I feel like this unit deserves a notably lengthier and more verbose description than the ones I had written for archives previously, partly because I'm probably never doing a full write-up due to reasons that will become apparent, partly because those reasons need some context.
Musica Transonic was a Japanese "contemporary improvised heavy psychedelic" supergroup, of sorts, formed in 1995, by Asahito Nanjo (electric bass, producer, "concept-writer", ex. High Rise, Mainliner, Toho Sara, Ohkami No Jikan, Nijiumu, etc, founder and studio engineer of La Musica Records), Kawabata Makoto (guitarist, ex. Mainliner, Toho Sara, Ohkami No Jikan, Tsurubami, Erochika, Baroque Bordello, etc, future founder and leader of Acid Mothers Temple and many other groups and adjacent projects, future temporary guitarist of british Space Rock group Gong...), and Tatsuya Yoshida (drums, ex. Ruins, Koenji Hyakkei, YBO², Akaten, The Gerogerigegege, Torture Garden, etc, future replacement drummer for John Zorn's Painkiller and founder of Magaibutsu Records, future leader of Korekyojinn, The World Heritage, Daimonji, various groups and duos with Keiji Haino...). This great wall of contemporary Japanese experimental bands might seem unnecessary, but it should give an idea of the credentials of the constant line-up of this band, although they were not immune to collaboration projects as well.
Those familiar with the names mentioned here, specifically High Rise, might find the description of the genre awfully similar. And at a surface glance they definitely sound alike, but to quote Nanjo (from an interview) himself:
Musica Transonic compose while playing moment by moment. But High Rise don't compose as they go along. In High Rise, we have certain things that we want to put into the sound, so we rehearse - but we rehearse unconsciously without any songs. In Musica Transonic we are ultra-aware of each second and compose as we go along. Recently we decide upon a very basic theme in advance - for example, jazz. Even though my view of jazz, and Yoshida's and Kawabata's are different, we just launch straight into it. And once we've started we compose as we go along. If there's a certain rhythm then I can obviously play something to go along with it and things develop that way. Of course, we don't want it to sound like diarrhea but there are times when it doesn't work. Other times it works really well. Basically we compose while we play. There are some things that we've worked out in advance, but we rearrange and recompose them while playing. That's the same for both recording and playing live. About half the time when we play live, we've [sic] playing stuff that we've come up with on the spot. Other times we go through stuff that we've worked out before, stuff that was on the first or second album. We don't really want to - it's sort of a gift to the fans. We'd prefer that you think of it all as new songs[...]But that said, in Musica we've never practiced certain songs, we just compose as we go along. The first time we played together it didn't work too well - we were all over the place. By the second or third time we already understood each other.
Regarding the formation of the group itself, Kawabata shed some light on this in a blog post, translation courtesy of Justin Simon:
The back story to the band’s formation is that, during one of my regular visits to Nanjo’s house for week-long (or sometimes even two-week long) recording sessions, Nanjo asked me if there were any drummers I’d be interested in playing with. Without a moment’s hesitation, I told him, “Tatsuya Yoshida from YBO2.” I was dumbfounded by Yoshida’s incredible drumming the first time I saw him play with Phaidia, and I loved his recorded work with Aburadago, YBO2, and Ruins. I used to call him “Japan’s Charles Heyward.” I remember discussing Yoshida once with another This Heat fan, Ochiai (drummer for cult Osaka group Heddiku), and asking each other, “How on earth can he play like that??” Eventually, Nanjo, Yoshida and I ended up in a studio together, and Musica Transonic was born.
Now, you may notice when opening the archive below that it seems quite puny in size when compared to previous archives. You will then notice that there's a notably proportionally lengthy Lossy & Missing txt. This is because most of the music was released on Nanjo's own La Musica Records label, and he is the sole possessor of the master tapes, most of which he had... molded to fit his vision, using his signature production technique: mixing everything with such distortion at such a high level that the audio meter on the mixing console is in the red (which is how he got the nickname "Red"). None of their releases got re-issued, aside from the first CD on PSF records, which got a significant make-over, with a brand new remaster done by Nanjo, and an entire LP side worth of bonus tracks (the reissue being intended for a double LP format). For the sake of preservation and my own preference for the original CD, I included both the PSF CD and the digital edition of the Black Editions Reissue, both of which can be differentiated in metadata with a different disc number, release year, and cover art.
There are also the aforementioned collaborations, namely with the Godfather of the contemporary Japanese musical avant-garde, Keiji Haino, and with the general madman and later guru of modern psychedelia, Yamatsuka Eye; The former in the form of a CD, Incubation, the latter released first as a cassette of the full show and later as a truncated remixed CDr. All are included in the interest of preservation once more.
