Fushitsusha

Rich with eccentric, radical figures impossible to pigeonhole, the Japanese musical underground has produced few personalities worthy, in charisma and visionary power, of standing alongside Keiji Haino, an artist who continues to slip free of any definition. Singer before he was ever a guitarist, improviser, performer, composer, explorer of noise and silence, Haino has built a body of work that systematically eludes labels. His creative universe revolves around an almost cosmic conception of sound, in which darkness, emptiness, the undefined and everything mysterious and elusive are not mere poetic images but concrete elements of musical practice. Haino himself has explained that, long before developing a personal instrumental technique, he had learned to grasp the relationship between the surface and depth of sound, studying that invisible space that exists "between front and back," to use his own words.
As the culmination of this reflection, the late Seventies would give birth to Fushitsusha.
But let's take this one step at a time.

Born in Chiba in 1952 and raised on the outskirts of Tokyo, Haino came of age during the most turbulent years of postwar Japan, amid student protests, political tensions and the rise of a fertile artistic counterculture. Before music, it was theatre that drew him in, spurred by his reading of Antonin Artaud. He began dreaming of becoming an underground actor, fascinated by the possibility of using the body, the voice and space itself as expressive tools. That performative grounding proved so decisive that his concerts still resemble genuine rituals to this day.

His first musical revelation came from listening to the Doors, above all "When The Music's Over". Yet what fascinated him was less the music itself than the stage presence of Jim Morrison, along with the theatricality of his voice and his ability to turn rock into a physical, immersive experience. Over the following two or three years he absorbed music almost compulsively, spending entire days listening to records and radio programmes. He would later recall having understood, very early on, the two qualities he sought in music: "What was hard, and what had no equal." He had no interest in virtuosity, nor in belonging to any particular genre, only in what could not be compared to anything else.
It's no surprise, then, that his influences are strikingly heterogeneous. From the closing section of "You Shook Me" by Led Zeppelin came his interest in vocalisation and in the dialogue between voice and guitar; the groove of Blue Cheer hit him like a tank, while Patti Waters revealed vocal possibilities that went well beyond rock.
In this process of initiation, his path took a decisive turn in the early Seventies, when he spent a period at Dam House, a small café near Kyoto's Ginkaku-ji, whose owner, a deep connoisseur of jazz and blues, selected around a dozen records and ordered him to listen to them obsessively, until he had fully internalised them.

Among those records were works by Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Fats Navarro, Lester Young, Charlie Christian, John Lee Hooker, Blind Lemon Jefferson, T-Bone Walker, Leroy Carr, gospel compilations, and even Glenn Gould, whom the man at Ginkaku-ji provocatively considered part of the same spiritual family as jazz. This was no mere listening exercise. Haino recounts that it was precisely through those records that he learned to perceive time in a different way. Jazz and blues taught him to manipulate a single second, to focus on infinitesimal intervals, on what in Japanese culture is called "ma" — the space between events, the pause, the breath, the emptiness that makes sound possible. "It was training in ma. It wasn't simple at all," he would later specify. From that moment on, music stopped being a succession of notes and became the management of space.
It's precisely starting from ma that one can glimpse a possible affinity between Haino's aesthetic and that of Nō theatre, though without speaking of any direct influence. The closeness lies in the shared way of understanding time, silence and stage presence. As in Nō, in his performances too, emptiness is not absence but a space charged with tension, while slowness, repetition and controlled gesture turn the concert into a physical, almost ritual experience — which is exactly what the "Lizard King" Jim Morrison, a true shaman of the stage, had already suggested to him some years earlier.

As a budding guitarist eager to learn, Haino looked around him hungrily. He listened, naturally, to Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, took an interest in the apocalyptic use of distortion by his friend Takashi Mizutani of Les Rallizes Dénudés, but it was the Irishman Rory Gallagher who truly struck him to the core. He would later say that he sensed, even before understanding it in theoretical terms, that Gallagher built his music according to a completely different logic. Where Hendrix and Clapton seemed to move within a system built on five elements, Gallagher used seven. His compositions escaped the categories of rock, blues and country, and in his riffs Haino could even perceive echoes of Baroque music. That intuitive complexity convinced him the guitar could be far more than an instrument meant to produce riffs or solos, becoming instead an open, unpredictable organism capable of generating ever-new forms.

