Posts Tagged Japan

AMT is a band I have always respected more than listened to. No matter how great they are to experience live, I can’t find a record that changes this. I mean I think they’ve put out some good recordings of some memorable songs, but I don’t know any of their records front to back. Until now. I mean like right now. Because while writing this post I had to really listen to the song and pay attention to the parts of it and I’m pretty into it. I was going to go more with something like, “well, you have to be there”. “There” being in a crowd of people dancing inside a cloud of pot smoke illuminated by lasers. While that helps, this is hardly an aimless jam. (“This” is a single 51 minute track, not entitled “IAO Chant From the Cosmic Inferno” but “OM Riff From the Cosmic Inferno”.)

First, some words on “The Cosmic Inferno”: I can’t really tell the different incarnations of this band apart. I don’t really know why they do it, but I like that they do it. You can get more info about that some place else. What am I, gonna rewrite a Wikipedia article? I’m not. It’s just something that should be mentioned. I didn’t put it in the title of the post at first so it would fit in one line, but it didn’t fit in one line anyway. This really bothered me, so I put it in and now it fills out two lines very nicely. But maybe your screen resolution is different and it looks terrible. I’m trying not to think about it.

Also, this is basically an extended semi-stealth cover. I didn’t know this until I read the notes on this bootleg which I mentioned in the last meta post.

Om Riff *a musical portmanteau of Gong’s “Master Builder” and Steve Hillage’s “The Glorious Om Riff”. Also known as OM Riff, also known as Om (or OM) Riff From the Cosmic Inferno.

OR IS IT. Short answer: yes. That’s kinda it. Resorting to wiki, we find Om Riff is just Hillage’s remake of Master Builder. Hear both here (or not).

Alright, so they just remade it again and added the chanting part. Well they added some stuff and stretched it out, but the “chant” is from another version of Master Builder from the live album Gong est Mort, Vive Gong. It’s at this point I start to become concerned about my inconsistent usage of italics vs. quotation marks but I am resolved to continue regardless, but why? Why do I do it. Why does it keep—oh. Here:

AMT’s version adds sections of ambient monk-like chants at the beginning, end and part of the middle. It’s not until about 2:30 the the “IAO chant” and The Riff begin. Rhythm guitar sticks to that over a propulsive beat and among swirling synth sine sweeps while main man Kawabata Makoto embarks on a wild noodly solo that eventually becomes an open-ended counter-riff. Then around the 18 minute mark the beat fades. The synth and rhythm guitar relax into drony washes. The counter riff continues but recedes into the background. After a few minutes a slow beat returns for another long solo backed by a one note dirge on rhythm until we hit 30 minutes. Then both guitars lock in to a simple gradually accelerating crescendo figure which becomes a phasy bridge which leads back to the beginning: the beatless chant (but this time with bagpipes? Nope, it’s hurdy gurdy.) and the triumphant return of The Riff and all the rest of that. They ride that for another fifteen minutes, which is a bit much, and towards the end it’s barely the song anymore, it’s kind of a glorious mess that even the main riff is buried in, but, eventually (45:20) the keyboard comes through with the actual Master Builder melody. Which, if you have the liner notes you can sing along to. (They don’t.) But it’s a pretty good payoff once you know it’s coming. Without noticing these separate parts it seems pretty structureless. And if you come in at the middle (like if you’ve got in the car or an iPod) it seems to end too quickly, the chanting part and feedback as everything falls apart at the end is only a minute. But they already ended the song once at the halfway point. It seems like a logical compositional choice. Or maybe they were running out of studio time and overestimated how long they could pad out one song to album-length so it just turned out that way. I don’t know.

Btw you can see all the liner notes at this site.

And you know what, of course the entire thing is also on youtube. Sure it is.

But wouldn’t ya rather buy it? Because you can get it for a buck. I mean the CD is regular CD price but it’s only one song and these guys don’t give a fuck, clearly, about trying to charge you more just because they had some some fun with it. Support that! And yes, the track is mistagged as “IAO Chant From The Cosmic Inferno”. Why you gotta be so uptight about everything? You can change it if you want. You can do that. Go do that. Enjoy. Listen to it more than once. %