There’s a certain point at which an alarm bell should go off in my head about Japanese multi-instrumentalist Keiji Haino. He calls himself a shaman. Or rather, he doesn’t, but everyone else seems to. Maybe it’s his look; head-to-toe black, black sunglasses for all occasions, three feet of black mane; that bit of Crowley-style evil about him. Perhaps it’s his incessant evocations of spirituality, mysticism, and God in interviews. For press photos, he poses with all the sexual ambiguity and Romantic drama of, say, Jim Morrison or Marc Bolan. The guy’s a mystique-builder. Big time. I should be able to write him off as a hack, same way I’ve done with the Lizard King. But then he rips through 70 minutes of molten guitar wailing out of Bronto-amps, and it’s like writing off a Brinks truck. William Blake would love it, and Morrison would seethe with jealousy.

Let’s start with the facts, or at least what little is known, that’s been printed in English. He was born in 1952. Japan was still haunted by postwar devastation; Hiroshima and Nagasaki continued to smolder. Grew up, by his own admission, a somewhat rebellious child, playing by himself and throwing tantrums in his strict, didactic music classes. Legend has it that, as a teenager, he got his professional-music start playing harmonica in a (ahem) Doors cover band; though this is undocumented, and he’s never talked about it publicly, but it would make sense, given a seeming burgeoning of love for the combo of music and theater, especially of the sort espoused by Antonin Artaud (a chief Morrison inspiration as well). In the early ’70s, he picked up a guitar and formed the heavy-psych-jazz outfit Lost Aaraaff, playing feral shows around Japan, well into the ’80s. At this point, his confidence piqued, he struck out solo, experimenting with different instruments (drums, vocals, electronics, theremin, um, hurdy-gurdy) and cranking out albums at a manic clip. This is where his own aesthetic begins to come into focus: absurdly long passages of ghostly, unsteady drone or furious, overdriven madness, stretching into infinity. In 1990, he formed his titanic noise-rock group Fushitsusha. At an age when most men are settling into complacency or surrender, Haino is unleashing his fiercest instincts. His visual aesthetic comes into focus at this point too; his solo albums are all black-and-white (or tinted) affairs featuring Our Man in motion, and the Fushitsusha covers are none more black, featuring kanjicharac— I’m sorry, you’re still stuck on the hurdy-gurdy, huh?

Yes, the instrument more commonly associated with French peasantry and dancing monkeys/Sting at the Grammys [A Sting joke? You hack!—Ed.] is officially, now and forever, in the service of demonic gas-clouds of unnerving, but strangely sweet-smelling noise. From his 1998 Alien8 album—ahem—Abandon All Words At a Stroke, So Prayer Can Come Spilling Out (his titles are almost uniformly fantastic) we get a 47-minute excursion of churning tones and scrapes accompanied by Haino’s own treated mewls. For those uninitiated, a hurdy-gurdy is a violin/accordion-type contraption in which a lever on one end is rotated, so that a wheel of stone and rosin rubs against the depressed strings in a weirdly non-sexual and potentially endless manner, which makes it a perfect instrument for Haino. The part excerpted here is the final 13 minutes, the high-flying apex of this dense, singular construction, and as good an example of noise so booming and all-encompassing that it turns trance-inducing; a Haino trademark. If that’s too much for you, here’s a cover of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s old blues chestnut “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” from the electric version of his Black Blues covers album. Just Haino and his guitar. And a little distortion. Totally straightforward and faithful. No, really!

But if he’s known for anything, it’s as the guitar god of Fushitsusha. The word comes from a Buddhist sutra representing (I’m reallyparaphrasing here) the point in a meditation in which individuality is lost, and a one-ness with the universe/a universal consciousness is achieved, and if a rock band is ever going to aspire to anything, that ain’t a bad thing to pick. The piece here is from their 1994 monstrosity Pathetique. It starts pretty conventionally, with a simple Hendrix-style riff (think the hot-blues sludge of Band of Gypsys), but soon evolves outward, grows fangs and claws, and begins tearing at itself, spinning modalities and splitting infinitives until it seems as though there’s nothing left but maximalist chaos and bog-stench ooze. But, as is true with the best noise, the magic is in the duration, in its continuous growth and expansion, and in the way he can make even the coarsest-sandpaper sounds stick to your brain like gum. In other words, it’s a mystical thing. It takes a shaman.

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