His sonic quest found its first outlet in 1970 with Lost Aaraaff, a group whose name was inspired by a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. The initial idea was already radical: imagining a traditional free jazz trio but replacing the sax with the voice, used wordlessly, as pure sonic material. The project soon took a new direction, with guitar becoming a permanent fixture of the line-up, feedback becoming a structural element, and the vocal delivery growing ever more physical, pushing the group beyond the boundaries of jazz and psychedelic rock. Lost Aaraaff took part in the earliest festivals of the Japanese underground, sharing the stage with Flower Travellin' Band, Blues Creation, Brain Police and radical avant-garde musicians like Masayuki Takayanagi, right up to the 1971 Genya festival, when the audience went so far as to throw stones at the stage — a sign of just how disturbing that music could seem even within the counterculture itself.

After that first experience, Haino went through a long period of near-total invisibility and, rather than withdrawing, devoted himself to a personal quest far removed from any notion of career or record-label demands, developing during those very years the insights into silence, space and improvisation that would form the foundation of his aesthetic. When he resurfaced towards the end of the decade, he did so with a new project destined to become the centre of his artistic output. In 1978, Fushitsusha was born — not a band in the classic sense, but a site of permanent experimentation, a shifting organism that would change line-up dozens of times without ever losing its deep-rooted identity.
The band's very name is already a statement of intent. Fu-Shitsu-Sha is made up of three Japanese characters (不失者) that resist any single translation. Reasoning from the fact that fu and shitsu function as negative prefixes while sha denotes a person, Alan Cummings rendered it — perhaps with a nod to "The Man Without Qualities," the masterpiece by Austrian novelist Robert Musil — as "man with no qualities," though the literal meaning remains deliberately ambiguous, not least because the name describes not something concrete but an unstable dimension, devoid of any identity fixed once and for all — which, on reflection, is perfectly consistent with Haino's poetics, given his lifelong refusal of any predetermined role, even that of guitarist. "First and foremost, I am a singer," he has stated on more than one occasion, overturning the perception built up around his devastating electric guitar playing.

In launching the Fushitsusha project, Haino did not simply seek to fuse rock, free jazz, blues, psychedelia and noise; above all, he wanted to challenge the very idea of rock, transforming it from within through improvisations that might last a few minutes or an entire evening, dominated by bursts of feedback, suspended silences and a conception of time wholly foreign to the song form.
The band's best-known incarnation would remain the electric trio, built around its leader's incendiary guitar, though over the years it would take on ever-changing configurations, at times even performing without guitar or with Haino himself on drums.

For over a decade, however, the existence of Fushitsusha (with Jun Hamano on bass and Shuhei Takashima on drums) remained almost entirely a matter of memory for those lucky enough to have seen them live. Between 1978 and the end of the Eighties, only a handful of recordings circulated, and the band acquired a legendary aura within the Japanese underground partly as a result.
Documentation remained extremely scarce in the years that followed too, with Haino living through another long period of near-total absence from the public scene between 1983 and 1987.
It was only at the end of the Eighties that Fushitsusha finally found a fully realised recorded form. In 1989 they released a double live album destined to become one of their essential testaments. It came out on PSF Records, the label founded in Tokyo in 1984 by Hideo Ikeezumi, guided by the philosophy: "I only release what I like, and I hope some of these sounds might interest the more demanding listener."

Known under various titles (“1st”, “Live I”, or simply, as per the catalogue, “PSF 3/4”), this double album (97 minutes long) finally offers a relatively complete picture of the band’s sound, here made up, besides Haino, of Maki Miura (guitar), the two drummers Akui and Seijiro Murayama, and bassist Yasushi Ozawa, the latter already active, in the second half of the Seventies, in East Bionic Symphonia.
“1st” brings together much of the research Haino had developed over the previous two decades: the relationship between noise and silence, the extreme manipulation of timbre, the physicality of voice and guitar, a particular conception of time, in which every sound seems to spring from the void that precedes it, and improvisation understood as a form of instantaneous composition. Regarding this last point, the relationship between Haino and the other guitarist, Miura, proved especially crucial — Miura, though far from inexperienced in improvisational practices, found in this new adventure a real challenge worthy of him: “Originally I specialised in improvisation, but with Fushitsusha everything was different. If we consider what they did when they improvised, there was simply nothing comparable. On a sensory level I could more or less grasp it, but it was as if my body and mind were learning a new way of thinking. I managed to tune in to what Haino was trying to do, and we discovered we had a lot of common ground in our pre-musical sensibility. I had the feeling that Haino had already explored mystical, unknown dimensions that I too was interested in. So I rehearsed for an incredibly long time, but at the same time I was having fun. I think I rehearsed for about a year, and then, almost without realising it, I found myself on stage with the band. Now that I think about it, sides A and C of that double Fushitsusha Lp are taken precisely from the first concert I played with them.”

