Mono - Rock symphonies from the Land of the Rising Sun

Mono can rightly be considered the finest Eastern disciples of a genre - post-rock - as hard to pin down as it has been significant over the last two decades. Formed by guitarists Takakira Goto and Yoda, bassist Tamaki and drummer Yasunori Takada, the band came together toward the end of the Nineties, when the wave of climax-driven rock, effect-laden guitars and soft/loud dynamics had not yet firmly taken root.

The case of the Japanese outfit is actually rather particular: tied neither to the more classical-leaning strand nor to the noisier one, the quartet positions itself at the intersection of both approaches. Over their now decade-long career, Mono have distinguished themselves not only for the sheer volume and quality of their output, but also for their ability to squeeze a touch of novelty out of every album.

Their first work, dated 2000, is the EP titled Hey, You. Across roughly forty minutes split into four tracks, Mono explore the path of instrumental rock, sounding at times raw but always very fresh. In the thirteen minutes of "Karelia", the guitars reverberate in a swaying motion, rising in pitch before settling into long minutes of stillness. And while "Finlandia" brings out the band's more devilish side, "Black Woods" starts from classical-tinged warmth before touching on notes of pure madness, amid effect-drenched guitars and noise cranked up to the max.

A year after that first EP, they caught the attention of Tzadik, the avant-garde label par excellence, for which they would release their debut album: Under The Pipal Tree. The eight tracks, spanning an hour in total, are all fairly distinctive, thanks to an unusual compositional variety. "Karelia (Opus 2)" opens the torment: a twelve-minute track that soars fiercely on guitars with an almost sludge-like quality, first building up before exploding and violently reshaping itself. "Jackie Says" recalls the more peaceful, meditative side of Mogwai, while "Holy" lives up to its title, unfolding in a relaxed manner throughout.

Form and substance sublimate into a tense character charged with destructive energy, and "Error 9" offers clear proof of it. The closing "L'America" and "Human Highway" settle into a quieter, more meditative register compared to the album's general mood. In a continuous alternation of surges and stillness, an excellent debut album unfolds - one that makes an impression but doesn't quite land the decisive blow.

Enthusiasm for the critical success galvanizes the band, who in 2002 release the long-awaited follow-up to their debut. One Step More And You Die, put out by Minemusic, is a notably leaner work in how it unfolds: besides an overall reduction in track length, there's a sense that the songs are less constructed and follow a flow all their own. Measured against Under The Pipal Tree, the sense of architectural complexity gradually fades, in favor of a more immediate sound, more direct and sincere. What also impresses in the Japanese band's second effort is a vaguely electronic streak. While the impetuous, furious beauty of "Halo" - which starts in a hushed tone before opening up first to melody and then to a mathematically-flavored noise - cannot fail to astonish, just as the hushed cold/warm alternation of "Loco Tracks" does, what truly enchants is the Eluvium-style reverb of "Mopish Morning, Halation Wiper": a mournful guitar follows the flow of waves in an autumn-tinged low tide, sea spray caresses the sand drifting lightly at the water's surface, shattering its gentle flow and rendering the sound granular.

And while "Sabbath" might come across as a bit plain, the record's true masterpiece - and surely one of the expressive peaks of the band's aesthetic - answers to the title "COM(?)": a sonic flow that feels like a fire spreading vertically, amid guitars and the clatter of cymbals, first trembling, then dying down and regaining strength in a noise-laced finale. The guitars light up the whole landscape. Exposing themselves to the usual criticism about the repetitiveness of their approach, Mono pull out of the hat a record that is as angry as it is melancholic, one likely to be remembered as their sharpest work.

In 2004 Mono land on the US market, and their music begins to reach an international audience thanks to a deal signed with the major American independent label Temporary Residence, which that same year releases their third studio album, Walking Cloud And Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered And The Sun Shined. Without straying too far from the mood already expressed in their earlier work, Mono try to develop some of those threads further on a record that nonetheless comes across as the least inspired follow-up to their previous output. The album shows a flow made homogeneous by vibrating guitars that lead the listener by the hand along an already charted path. Thus, the steep ups and downs of "16:12" and "Last Snow" are only thrilling up to a point, while elsewhere, playing between nineteenth-century-flavored odes ("Ode") and tributes to most worthy masters ("Halycon"), Mono build a tapestry whose outlines remain suspended in limbo.

Even though there's no shortage of gripping moments, in short, a sense of incompleteness prevails. The melancholy of the previous work here gives way to conflicting feelings: Walking Cloud And Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered And The Sun Shined strikes neither the heart nor the mind.

That same year, that old fox John Peel, sensing the Japanese band's potential, invited them for his famed sessions, to perform three tracks from the record they had just released.

2005 saw the realization of a collaboration, titled Palmless Prayer / Mass Murder Refrain, between the four Japanese musicians and World's End Girlfriend, the imaginative electronic experimenter, also from Japan.

The five lengthy compositions (running to about an hour and a quarter in total) distill the band's already pronounced emotional potential into something truly moving, here emphasized by a more accentuated melodic vein as well as by the meticulous production, courtesy of World's End Girlfriend, and by the generous contribution of classical and orchestral instrumentation, including piano, saxophone and a string trio.

The conceptual kinship with the work of Rachel's, and the more strictly musical closeness to the quieter, orchestral moments of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, is immediately suggested by the slow unfolding of "Trailer 1", which, after a brief intro colored by xylophones, puts the romantic, aching dialogue between the strings front and center from the very start, barely framed by an impalpable rhythm that grows silently and gracefully, keeping its emotional tension intact, repressed within subtle harmonic meanders rather than spilling into an all-too-predictable explosion.

The Japanese band's post-rock imprint remains, though unlike in the recent past it is expressed here not through distorted surges and cadenced rhythms, but in compositions that appear measured, as serene as they are visionary ("Trailer 2"). Only in a few passages does a vaguely "rock" disposition surface, materialized by Tamaki's gentle bass, which introduces "Trailer 3" and its seventeen minutes of pure emotion, combining melody, classicism and distortion as no one has managed to do since the mighty GY!BE.

But even where the guitars' contribution is more pronounced, as in "Trailer 5", the band pushes toward melody, toward the harmonic fluidity of compositions that demand great patience and application both in their performance and in their listening. To the measured technical skill of harmonic structures that are at once complex and immediate is added an unprecedented taste for limpid, almost ambient-like expansions, enriched by the ethereal choirs of "Trailer 4" and by the moving piano of Kazumasa Hashimoto, who, on the final two tracks, admirably completes the "classical" components of a work that sounds like a natural extension of Mono's own output. The album, released only for the Japanese market, would be reissued the following year by Temporary Residence.

In 2006, ahead of the new album's release, an EP titled Memories from the Future came out, containing two not particularly notable tracks, one more fiery and vibrant, the other placid and soft.

The following You Are There, recorded with the contribution of the ever-present Steve Albini, confirms a sonic framework marked by a strong contrast between melodic moments, the fruit of great compositional care, and noisy spasms, at times sudden and violent enough to brush up against the borders of metal.

The album can be ideally split into two symmetrical halves — each made up of two long movements and a shorter interlude — the first of which presents the band's usual vertical motion and a continuous alternation of passages, while the second is composed of relatively smoother, more fluid pieces, in which the romantic and orchestral components prevail over the metallic fury of the guitars. Yet the opening track, "The Flames Beyond The Cold Mountain", begins with three minutes of dense, muffled stillness, a mystical silence, over whose lulling stasis a kind of "choir" among the instruments takes hold, guided by a drowsy rhythmic pace within a refined weave that then surges into a series of concentric explosions, layering feverish percussion and increasingly thunderous guitars, whose distorted echoes dissolve into the distance, leading the track first back to the stillness of its incipit and then into a more austere crescendo, up to the rough guitar charge of the finale.

The following "A Heart Has Asked For The Pleasure" softens the tone but leaves the compositional tension intact, here stripped of the previous track's splendid melody into a bare, tormented interlude still steeped in darkness. Closing out this first "side" of the record, "Yearning" revisits a pace similar to the opening track, but this time, with no melodic mediation whatsoever, set within claustrophobic atmospheres, with an approach that immediately hints at a martial gait, already torn open halfway through its quarter-hour length by cutting distorted waves.

