This music consists entirely of shocks.
It is not bound by the limits of media.
It is not divided into units of time that
cannot exceed a few short minutes,
nor does it contain melody as a unit of
time. At first, I tried to count along as
I listened, but I gave up almost right
away. This is music that is impossible
to grasp by using those methods.
— Hiromichi Hosoma
Behavioral Scientist and Musician
Kukangendai
A three-piece band formed in 2006 with Junya
Noguchi on guitar and vocals, Keisuke Koyano
on bass guitar and Hideaki Yamada on drums.
Performing as a three-piece, their tracks are
made through a process of editing, replicating
and deliberate error.
This music creates a sense of distortion and
places a burden on the performers, leading
to their characteristically stoic and humorous
live shows. In recent years, the band has
attempted to construct and implement a form
of live concert in which they go back and forth
between playing multiple simultaneous songs
in parallel, but the flow of time manifests as a
single unified rhythm.
In 2016, the band opened their own studio-
cum-venue, Soto, in Kyoto, moving their
activities from Tokyo to Kyoto. 2018 saw the
vinyl release of Zureru, a collaborative album
by Kukangendai and Ryuichi Sakamoto. In
2019, Palm—the band’s first non-collaborative
studio album in seven years—was released on
Ideologic Organ, a sublabel of Editions Mego
headed by Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley.