Wednesday, June 18, 2008

"band first, woman second"


Repress of our dusty Come Friendly Bombs 7" via Fatalist.

Originally this was supposed to be for Turn Illness Into a Weapon but things got fucked up in the studio and half the session was lost. Typically we'd recorded Illness the week before Kiyasu, our original drummer, was due to move back to Japan so we couldn't re-record it and it ended up becoming a 7".

Amongst the material lost in the butchery was the original and different version of Island that ended up being re-recorded for the Warzone Womyn split. Sadly we also lost an incredible noise track that featured some completely bizarre vocal freakouts from Kiyasu; lots of inhuman gruntings, injured primate sounds and general possessed lunacy.

Kiyasu was a true artist, even when he was doing a take of hitting a guitar with a squeaky toy hammer (for the original version of Island) he was totally, insanely focused on what he had to do. We would arrive at practice and he'd been there for six to eight hours before us just practicing everything like mad and writing everything down in his black book. I once snuck a look at Kiyasu's black book when he was eating his drummer meal of two bananas and a litre of orange juice and nestled between lines of drum notation was the two words "bread noise." And who wouldn't miss daily conversations on packed subway trains that started with lines like "how do you ask a girl to show you her pussy in English?"

And then there were the times when Kiyasu would tell us utterly fucking terrifying stories of growing up in a Yakuza household. I'm not even making that up.

Anyway, we miss that crazy asshole.

He can now be found playing in the noise crazed grind of Sete Star Sept and occasionally with legend Keiji Heino.

(and he learned to play hardcore from this guy)