The second part of the record opens with the airy orchestral texture of "Are You There?", in which the essentially lyrical compositional spirit culminates in an ever-latent tension, which best captures Mono's ability to build intricate, post-atomic symphonies of moving dramatic intensity. Where the corresponding "The Flames Beyond The Cold Mountain" moves in swirling fashion, "Are You There?" is instead smoother and more fluid, revealing its epic grandeur amid "rock" constructions and orchestral openings chasing one another, merging into a shifting emotional interplay that culminates in a substantial (over three minutes) coda of romantic minimalism, an ideal prelude to the graceful piano that marks "The Remains Of The Day", a brief, hazy twilight passage, a delicate fresco that beautifully conveys the subtle melancholy of the day's decline.

Finally, in "Moonlight" romanticism takes over, dispelling the tangled darkness of the record's more restless moments into a soft yet energetic elegy, not without a surge of passion still tempered by the coexistence of harmonic structures capable of masterfully smoothing out certain sonic roughness, rendering — translated into epic abstraction — what the first part of the record conveyed through a rougher, more concrete impact.

You Are There has the merit of being a work that doesn't fold in on itself in mannered apocalyptic tones, but instead opens up, thanks to its many compositional solutions, to an intense romanticism and to the outline of an elusive hope born of emotion.

Given the high demand for the EPs, which were often hard to find, 2007 saw the release of Gone, a CD/DVD that, besides collecting all the short-form releases from 2000 to 2006, also includes filmed material from the quartet.

Three years after their last album, Mono return to the spotlight with Hymn To The Immortal Wind. Images of memory seem to flow one after another, as vivid in spirit as they are yellowed in form. Hymns, as we know, are flowing poems that glide by lightly while still carrying a dense emotional impact. And Mono manage to capture their heart and essence, laying out their sonic weave across horizontal planes, its ripples almost always softened by strings. The flow of the notes benefits from this, cascading in a natural stream, far removed from any sense that the mechanism was artificially built or engineered. The hymn to the wind is thus a free game, loosened from the reins of structure, hovering and spinning on itself in a light, relaxed motion. Where in certain earlier works the formal construction of the songs followed a kind of rigid, pre-set script that ended up trivializing their purely emotional dimension, here instead the expressiveness and immediacy of the sound reach absolute peaks.

The chapter Mono open with this album is, however, undeniably new: dominating the scene is a twenty-eight-piece orchestra, the guitars quiet down, and it's the violins and the occasional drum cymbal that envelop the listening experience. The introductory section of the opening "Ashes In The Snow" is about as close as one can get to Sigur Rós, amid faint little bells and an enchanting piano, before it comes to an abrupt halt. The classical warmth of the almost eleven minutes of "Burial At Sea" revisits the band's trademark emotional climaxes, softened by a string section that reins in the guitars' action, rendering it warm and even.

"Silent Flight, Sleeping Dawn" recalls the happiest moments of Rachel's, while "Pure As Snow (Trails Of The Winter Storm)" is a new feat: the scattered notes à-là Mogwai at the start cross paths symmetrically, the violins step in to reinforce the gust of wind, which grows ever more sumptuous, first flowing with increasing vehemence, then suddenly calming down only to gather strength again in a spine-tingling finale.

"The Battle To Heaven", as the title suggests, brings back the quartet's most Luciferian guise, proving as compelling and forceful as it is perhaps a little trapped within its own climax mechanics: the surges and noise of their early days reclaim the souls of the four musicians, who, wielding their guitars, erect an imposing sonic wall. The closing "Everlasting Light" unfolds its narrative on piano sustained by the orchestra, behind which the guitars kick in, climbing upward before collapsing back on themselves, leaving the close to a compelling run of violins.

Hymn To The Immortal Wind presents Mono in an unusual guise. Steering clear of easy soft/loud formulas and pulling what is probably their most convincing and mature work out of the hat, the Japanese quartet has put together an enchanting record whose classic intimacy leaves you genuinely stunned at several points. Caught between classicism, post-rock and instrumental music, Mono have forged an evocative work that certainly won't be lost to the winds of memory.