(Maki Miura)

Miura's words take on an even deeper meaning when read in light of Haino's own conception of musical improvisation, which, in his view, is not simply the absence of structure or preparation, but a practice grounded in listening and in the constant pursuit of what has not yet been produced. Haino in fact prefers the Japanese term "nazoranai," which can be translated as "do not repeat," to stress the need to avoid reproducing musical gestures already made. Improvisation thus becomes a practice of listening and of constant attention to the present moment, in which every performance should ideally start "from zero," producing sounds that are not the repetition of something already known. From this perspective, the concept of ma also takes on particular importance; Haino refuses to reduce it to the simple idea of "silence," recognising in it instead the deepest moment of the one producing the sound — the perceptual and temporal dimension from which it springs. This conception, bound up with the lived experience of the instant, demands constant listening, directed as much at one's own sound as at that of the other musicians.

With a black cover, on which the band’s name stands out written in Japanese, “1st” opens with “Acchi”, the track that most clearly draws on the psychedelic blues-rock tradition and builds its development through a slow sonic accumulation. The opening riff doesn’t so much serve a melodic function as establish the perimeter within which the track takes shape, creating a tension destined to spread throughout its entire development. Over this foundation, Haino’s harmonica introduces an alienating, almost ritualistic element, while Yasushi Ozawa’s bass moves through deep, elastic lines, continually shifting the balance of the sonic blend. The voice moves between moments of invocation and more assertive passages, never seeking a properly melodic dimension. The guitar, meanwhile, intervenes with atonal, dissonant fragments that interrupt the continuity of the riff and constantly call its stability into question. Even the rhythm section seems to progressively lose its ordering function, contributing to the construction of an unstable, unpredictable sonic environment. It is within this space that Haino’s guitar manages to bring out, alongside its harsher, more dissonant side, a deep, at times almost painful, melancholy.

Haino's poetic universe is pervaded by a recurring desire to abolish the distance between Self and Other. In “Acchi” this tension reaches an extreme, turning the encounter into a process of dissolving identity. The Other is not an individual to be contemplated or loved in any conventional sense, but a territory to inhabit, a consciousness to be reached until it merges with one's own. The images scattered through the lyrics resist any realistic reading. When Haino imagines living “in your nerves” or “tickling the inside of your brain”, the language stops describing a feeling and ventures into an almost visionary dimension, where intimacy coincides with the loss of every personal boundary. It is an unsettling closeness precisely because it has no limits, just as the wound — a recurring element in the musician's poetics — does not simply indicate something to be healed, but becomes a path through which a deeper truth can emerge. This is why Haino comes to desire a “small, beautiful hidden wound” and even an alteration of the listener's consciousness, since only by cracking the surface of the self can a pre-linguistic level of communication be triggered. The identity of the addressee remains, in any case, deliberately undefined, so that the song can suggest an absolute love, a spiritual devotion, or even a dialogue with an unreachable part of oneself.

After a long prologue entrusted to the guitar, “Angou” takes shape around a slow, hypnotic riff, a circular figure that turns the track into a kind of sonic ceremony, out of which Haino’s voice emerges as an alien, visceral element, oscillating between invocation and pure outburst. When the guitar pushes beyond simple thematic development, letting itself be carried away by feedback and distortion, the debt to Takashi Mizutani’s lesson becomes clear — namely, the invitation to reduce rock, first and foremost, to its most physical, obsessive, primordial component.
In this track, blues survives only as an original trace, a skeleton that Haino and Fushitsusha bend until it becomes something else entirely. The riff doesn’t lead the track towards any real resolution, but instead creates a space of continuous tension, where noise, repetition and improvisation coexist in precarious balance. The “code” evoked by the title isn’t a hidden message behind the music, but the music itself in its most primitive, indecipherable state.

