The Boredoms‘ Eye Yamantaka is ordinarily a man of few words, but the Japanese experimental music veteran let the flood gates fly open via my e-mail interview. No snores here – just expect to whet your appetite for the Boredoms‘ Tuesday, March 18, show at the Fillmore. Ex-Black Dice drummer and current Soft Circle impressario Hashim Kotaro Bharoocha provided the translation.
SFBG: The new album is amazing — it sounds like positively symphonic! What was the idea, goal, or focus?
Eye Yamantaka: Recently I have been getting into symphonic progressive rock. I
want to buy music like that, but I don’t know who’s making it. I’m also a fan of progressive heavy metal from Scandinavia. On the album, I am taking a minimalist approach by manipulating sounds on the turntable (I am using church pipe organ music by Jon Gibson).
The sub-patterns from the church organ sounded like human voices to me, so we had that scored, and had an actual choir sing it. We weren’t doing anything on Christmas Eve, so we decided to do a show that day, and the choir fit the night perfectly.
SFBG: I remember interviewing Eye and Yoshimi years ago in the late ’80s in San Francisco. How would you say the band has evolved since then? What has your muse been telling you? Where have your
interests led you?
EY: The band went through significant changes on SPR and GO!!!!!! We started to take a minimalist approach from SPR, but after this album we took that approach to the extreme. I think that those records were a rebirth point for us. After those records, we got rid of the guitar and bass in the ensemble, and I started to DJ a lot more (I was DJing a lot more than performing with the band). We started to think in terms of performing as if we were a record player, rather than playing as a normal band.