The magnificence, and at the same time the excesses, of "Hymn To The Immortal Wind" somehow celebrated the summa (and the imminent fading) of a musical path that held absolute centrality over the previous decade. Mono's orchestral symbiosis was decisive and in some sense definitive: its powerful sonic and emotional impact - successfully replicated in New York with the Wordless Music Orchestra - reflected an end-of-the-world epic reaching its peak, a funeral chant brimming with hope for whatever would remain.

And, all things considered, the follow-up offered by For My Parents is in line with that sentiment: the immortal wind is the wind of memories, of a present read through a constant backward glance. The Japanese band stays true to the romantic pride built up over an entire career, refusing to slot itself into the new aesthetic forms of instrumental rock.

As suggested by the greater length of the individual tracks, the difference lies in a partial abandonment of the climax in favor of an extra dose of reflectiveness; the distortions and the buildup of the various elements tend to stretch out over a wider horizon, avoiding the classic contrast between calm and turmoil.

So, while "Legend" and "Unseen Harbor" retain the eternal breadth already found in the emblematic "Ashes In The Snow", the following "Nostalgia" happily gives itself over to quiet emotion. The role of the orchestra, a founding element of the 2009 album, is found far from the importance granted to it back then, ending up as little more than a "glue" between the main instruments, further underlining the autonomy they in fact take on in every live show.

For My Parents is a relatively subdued record, well aware that another step forward would certainly have been cloying. What survives is memory, the faded image worn down by a band entirely faithful to itself. Many have already grown tired of this melancholy rock, and yes, it's probably been past its sell-by date for a few years now. On the other hand, anyone who believes memory is necessary to better live in the present can still find a devoted ally in Mono.

In response to all these considerations, two years later the Japanese quartet surprised everyone with a bold double album, a nearly two-hour monolith split into two halves. The sounds are the same as those of the unforgettable "Hymn", only now separated into its two components: the melodic, lyrical, intimate and crepuscular side on The Last Dawn, and the side of epic, endless climbs, explosions and walls of deafening, distorted guitars on Rays Of Darkness. So, if the intro to the first is represented by the long, interlocutory chiaroscuro of "The Land Between Tides/Glory", "Kanata" is one of the most beautiful and pure landscapes ever described by the quartet, with the shimmering guitar taking center stage as narrating voice. "Elysian Castles" sits on the same wavelength, sketched in pencil and charcoal just like the album cover, set against the more vivid and pungent colors of "Cyclone". The backward journey of "Where We Begin" suddenly pushes the narrative's pace forward, with drums and guitars shaking things up just enough to let you fully savor the beautiful finale of the title track: a dawn of soft, crisp shades, a warm cradle to take refuge in. A twin sibling though formally its opposite, the second disc instead collects two of the most tormented jolts in the band's entire discography. Here too it's a long, preparatory odyssey that decisively clears the ground, "Recoil, Ignite", which starts quietly only to writhe toward the end, offering a decent preview of what's to come. The torturous grip of distortion in the closing "The Last Rays" paradoxically acts as a refuge from the hurricane of "The Hand That Holds The Truth", which goes well beyond the boundaries of sludge, helped along by the screams of friend Tetsuya Fukagawa, the voice of Envy. Nor is there any shortage here of an exception to the rule, this time taking the form of the symphonic hymn to melancholy that is "Surrender".

For anyone who knows Mono inside out, though, none of this is really new. By isolating the components of their sound in pure form, they manage to create the illusion of a sonic evolution that, in fact, isn't really there. And yet, even once the trick is exposed (or rather, never truly materializes), their mastery emerges intact. If anything, it comes across even greater.

If you were looking for the cinematic equivalent of Nowhere Now Here, the Japanese band's return to the fray, you'd find it in some dark film, perhaps set in a rain-soaked European capital with an apocalyptic backdrop.

The opening of this latest work by the post-rock outfit from the Land of the Rising Sun is, after all, precisely an unsettling, muted anticipation of an end that seems imminent and unpostponable; "God Bless" has the flavor of a disquieting preamble, evoking the seventh angel of the apocalypse, trumpet to its lips, ready to fade away only so that the second track ("After You Comes The Flood") can detonate, with no way out, no repentance, no redemption.

