‘Each track on Vision Creation Newsun is equally an opportunity to get lost and be fully present.’
Release date: December 10, 1999 | Birdman Records / WEA Japan | Bandcamp | Website
Boredoms were infamous for their noisy, irritating sound and dangerous live persona, especially their frontman Yamantaka Eye. So 1999’s Vision Creation Newsun must’ve come as a shock to the system for many who held out hope for the band to return to their roots after the krautrock-y Super Æ. Here, the erstwhile cacophony of suffering was replaced by gorgeous tinges of kraut, folk, new age, field recordings, and soft psychedelia.
Broc Nelson
I remember my first acid trip. There was something very anti-climactic about the whole thing. Perhaps it had been built up too, much. Like, the horror stories of cracking your spine in some distant post-trip future and reigniting the whole ordeal without your control, the portrayal of tripping in media, everything melting into new horrors and the exaggerated personification of nearly anything you looked at, the stigma of it being a ‘chemical’ rather than grown, added up in my mind as if I were jumping off of a cliff, never to return to a life of normalcy, awakened anew with my consciousness and third eye attuned to frequencies of the mortal plane that the less daring would never know.
We mostly just hung out in an apartment and took a little walk. There was some orange soda, and a kind of old and uninterested cat. Sure, we laughed and things looked brighter, and we chatted about whatever came to mind. We even had a ‘trip sitter.’ And, yes, thoughts and experiences did seem to have less defined parameters of themselves, bleeding concepts into each other, but it wasn’t overly revelatory, just a steady backbeat and pulse of life while the rest of the world went on, unaffected.
This backbeat is what I think of when I listen to Boredom’s 1999 exercise in ecstatic experimentation, Vision Creation Newsun. The whole album does feel like being high on psychedelics, but in a way that is more climactic and interesting than my first LSD experience. In fact, I think about this album way, way more than that weird summer afternoon.
The elemental and almost tribal drumming that carries most of the album is addictive. It is more propulsive than a hip hop beat, but shares the hypnotic quality of latching onto a rhythm and letting the lyrics or music fill your senses. There is an undeniable krautrock quality to how it plays out. “(Heart)” gets close to the motoric pace mastered by Can and Neu!, but the addition of hand drums pushes most of the album outside of that BPM, even if guitars, synths, noise, and chants evolve in mysterious and unpredictable ways.
Revesting this album, I was struck with how much this reminded me of Animal Collective, who coincidentally, were working on songs for their debut album, Spirit Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished, the same summer Vision Creation Newsun was released. There is some Hawkwind in here as well with the heavy guitar riff of “(Spiral),” but I think what separates Vision Creation Newsun from all of the aforementioned artists, is their background as noise artists.
Noise isn’t a popular genre, but it is essentially jamming, the free jazz or minute 17 of some jam band going off the rails, but with feedback loops and static. So, as Boredoms entered into the psych rock phase of their career, they were already well adept at spontaneity and a willingness to cause discomfort if the song’s mood required. So, when things start to glitch out on “(Star)’ or you hear a distinct frog ‘ribbit’ in “(Tilde)” it is to snap you out of the trance with something shocking.
In Zen Buddhism, a moment like this, one of total presence, is called satori. Occasionally expressed by a monk slapping or hitting a Zen student lost in thought, snapping that student into enlightenment. Each track on Vision Creation Newsun is equally an opportunity to get lost and be fully present. I hate pausing this album, because of that. Each track seems like a progression from the previous track, each new measure altering the course just slightly, always giving you something to discover. Boredoms may not provide enlightenment, but this album demands the kind of jubilant mindfulness that can lead to it.
Dom South
Yamantaka Eye (or just Eye, or Yamatsuka Eye among many other aliases) has made a career off of violent, chaotic, frantic music that is often not classified by genre as much as the adjective unlistenable. From his earliest forays with power tools and bulldozers in Hanatarash to his collaborations with American artists such as Sonic Youth (on the TV Shit EP) and with John Zorn in the supergoup Naked City, there is no shortage in his catalogue to back it up. To a large degree his best-known band Boredoms are no exception, from their Stooges-inspired early music to the sludge of Wow 2 which came just before their tour with Nirvana. This makes it all the more surprising that their later albums are psychedelic opuses inspired by krautrock and are as spiritual as they are musical.
