les rallizes denudes rfi

I've seen a couple of reviews of Naked Diza Star (I'm quite sure it's Diza with a D) complain that the discs are CDRs, so tread carefully.

It is Naked Diza Star, you are correct

Listened to some of it yesterday. Only issue I have is the sequencing, it sorta skips around and spans a lot of time (73 to 87), but there are some pretty great jams on here. Surprised by how much I dug "The Last One" from '87. Also surprised that the audio fidelity of these boots never really improved in like 15 years. Like it's often difficult to tell what 'era' you are listening to based on audio fidelity alone.

But yeah, CDR or no CDR, it's quite a bit of LRD for not much dough, so I may go for it, if only to have some new jams for the car

So has anyone figured out why there's a swastika on the drum set in that one video? Because I love this band but it's been bumming me out since I saw it. And yes, I registered an account just so I could ask this question.

link ?

Sorry, it's from way earlier in the thread: https://youtu.be/sbhtAejVmEg

It's on the kick drum; you can see it pretty clearly at around 5:30. I know Mizutani was involved in radical left politics, but sometimes radical left-wingers become radical right-wingers. I have a feeling something else is going on here, but it just bugs me not to know because I otherwise idolize this band.

probably general cluelessness/shock value thing going on

yeah, my best guess is it's a stooges tribute sort of thing ?

i did like four hours of research this morning and nothing turned up.

sent a few emails, will see if that yields anything but i strongly suspect (and hope) this was an idiosyncratic, very stupid, isolated occurrence.

Thanks for the replies! Yeah, I almost wonder if it was just there from the last act or something. I did a fair amount of research too (limited, of course, by not speaking Japanese), but all references to politics are to the Japanese Red Army Faction, etc. Let me know if you hear anything interesting back from your e-mails!

i did hear back and was tipped to a small group of far-right japanese bands doing ultranationalist / oi type things, none of which i feel like discussing in this thread. that said, i went down a discogs rabbit hole trying to see if there was any crossover between musicians in that scene and mitzutani's band c. '94 or really ever. nothing came up but tbh i didn't try all that hard. if that seems like a promising tip to you, feel free to send me an ilx mail and i can give you names of bands and musicians who were most certainly using nazi iconography / lyrics on purpose. as for me i'm going to move on i guess.

I thought the swastika was used quite a lot for shock value during punk and before. You see it on Siouxdie's armband, Side thirty, Gonn's amp cover et etc.

So would think it tied in with that.

Not sure if Ron Asheton's Nazi clothing fetishism does. That may be his own aesthetic.

my phone autocorrected Siouxsie's armband and Sid's tshirt.
THere were other uses of the symbol at the time too.
& Gonn were 10 years earlier, their Black Out of Gretely is a killer garage track.

Thanks for looking into it -- I'm tempted to do that discogs digging, but I think instead I'll just choose to believe that it was the drummer's misguided Stooges tribute. I just think that if Mizutani had taken a Nazi turn in the '90s, that would have made it into the legend. The fact that he played with Arthur Doyle in '97 also makes it unlikely (though not impossible!) that he believed in Aryan supremacy.

not sure if anything is to be gained by my weighing in here but ime the general Japanese grasp of Naziism and its tenets, both in theory and in practice, is very limited. This stuff is not taught in Japanese schools, the European context and history of it is obscured, and the understanding of the symbolism is vague. The average Japanese person does not really know what a Nazi was (much less a Jew).

That being said, it makes it more likely that that flag was more in the spirit of punk provocateurs, primarily British, that trotted out Nazi imagery for shock value, a detailed discussion of which recently took place here: The Ian Curtis memorial thread. It seems reasonable to assume that Les Rallizes Denudes were not real European Theater WWII buffs and more likely taking cues from a musical culture/iconography with which they were more passingly familiar (Stooges, UK punk, etc.)

It has been announced via the official Rallizes website that Takashi Mizutani died in 2019, which is a very on-brand way of breaking this news:
https://www.lesrallizesdenudes-official.com/

Heaviest RIP. The statement on the website says we can expect archival releases "with far more alive and striking sound than the bootlegs that have been circulating over twenty years"(!)

damn rip

some are saying that Mizutani may not actually be gone ... former band members are claiming they talked to him last year. the plot thickens?

Big if true!

rip...if true, lol

this is all so much in character, happy to remain confused (esp if we get better quality recordings that aren't on that fucking Phoenix guy's pirate label)

https://thequietus.com/articles/30783-makuto-kubota-les-rallizes-denudes-interview

Interview with former bassist Makoto Kabuta, who's overseeing the remastering

that was fabulous, thanks. I hope they sue the shit out of the Radioactive/Phoenix dude.

