the piece has exploded into a cacophony of explosive drumming, cinematic choral singing, and buzzing electronic noise.
“LIVWE!!” is built mostly around alternating blocks of sustained choral singing and frenetic tribal drumming. At points, the choir moves to more aggressive call and response figures that shake the piece from its bed of sustained voices and give the music a sense of added propulsion. Still, it always returns to climatic builds of voices and explosions of percussion and electronics. The yells of a lone voice cuing the drummers through rhythms of the percussion interludes acts as its own instrument, and, along with the occasional crowd sounds, blows the listener back into the realization: “Holy shit . . . this is live?!”
What’s difficult about the listen is the group never ceases to perform at its top energy level. The relentless drumming never eases in its complexity, and the choir is constantly at full force and top volume, giving the piece a uniform and sometimes monotonous sound. The electronic element somewhat compensates for this; upon close listens, sections that initially sound identical are actually subtly different. The occasional entrance of synth chords, swishing electronics, or a new percussion instrument provide the listener with something new to grab on to. The drum interludes and occasional moments of silence provide much-needed breaks from the choral wall of sound. Nowhere is this more effective than at the 28-minute mark, where the song comes to a halt, the sound of the crowd rises in rapture, and the group reenters with half-time drumming and heavenly choir chords.
The last three minutes of the piece achieve true ecstasy. Falsetto vocals improvise around the sustained chords of the choir, bringing to mind the scat singing of Pink Floyd’s The Great Gig In the Sky and taking the listener past the confines of ordinary reality to the surreal realm of interstellar space.
Experimental music of this magnitude can be difficult to digest. To enjoy the listen, one needs to suspend his/her conception of traditional song form and give way to the alternating blocks of sound that comprise “LIVWE!!” Like a lot of minimalist music, listening to it can often take as much focus and endurance as performing it. Still, for the ones willing to take the ride, Super Roots 9 is well worth the trip.
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