1. FushitsushaLive 2
It was the first record that I heard from them, and it was back when [Keiji] Haino and definitely Fushitsusha were a little more mysterious than now. Now I feel like they’re pretty well-known. He even does cool demonstrations for the Sunn O))) Earthquaker pedal, and people know who he is, and some people have made funny Twitter parodies of his stuff. But back then he was a very mysterious sort of fellow, and everything was black on black, and the music itself, I never heard anything like that.
I still don’t think anybody has ever come close to this record for what it sounds like in the heaviness of it. For me it was, and still is, probably the heaviest record I can think of. That term, ‘heavy’ means different things to different people. For me, the heaviness comes from how the music vacillates between being on the metre and being off of the metre. He pulls the metre apart, so you don’t really know when chords are gonna hit and then it’ll come together and it’s that waiting for something to hit and then not hitting and then it hits that I think becomes very heavy for me.
Some people find heaviness in things that have a very strong metre, but for me, that’s why that record is so heavy. Maybe the only band I can think of that does that now is Khanate. I told Stephen O’Malley, ‘The first time I saw Khanate live, you were the first band to be as heavy as Fushitsusha because of that very thing of not knowing when things are going to hit.’ So that’s rhythmically why that’s so heavy, but also sonically, it’s like from the very first song, those chords, I still don’t know how he’s making those sounds, as a guitar player, trying to dissect those things. I know he was a Boss pedal man, so I have a hint of maybe how he’s getting some of it, but it doesn’t matter, because you just can’t play in that way, and every chord is like a miniature little black hole sucking all the colours out of the room. It’s still one of my favourite records of all time. Probably my favourite, I’ll use the term rock & roll very loosely, but probably my favourite rock record of all time. Right in front of White Light, White Heat, which is a very close second.
