JUNKO & MASAYOSHI URABE on AN'ARCHIVES RECORDS

JUNKO & MASAYOSHI URABE

“ Swing Low, Sweet Silence”

Recorded live on [Month/day, year] at Super Deluxe, Tokyo, during the 20th anniversary celebration night of PSF and Alchemy labels.

Even the less skilled orator, even the worst speaker can give substance to the sounds coming out of their mouth, whether it be ramshackle, aphasic or even frigid” Jean-Jacques Lebel « Poésie en Action », Loques/Nèpe.


Here, on this record, the screamer and the whisperer sail away toward the worst, expelling from their bodies shredded songs whereon our senses shatter. Such a poetic extremity is not drawn from the cultural landscape, but from the breath of the living world. Raw poetry or a poetic racket made of copper whispers and screams of terror, erotic glossolalia and ramshackle choirs. They stand like two narrators, burnt in the hullabaloo of an infinitely melancholic melody, dislocating in great devouring rests, tuning back to an unheard of pitch, swirling in close combat. Tightrope walkers dancing above our inner abyss. lovers call and respond in the electric night.

Masayoshi Urabe. Lips split in two by the alto sax. Bag full of burning air blowing into brass. Dancing hysterically in the sound. When he plays the heavens are forced to lie at his feet, our listening experience swinging, spitting sticky melodies until beauty lies exhausted. He walks on the wild side to reach asphyxia, ending breathless, as testified by the recording. A brother only to Kaoru Abe and Albert Ayler. The same tragedian, the same single jealous chord to go swinging in sound. His art is reminiscent of a sonic Seppuku, splitting his body in half as well as our understanding. Sublime and tragic, with a murky erotic charge. Nothing remains after the music fades but a burning fire.

Junko is like a white shade after Hiroshima. Her overexposed diaphanous body, her scream, miles away from the hysteria of other yellers in the noise music landscape. It is just terror, or call it beauty. She almost appears disconnected from herself, as if her voice were detached from her body, each evolving in a separate space. Her punctured tongue giving access to the unutterable and  unspeakable. Dyslexic, monstrous voice, rising to inhuman high pitches, held on the threshold of auditory pain, almost endlessly. Junko’s scream recalls the phrasing of free music saxophonists, a common musical naivety devoid of academicism and technique. Her voice is her own erotic body, her “music”, to quote Mishima.

Voice and alto sax magnetically unite under the white lights of the stage, abolishing space and time like lovers do. Bound to one another in a beautiful confusion of timbres, whispers, phrases and stories.

A story of noise and fury told by two idiots

text : M.H

picture : kazuhiro okuno