"Nowhere Now Here" is nothing more than a journey into darkness, into dimly lit zones, where the sounds recall noir/thriller works from television or film entertainment (Angelo Badalamenti and Mogwai above all). If the foretold end hasn't arrived yet, it's only a matter of moments. The album is a work of closeness and distance, of contact and farewell, embraces and departures carried on arpeggios that swing between the dreamlike, the surreal (a ballerina on tiptoe atop Big Ben) and the elegiac ("Far And Further"). It's music rooted in the dichotomy between being and no-longer-being (now here, precisely, and nowhere), unfolding through crescendos and diminuendos of considerable dynamic range, with extensive use of reverb and delay.

The repetition of the phrasing too often slips from being a cradle for the imagination (the Iceland of Sigur Rós doesn't feel so far away) into a mere backdrop for dull, listless evenings; what's more, several tracks from a promising opening often dissolve, running aground in noise-laden finales with blurry outlines, closer to a vacuum of ideas than to genuine artistic awareness.

For their eleventh studio album, Pilgrimage Of The Soul, recorded in the summer of 2020, Mono return to a clearly defined post-rock classicism built up over more than twenty years of career, looking in particular to the ecstatic style of their third album, Walking Cloud and Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered And The Sun Shined (Temporary Residence, 2004), the record that first made them widely known during a golden era for the genre. Over time the sound of the cult Japanese band has hardened and grown sturdier, drawing closer to post-metal territory, which it has paired with increasingly refined orchestral arrangements, always in the skilled hands of Chicago producer Steve Albini.

It is within this blend of styles and sounds that "Pilgrimage Of The Soul" finds its reason for being, caught between elegy ("Imperfect Things") and unease ("To See A World"), between Pelican ("Reptide"), Sigur Rós ("Heaven In a Wild Flower") and God Is An Astronaut ("Innocence"), with the closing section bringing it all together in a perfect synthesis ("The Auguries", "Hold Infinity In The Palm Of Your Hands"). The result is undoubtedly pleasant, but the expressive solutions Mono adopt here spin too much on themselves. While the album is indeed more cohesive and inspired than its predecessor, "Nowhere Now Here" (Temporary Residence/Pelagic, 2019), it offers no real spark of novelty, bringing us back spiritually and emotionally to the Nietzschean idea of an "eternal return of the same", embodied by the bittersweet circularity of the closing "And Eternity In An Hour".

Twenty-five years after their debut, Mono mark the anniversary with an orchestral tour and with Oath (2024), their twelfth album, which ideally continues the path laid out by Pilgrimage Of The Soul. Recorded and mixed by Steve Albini, the record broadens the band's sonic spectrum without blunting its expressive power: a balance between new influences, more prominent orchestration and the band's usual knack for building emotional narratives without words.

Taakakira "Taka" Goto observes a world marked by greed and competition, while the music seeks a more peaceful harbor. The rhythm section led by Dahm Majuri Cipolla props up the ethereal interplay of Taka, Tamaki Kunishi and Yoda, sustaining a journey that alternates tension with luminous openings. The kraut-rock pulse of "Reflection" introduces a building sequence – "Us, Then, Oath", "Then, Us" – in which horns, strings and electronics expand the sonic palette. Tracks like "Hear The Wind Sing", "Hourglass", "Moonlight Drawing" and "We All Shine On" display a mature balance of delicacy, dynamics and control, with guitars that are more often melodic than abrasive.

The common thread is time: its passing, its weight, and the way we inhabit it, themes that find their synthesis in the closing explosion of "Time Goes By". Here Kunishi's bass and a particularly incisive drum part drive the final crescendo, closing out an album conceived as an ascent toward a more human, open space.

In this context, Oath also becomes an implicit tribute to Albini. A work that confirms a band still on the move, capable of renewing itself without losing its identity.

Contributions by Raffaello Russo (“You Are There”, “Palmless Prayer / Mass Murder Refrain”), Alessandro Biancalana (“Palmless Prayer / Mass Murder Refrain”), Michele Palozzo (“For My Parents”), Matteo Meda (“The Last Dawn / Rays Of Darkness”), Federico Piccioni (“Nowhere Now Here”), Maria Teresa Soldani (“Pilgrimage Of The Soul”), OndaRock Staff (“Oath”)

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