My copy of '77 Live (retitled Le 12 Mars 1977 à Tachikawa is on the "Over Level" label, which only put out two releases according to Discogs; the other one is another Rallizes bootleg from 1972.

that was fabulous, thanks. I hope they sue the shit out of the Radioactive/Phoenix dude.

does seem like he's probably made a decent chunk of change off of this music. also he is very lame.

amazing interview though! excited to see what comes next... LRD deserves way better than what they've gotten, will be great to have official, well-done versions of these records. will remastering change the entire vibe, though??? (probably not)

lol I hope not!

Decent masters should only enhance the vibe! Had no idea about the Hosono / Sandii & the Sunsetz connection.

Glad I offloaded most of the boots I had (especialy from the aforementioned organisation) but I'm sort of expecting releases to trickle out at most if the family don't get someone experienced to take it on. Great interview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_34Jq5pTDSU

Just got round to this now, good interview. Doubt we will learn anything new from the remasters though, but nice to get some info on what that kind of scene might be like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrQL7K-BdOU

fantastic

oh wow - https://pitchfork.com/news/les-rallizes-denudes-officially-release-white-awakening-listen/

Well this'll keep ya going

https://lightintheattic.net/releases/8593-the-oz-tapes

Operating out of a small upstairs space just around the corner from the train station in the Kichijoji neighborhood of Tokyo, OZ was a scruffy, DIY affair that lasted not much more than a year. Between June 1972 to September 1973, the cafe and performance space became the nerve center for the city’s burgeoning underground and counterculture set.

Hadaka No Rallizes, aka Les Rallizes Dénudés, the psychedelic noisemakers originally from Kyoto, was one of the marquee names at OZ. Led by the enigmatic Takashi Mizutani, the now-legendary band was one of the earliest bookings for the venue, and would ultimately close out OZ Last Days, a raucous five-day blowout to celebrate the short but wonderful world of OZ. To commemorate the occasion, recordings made at OZ were released as OZ DAYS LIVE, a private press 2LP set featuring Miyako Ochi, Acid Seven, Masato Minami, Taj Mahal Travellers, and four tracks by the Rallizes—which constituted just a fraction of what had been recorded at the time. For nearly 50 years, these songs remained the only official appearance of the Rallizes on vinyl LP—until now.

With The OZ Tapes, we are finally able to hear the missing pieces. Stored on reels of Scotch analog recording tape, these recordings had laid dormant in storage for almost half a century. The previously unheard material reveals the Rallizes at some of their most unhinged and experimental, as well as moments of delicate tenderness—the two sides of Mizutani that would come to define his band’s legacy. Taken as a whole, The OZ Tapes help to demystify the band’s murky history, yet this vibrant and seemingly relatively innocent era only hints at the explosive, uncharted worlds into which Mizutani would lead the band.

Vinyl only (so far at least), due in November.

so psyched for this. november so far away though...

Ah, very happily there is a full digital edition of this also coming via https://lesrallizesdenudes.bandcamp.com/

Also per John Whitson of Holy Mountain: "There’s also going to be a 3CD with the other groups on the original Oz Days comp plus extra LRD some time next year."

gahhhhhh so cool

Annnnd that digital release of their OZ Tapes material is now live.

https://lesrallizesdenudes.bandcamp.com/album/the-oz-tapes

brb hittin the bong and pressing play

Thanks for the reminder!

Nice! Still excited for the 3xCD thing too.

so stoked for this

it sounds so CLEAR

i'm so happy. dream come true

really sounds good. what a cool band!

BTW looks like there was a listening party-only release just now, as in a party for this release:

https://www.discogs.com/release/22958801-%E8%A3%B8%E3%81%AE%E3%83%A9%E3%83%AA%E3%83%BC%E3%82%BA-Les-Rallizes-D%C3%A9nud%C3%A9s

That was vague: a party for the OZ Tapes release, but now there's this something else out there:

A1 A Shadow On Our Joy = 僕らの喜びに影がさした (Ver.2) 6:44
B1 Wilderness Of False Flowers = 造花の原野 (Ver.2) 18:30

Only 100 copies pressed, sold exclusively at the "Fall and Rise of Les Rallizes Dénudés Vol.2" event.

And it was on Temporal Drift so it's legit, whatever it is.

I really do want to hear this alternate "Wilderness of False Flowers" because it's over twice as long as the version on the new album!