The pinnacle of these musical experiments is 1999’s Vision Creation Newsun, an hour-long epic with 7 sections but devoid of traditional song structure and track titles mostly made of symbols rather than words. Eye’s howling self is even dialled back, at the start of the album he mostly repeats the albums title over and over above Yoshimi P-We’s hypnotic percussion. Vocals are largely missing entirely as Eye instead handles a range of instruments from sampler, to turntables, to computer. As bandleader he contributes mostly to the spacey atmosphere we experience across the journey of the album.
Otherworldly is one way to describe what Boredoms offer up, its power so strong it enraptured Julian Cope to suggest that he ‘felt like the mystery of all music had been boiled up over one Hindu kalpa (8,640,000,000 years of human reckoning) and had then been distilled through this Boredoms album’. In truth, Cope rather sums it up. The journey of the album feels so far removed from most music that it is an entirely different experience altogether. Weaving through what we imagine space and time sounds like, hypnotised throughout.
P-We’s percussion leads the way, joined by both ATR and E-Da, on the album’s second piece (represented by a star) the drums are ramped up to their usual speed for a Boredoms album but underneath a softer atmospheric soundscape, giving way to louder synths towards its end, drifting in and out of the pulsing drums and crashing cymbals like a Gran Turismo soundtrack going through a blender. Those soundscapes are a constant across the album, stitching together the whole like a tapestry. The atmosphere remains consistent across the heart section, building up to a forceful climax during the spiral section.
Across the piece Boredoms grow louder and louder, the percussionists hit harder and faster as the electronics become more intense over 5 minutes until reaching an enlightening intensity. While Shelter’s Mantra is a direct message for the power of spirituality, the power of Vision Creation Newsun is that it barely says a thing while feeling like such a spiritual journey. Throughout spiral, there are bongos on top of the electronics as the reverb swallows Eye’s ‘ch-ch-ch-cha’ before we get the main taste of the louder guitars of old Boredoms but with a clarity we’re not used to. They suddenly reach a moment of synchronicity, forcing through a soundscape with a wash of blissful punk, the kind of spiritual noise Liturgy have made a career on attempting to achieve (with the tremolo picking left out).
The second half gradually slows down the album, with the squiggle section a slower drum-led piece with a range of animal sounds such as frogs and birds interspersed throughout. The spiritual awakening of the album’s climax seems to have put the band in a blissful nature. P-We and her colleagues continue to plug away with an acoustic guitar strumming away as there is no stasis, even in peace. The hypnotic repetition continues over the double circle section, leading further into a dream like state. A more guitar-heavy part with the arrow has harmonics, echoes and strums lead into more of P-We’s consistent drums. Vocals return but with Eye acting as the shaman, muted but with repetitive chanting over the still strange and beautiful soundscapes.
The Omega sign and final piece (the only one with a true name) tie up the psychedelic journey. “Omega” with its a range of chanting and quietened instruments; devoid of the driving rhythms, as chanting leads with boinging strings and electronics creating the ambience. Then, on that final track, Eye’s vocals return, joined by simple, clean and layered guitar chords as we’re stripped of the overwhelming sounds of the album. This decrescendo of guitar and voice is like the final reverberations of the sound bowls in a yoga class, bringing us back to a recognisably ‘normal’ state, feeling different after our journey, but how remains a mystery except to the listener.
Vision Creation Newsun is, to this day, Boredoms most complete statement. With Seadrum/House of Sun following in 2004 an underwhelming follow-up and their experimental 77 Boadrum more of a performance art installation, we may never have another album. Truthfully, I wonder what else Boredoms would have to say, they reached a point where they were seemingly asking the questions of what popular music could be. Without proper lyrics/vocals, without conventional structure and more intent on an atmosphere and feeling, Vision Creation Newsun was an experiment in challenging what was possible, so what else could they really try to do anyway?
