GUNJOGACRAYON

Not showy or colourful but fruitful and tasty - for GUNJOGACRAYON's debut EP this phrase should be so fit, shouldn't it?

What an interesting and impressive style - around 1980 in Japan was such a musical style I'm very surpirised and amazed indeed. GUNJOGACRAYON is a four-piece (in the beginning five-piece) outfit formed around the violent guitarist Tadashi KUMIHARA and free-form keyboard player Fumio OHMORI (having already left).

Their unique musical style is they have a steady rhythm section (a bassist Takashi MAEDA and a drummer Atsushi MIYAKAWA) on the basis, the aggressive melodymakers as above mentioned, and the avantgarde and eccentric stage performance and voices by Yuji SONODA, called as a MOVER. Here is a wonderful balance and harmony between the two strict pacesetters and the three crazy pacebreakers - oh no joke! It's so difficult for me to explain this balance itself, but you will not feel uncomfortable with listening to their sounds through this album.

Tadashi's guitar solo is always aggressive, heavy, bloody, gaudy, and hatefully flexible. And Fumio's keyboard is hopping, chaotic, fuzzy, and hastily agile as a squirrel. Exactly at a quick thought they have no relation to the word "strict" or "steady", but I consider the really avantgarde gang should calculate this balance by nature. Therefore such a mysterious combination can be sometimes ambient, sometimes danceable, and sometimes freaky.

Furthermore, whatever their substyle should be, you can feel the same atmosphere in them. In this EP they played with stoner, heavily slash, march-like, ambient, or funky style - you can be immersed in their comfortable mismatch as if their ensemble be completely musically correct.

Anyway, Ryuichi "Professor" SAKAMOTO love Tadashi's guitar play and he voluntarily took charge of dub-mix of the fourth track 35. You can understand easily without my review, that's it!