This is one of the most confusing archives to assemble, both due to the aforementioned absolute unavailability of most of the Musica Transonic Discography, and how a lot of the releases put out on La Musica Records are either faultily bootlegged, or just... strange. You may notice several CDr rips which share some tracks, with different mastering, and to my knowledge this was done with Nanjo's intent. Since the main way to get a lot of this stuff is file-sharing, with varying degrees of quality (the Introducing! tape is marked as missing because a lot of the "rips" I can find are just low bitrate versions of the first CD, the Musica Groove vbr opus came as a single track which I had to manually split and add metadata to...), with the only source for some of these rips being bootleg box sets of some CDrs, and many releases having an unconfirmed existence, this one will take a long time to complete, and it may possibly never occur, given that Kawabata said he has a few cassettes he won't reissue, and Nanjo disappeared from the public eye entirely since the early 2000s, though rumors claim he was seen giving Keiji Haino a hug backstage after a Fushitsusha show in 2024. Who knows.
Nevertheless, what we do have available of the Musica Transonic discography points to one of the most overlooked experimental groups I can think of, and a testament to the the technical prowess of the individual members (though even this didn't convince me Kawabata was much the prog type, until I discovered Erochika). To elaborate on why this band feels so satisfying, I'd point back to the differences in approach that Nanjo highlights. To put it in my own words, Musica Transonic is like an instant compositional group, whereas High Rise is a fetterless rock group. Both are almost entirely free of writing and get their improvisational structures from a concept, but the concepts used in the latter are thematic/lyrical while the concepts used in the former are stylistic. Nanjo mentions tying together around the concept of Jazz on some tracks, for example, but the most visible deployment of this method can be found on albums where the styles are overtly stated rather than covertly demonstrated, like Hard Rock Transonic, Psychedelic Freedelic Sounds, the studio session on Freedelic Transonic, and so on. And the ingredient that, in combination, leads to an entirely different brew, is the aspect of listening. High Rise is meant to be a free for all rock assault, while Musica Transonic is meant to be more akin to a conversation in nature. It's the difference between chanting "Yes!", and replying "Yes, and...". You end up with a towering monolith all the same, it's just that one is closer to a giant slab of concrete, while the other is closer to a machine of Kafkaesque intricacy. Both are highly enjoyable, in a musical context anyway, but I know what I prefer. The faux-Greek typography that makes up most of their discography will confound anyone who can read Greek, though.
There are also the aforementioned collaborations, namely with the Godfather of the contemporary Japanese musical avant-garde, Keiji Haino, and with the general madman and later guru of modern psychedelia, Yamatsuka Eye; The former in the form of a CD, Incubation, the latter released first as a cassette of the full show and later as a truncated remixed CDr. All are included in the interest of preservation once more.
This is one of the most confusing archives to assemble, both due to the aforementioned absolute unavailability of most of the Musica Transonic Discography, and how a lot of the releases put out on La Musica Records are either faultily bootlegged, or just... strange. You may notice several CDr rips which share some tracks, with different mastering, and to my knowledge this was done with Nanjo's intent. Since the main way to get a lot of this stuff is file-sharing, with varying degrees of quality (the Introducing! tape is marked as missing because a lot of the "rips" I can find are just low bitrate versions of the first CD, the Musica Groove vbr opus came as a single track which I had to manually split and add metadata to...), with the only source for some of these rips being bootleg box sets of some CDrs, and many releases having an unconfirmed existence, this one will take a long time to complete, and it may possibly never occur, given that Kawabata said he has a few cassettes he won't reissue, and Nanjo disappeared from the public eye entirely since the early 2000s, though rumors claim he was seen giving Keiji Haino a hug backstage after a Fushitsusha show in 2024. Who knows.
Nevertheless, what we do have available of the Musica Transonic discography points to one of the most overlooked experimental groups I can think of, and a testament to the the technical prowess of the individual members (though even this didn't convince me Kawabata was much the prog type, until I discovered Erochika). To elaborate on why this band feels so satisfying, I'd point back to the differences in approach that Nanjo highlights. To put it in my own words, Musica Transonic is like an instant compositional group, whereas High Rise is a fetterless rock group. Both are almost entirely free of writing and get their improvisational structures from a concept, but the concepts used in the latter are thematic/lyrical while the concepts used in the former are stylistic. Nanjo mentions tying together around the concept of Jazz on some tracks, for example, but the most visible deployment of this method can be found on albums where the styles are overtly stated rather than covertly demonstrated, like Hard Rock Transonic, Psychedelic Freedelic Sounds, the studio session on Freedelic Transonic, and so on. And the ingredient that, in combination, leads to an entirely different brew, is the aspect of listening. High Rise is meant to be a free for all rock assault, while Musica Transonic is meant to be more akin to a conversation in nature. It's the difference between chanting "Yes!", and replying "Yes, and...". You end up with a towering monolith all the same, it's just that one is closer to a giant slab of concrete, while the other is closer to a machine of Kafkaesque intricacy. Both are highly enjoyable, in a musical context anyway, but I know what I prefer. The faux-Greek typography that makes up most of their discography will confound anyone who can read Greek, though.
Yes, I will eventually archive Toho Sara and Mainliner as well, I just need to clean the files I have for them up a bit.
