Photo by Kei Fujiwara

As I ease into a trendy Shibuya café with the five self-effacing members of Kansai-based Para prior to their gig at On Air West, it soon becomes clear this isn’t going to be the easiest of interviews.

First of all, the music is blaring in the background, obscuring their often-mumbled answers. Second, their responses are often vague or impenetrable. When did they form? “Well, ahh…,” they look at each other for answers. “I think it was at such and such a rehearsal,” ventures one. “No it was at such and such a jam,” cautions another.

But as a riveting performance before a rabble of attentive otaku types that evening proves, it’s worth making the effort to understand Para’s music. An instrumental quintet of twin guitars, twin keyboards and drums, the group builds complex layers of melodies in the way that spiders construct the fractal patterns of their webs. Yet while the structures of their music may be labyrinthine, the delight that suffuses its melodies isn’t. These guys are having a blast.

Formed by players on the notorious Kansai noise-rock scene “sometime around 2001,” Para has as its lynchpin the gruff-yet-amiable Seiichi Yamamoto, once and perhaps future guitarist with the seminal Boredoms (more on that later), and also a founding member of noted jam band Rovo. Filling out the lineup are dreadlocked “space” guitarist Yoshitake Expe, keyboardists Shigeki Ieguchi and Ryota Nishi, and phenomenal young drummer Muneomi Senju, himself incidentally part of the current Boredoms lineup.

“Our first percussionist passed away, but our original lineup also had two drummers,” Yamamoto explains about the band’s founding, which took a tragic turn when his girlfriend, Mana “China” Nishiura, died in a car accident. “We were aiming for perfect symmetry, at something mathematical.” Although Para may not fall strictly under the rubric of the much-hyped genre “math rock,” there is something similar in the music on their second and latest album, Curriculum (issued on boutique electronica imprint Sublime), to the mechanical precision of bands like Battles or the hypnotic minimalism of New Music composer Steve Reich.

The unrestrained freedom and cacophony of the Boredoms, or the jam band improvisation of Rovo, are not part of the picture. “We used ‘multiphrases,’” Yamamoto says. “By putting together all our parts, we come up with one phrase. So there’s a lot of pressure: if one person makes a mistake, it messes the whole thing up. I have to get my guitar part exactly right, which can be really stressful.”
Slip-ups, however, have their uses. “Mistakes are the true improvisation,” Yamamoto insists. “That’s when you make the real discoveries. Improvisation, which jazz made famous, comes during fixed parts of the song. Musicians already have a strong idea of what they’re going to play, so jazz is not true improv in my mind.”

Though he’s come along way from the anything-goes Kansai music scene, Yamamoto still owns pivotal noise-rock club Bears in Osaka. And despite appearances to the contrary, he may even still be a member of the Boredoms. “I haven’t left!” he bridles in response to a question about why he departed the group. “I’m not sure what exactly happened, but somehow the band ended up with someone new,” he continues more quietly. “I’d like someone to tell me what happened myself! Perhaps [key Boredoms member] Yamatsuka Eye didn’t need me anymore. Maybe he dislikes me. I can sense it. But I’m OK with it.”

Reaching back into noise-rock lore, I ask him whether it’s true that Eye once killed a cat on stage, riffing on a pet theory that the early Japanese noise rockers were influenced by butoh innovator Hijikata, whose onstage strangulation of a chicken is part of 20th-century Japanese artistic lore. “That wasn’t the Boredoms, it was [Eye’s previous band] Hanatarashii,” Yamamoto answers. “It’s a myth. He didn’t kill a cat. A guy in the audience threw a dead cat onto the stage. Our influences weren’t butoh, but bands like Hijokaidan and Einsturzende Neubauten. But that sort of thing was popular at that time.”

Why is it that the noise rock revolution emerged from Kansai rather than Kanto? “Kansai has been the center of alternative culture for a thousand years,” says Yamamoto. “The culture there is so much older than Tokyo’s, which affects you. And because it’s separate from Tokyo’s entertainment business, it’s a bit of a ghetto—the music scene there may be small, but it’s dense. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.”

Basement Bar, Aug 24. See concert listings for details. Curriculum is available on Sublime Records.

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