Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O.

The show by Acid Mothers Temple of Kawabata Makoto – in their most iconic lineup, Melting Paraiso U.F.O. – at Spazio Aereo in Marghera, is one of the most eagerly awaited dates for all northeastern devotees of the most radical psychedelia.

The collective behind the band (based in Osaka, Japan) has established itself since the second half of the '90s as a forge of talent for lysergic music, a majestic summation of ferocious cosmic rides spanning decades of adventurous sound, from pure cacophony to electronic avant-garde, from acid-trip jams to classical minimalism, from the grammar of the great German bands of the '70s to baroque progressions.

Opening the event are two promising homegrown acts, Sonicatomic (vibrant jazz-punk) and Plastic Experience For Vegetable Sons (Yume Bitsu-style post-rock drone). Then, when the Acid Mothers take the stage with a new and even sharper bass-drums section, it takes just a few supremely powerful touches of chaotic improvisation to scramble your perceptions. Their imagery evokes and fuses together lysergic samurai, space warriors, ascetic monks, kitsch erotic cabarets, sonic terrorists, demented jokers, electronic vandals.

The four properly take off with the dense, ancestral, suffocating atmospheres of "La Novia", sung in chorus and then elevated into a mighty, endless concertation on "Acid Mother Sky" (their version of "Mother Sky" by Can). But that's only the beginning. After a brief conventional pause, the only one of the whole concert, the doors swing open onto their favorite format, an uninterrupted jam that transcends everything, any structure, from the eternally repeated mantra, impeccably led by a Makoto in trance, to free-form passages, often the exclusive territory of longtime comrade Higashi Hiroshi and his chirping keyboard of the stars.

Whether the sources feeding their engine are their own songs or someone else's (for instance a "Wizard" by Black Sabbath), the result is always a crescendo, an intensifying surge, and at times even a supersonic acceleration, that darts, streaks and veers above and beyond musical notation, a psychotropic experience that grips the listener and drags them to the very limits of what listening can bear.

Amid off-kilter rides and near-endless devastating bacchanals, the band's deepest spiritual kinship is above all with Gong, reaching an epic peak when Kawabata intones the mantric chant of "Flying Teapot" amid the most piercing din, conjuring the sense of being in the middle of a cosmic circus that Daevid Allen himself would have loved, with renewed, blazing power. Another glorious moment is their own techno-pounded version of "Pink Lemonade", driving enough to get the whole venue moving, before gradually sliding back into the usual merciless lysergic roar. And the grand finale, a compact version of "Cometary Orbital Drive", is simply a summation that's if anything even more exhausting than everything heard before, for a total of nearly two hours of intensely live music.

So despite a lineup revolutionized with new blood, their cohesion is more rock-solid than ever (especially the drummer, a human machine unleashing devastating rolls worthy of Jaki Liebezeit). The Acid Mothers rival their fellow countrymen Boredoms for the title of marathon live act and visionary act, full stop. Their eternal suites, as they fill every corner of the venue, conjure and leave imprinted a freak-out cosmos, one that holds both an austere memory of folk roots and an awareness of an unknown future, of a language yet to come. No encore: after them, only the void of space.

(photo contributions by Andrea Sanson)

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