Gerogerigegege

One of the twisted giants of Japan's noise scene, Juntaro Yamanouchi's Gerogerigegege has been working out his particular obsessions with a flood of releases since his debut in 1985. In Japanese, Gerogerigegege is onomatopoeia for simultaneously vomiting and expelling diarrhea, and the sound of Yamanouchi's work often sounds like this played on instruments or as if it's meant to induce such behavior in the unprepared listener. Gerogerigegege's releases usually fall into two categories: noise and senzuri. Noise work is relying on feedback, processing, and distortion, sometimes using pop culture as a source, sometimes not. Senzuri work is pieces that include the sounds of a man masturbating -- all exaggerated moans and groans that last interminably. Even stranger, Yamanouchi has been able to reproduce both styles live, with the latter using Gero-30, a man who loves to masturbate in front of people -- leading to some notorious concerts in the Japanese underground scene. It's also one of the reasons his work has made it to the West -- it's everything one could hope for in a Japanese noise band, something so strange and transgressive that it demands attention. There are many Gerogerigegege recordings, but many had small print runs. One of his earliest releases was "Shaking Box Music (You Are Noisemaker)" from 1985, but this was more a Fluxus-style joke: 100 blank cassettes in a steel box. He soon after became serious and in 1987 released the scarce Senzuri Champion, tracks of masturbation and noise. There is a direct attack on pop music in the next EP, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which mixes rock styles, sex manual samples, and much noise. The zenith of his noise style was reached in 1990s Tokyo Anal Dynamite, one of the classics of the noise genre; it's 40 harrowing...