The perspective shifts completely in “Suki ni sureba ii”, which projects us into a nocturnal, desert-like dimension, an inner landscape in which Haino’s voice floats like a fragile echo in the void, almost frightened by its own substance in the face of the vastness surrounding it. Yasushi Ozawa’s bass pulses like a heart worn down by pain, while Haino’s guitar rises towards the gates of heaven, turning sound into a vertigo that is, at once, wound and revelation.
With “Todokanai”, Fushitsusha venture into more elusive, unstable territory. The meaning of the title — “unreachable”, “that which never arrives” — seems to find a correspondence in the music itself, which throughout these grooves is sustained by a constant tension.
The first part unfolds through subtractions, accumulations and sudden deviations. There’s no central riff around which to organise the discourse, but rather a flow in which the guitar acts as a destabilising element, capable of opening gaps and fractures through rarefactions, feedback and explosions, while bass and drums maintain a fragile balance. In the second half, the track takes on a new shape: the accumulated tension finally finds a more defined direction in a pulsing, hypnotic rhythmic drive. Bass and drums thus gain weight and continuity, becoming the engine of an ever more intense progression, while Haino lashes out with a series of vocal whiplashes, screams and lacerations that amplify the music’s physical character, once again revealing its latent ritualistic charge.

“Koko” (a title meaning “here, right here”) opens on an angry, insistent riff, before thinning out into a more rarefied section and then building back up into a long, noisy crescendo, just before Haino gifts us one of his most touching solos, sealing an epic transfiguration of a desire so intense it becomes an almost mystical experience.

O you who upon waking were in humiliation
O you who had foreseen every betrayal from the start
The cursed joy,
don't forget it
The joy of having been chosen,
don't throw it away

When will I be able to meet them?
Fragments of myself
In the moment everything collapses,
will I be able to meet them?

How long has this place existed?
You who arrived before me, who are you?
Who is it that's always watching me?
Is it you, smiling in the depths of the earth?
What is it you want so badly from me?

Look, that voice that anyone can hear
Comes only once and immediately goes away again
That voice I had already heard before
Is overflowing from my flesh
This madness, this feeling…
It's fine even if nothing changes
It's enough that that sign over there welcomes me
and smiles at me

That voice… was it you?
This splendor, the strangeness of every word
That landscape
Is your gift
Even though I know it, because I don't want to part from you,
I'll push myself all the way in

“Fuwa Fuwa” returns to the precarious balance between rarefaction (the title literally means something like "soft", "light", "floating") and emotional upheaval, once again entrusting Haino with the task of tearing open wounds in the fabric of the piece. His guitar doesn't dominate the track in any conventional way, but intervenes as a destabilizing force, capable of turning an almost elegiac suspension into a restless landscape. "Fuwa Fuwa" thus reveals one of the album's most fascinating aspects: the alternation between fragility and violence, contemplation and sudden deflagration.
Built on the continuous friction between rhythm and noise, between drum bursts, electric sparks and brutal rasps, "Nattanjanai" is one of the record's most nerve-wracking episodes. The title, with its questioning inflection — "hasn't it become like this?" — seems to allude to an unexpected transformation, to something changing shape almost imperceptibly. The tension of the track grows progressively until the finale, when noise definitively takes over, resolving into a deafening mass in which guitar, drums and voice merge into a single deflagration.
"Nattanjanai" is one of the tracks where what Miura, in a 1990 interview, called "differential rhythm" manifests most clearly: "If you transcribe the rhythm of the riff, the first rest mark is shorter than normal, and the last one is even shorter still. But the difference from the norm is really minimal. In this kind of rhythm you don't play when your foot hits the ground: you have to leave it with your toenails suspended in mid-air. You're probably thinking: why make such a simple riff so complicated? But actually it isn't as simple as I've made it sound. (…) This differential rhythm is one of the keys to Fushitsusha's tension. (…) It's not something you can calculate numerically, as in progressive or electronic music. At the very least it's a natural law, or a kind of breathing pattern."

With the ten minutes of free-form guitar on “Maigo” (a title alluding to a “lost child” or a “lost soul”), the band finally lands on the shores of its own Ithaca.

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27/09/2026