In 2007, Drag City released Overture: Live in Nippon Yusen
Soko 2006, a CD/DVD that documented an improvised live piece from
Japanese noise-folk-psych band Ghost. The recording began with the
sound of a door shutting—no one was permitted to leave the room
during the performance—and the band played amid drapes that
preventing them from seeing one another. At the time, Overture was the closest American audiences could get to hearing Ghost perform
live; after a 2006 tour, the band refused to play shows in the United
States until George Bush was out of office.
Now with the Obama vegetable garden sprouting its way through the
White House lawn, the time has come for Ghost to bring back their
harvest of earthy, mossy, fucked-up folk. “Sorry for our long absence,”
says bandleader Masaki Batoh via email. “How happy we are to have many
peaceful American people longing for us.” Ghost has been known to play
in temples and other sacred places, and in their early days they
performed guerrilla style in parks and subway stations, but for this
tour they are visiting a fairly conventional string of rock clubs.
They’ve added celloist Helena Espvall (“a graceful, dangerous weapon,”
says Batoh) from Philadelphia psych-folk band Espers to the lineup.
In addition to Overture, Ghost released the In Stormy
Nights studio album in 2007, and the two recent works sum up the
eerie, elusive quality of Ghost’s music. Nearly half of In Stormy
Nights is taken up by “Hemicyclic Anthelion,” an improvised piece
that ranges from pulsing near silence to all-out squalor, with
feedback, reverb, and drifts of wind weaving through flutes and
vibraphone. Conversely, the album also contains “Motherly Bluster,” a
straightforward folk song with a moody acoustic guitar figure and
obtuse lyrics in English. The album peaks with “Caledonia,” a faithful
cover of a song by death metal progenitors Cromagnon from their 1969
album Orgasm. It transposes Eastern drones with Western pipes,
and vocals are simultaneously whispered and screamed atop thumping
tribal drums.
While there are placid moments in Ghost’s music, the general tone is
one of uneasiness: Lucid thought patterns become scattered, and
physical objects are consumed by immaterial energy. Indeed, Ghost is
the ideal name, even if they did take it from the Patrick Swayze/Whoopi
Goldberg movie. There’s a freakiness in common with fellow Japanese
avant-noise band Boredoms, but none of that band’s celebratory ecstasy.
And there’s a penchant for heavy doom, as with Boris—with whom
Ghost guitarist Michio Kurihara recorded two collaborative
albums—but also a lighter, pastoral touch that evokes both modern
hippie folk and ancient Japanese legend.
Let’s call it ronin rock, then—after the roving medieval
samurais who were not tied to a particular lord and master. The music
of Ghost is similarly nomadic: It’s not based on any specific genre,
and the band is much more interested in the exploratory process of
improvisation.
“We never do the same method again. That’s our protocol,” writes
Batoh, then adds, somewhat cryptically: “The most important thing is
the catalyst—the feedback energies from audience in spiritual
atmosphere. We need it to sow our everything. Absolutely no one knows
what we do every night, because we usually never decide what we do in
advance. What you have with us is far beyond [today’s] secularism and
materialism. You don’t need any drug with us.”
