![]() ![]() ![]() Maybe the sound itself can kind of echo because it’s universal. “American people hear English songs all over, but I wanted to give, like - oh, maybe you don’t need to understand. So, I thought that should happen in vice versa,” Kurosawa says. “We grew up listening to Western music and never understood what the lyrics meant, but we could get into it. It’s an effort to give other audiences the experience they had coming to psychedelia from afar. The language barrier is actually what inspired Kikagaku Moyo’s vocals. During college, they both spent some time in the States where they were entranced by the energy at DIY house shows. Here in the U.S., Kurosawa and Katsurada serve as the band’s de facto spokespeople due to their comfort with English. Katsurada, who has attended many Acid Mothers Temple shows, said that Kikagaku Moyo would be “really honored” if people think they’ve earned a place in that “Japanese psychedelic history.” “Because the social order is so strong, it’s like, ‘How can I escape from reality?'” “You’re part of one big community as a Japanese - an island, like, limited space,” says Kurosawa. Kurosawa attributes the growth of psych rock in the country to a backlash against Japan’s “strong society.” Later groups - most notably the the long-running collective Acid Mothers Temple - took a more experimental approach and cultivated an underground fan base. Early Japanese psych acts like the Flower Travellin’ Band sang in English and covered popular songs from abroad. ![]() came just as Western rock exploded in popularity among Japanese youth. The genre’s late-Sixties emergence in the U.S. Japan has developed its own small psychedelic-rock scene. “Psychedelic rock originated and it has lots of background like roots, like country music, blues music, lots of influence,” Kurosawa says. And rather than the classics of the Sixties, Kurosawa cites krautrock and more obscure crate-digging finds as key influences. Indeed, growing up, Kurosawa thought jam-band godfathers the Grateful Dead were a fashion label when he first saw their famed skull-and-rose merch in the vintage boutiques of Harajuku. “Japanese psychedelic bands kind of imagined what is psychedelic culture not knowing and not really experiencing exactly what happened in San Francisco, for example,” Kurosawa says, “but kind of imagining … and then trying to create our original.” Part of what makes their sound unique is the fact that the band formed in Tokyo, more than 5,000 miles from psychedelia’s Bay Area birthplace. They play an expansive take on psychedelic rock that ranges from metallic to meditative. Indecipherable lyrics are just one of many things that makes Kikagaku Moyo - which translates to “geometric patterns” - unique. “It’s amazing that the music we play echoed,” Kurosawa explains. Two of the band’s five members - drummer Go Kurosawa and multi-instrumentalist Tomo Katsurada - spoke with Rolling Stone about their approximately decade-long run and the decision to call it quits. Now, they’re planning to go on “indefinite hiatus” following a final album Kumoyo Island, out May 6, and an international farewell tour. Since getting together in 2012, the band has gone from playing small bars to amassing more than 200,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, selling out major venues, and becoming a fixture on the jam-band circuit. But singing in tongues hasn’t stopped this Japanese quintet from connecting with audiences around the world. The group’s lyrics consist entirely of invented syllables - phonetic sounds that complement their intricate looping riffs. Kikagaku Moyo literally speak their own language. ![]()
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