Keiji Haino
Guitar Works I-VIII
Guitar Series Vol. II
1994

As auspicious cultural moments go, this one was a little sneaky. No one really knew it was coming. Now, it looks suspiciously like something that had to happen—a cool idea, and like all cool ideas, a little ahead of its time, yet very much of its time, if you were given to wearing the right kind of wristwatch. The year was 1993—a lifetime ago in pop terms, still the very early Clinton Era, plenty of dreams yet to unwind, and the final commodification of Alternative Nation waving from the near distance—and an independent record label had just set up shop in Atlanta, Georgia. Not exactly the grand locus of avant-garde activity, but still Dixie enough to nourish a little ruckus-raising. And that, from the get-go, was the purpose of Table of the Elements—a fact announced with its very first releases, a collection of 7-inch singles which featured twelve masters of the electric guitar. Not noodlesome masters, or Southern boogie masters, or jazz-wank masters, or new-folk revival masters or any of that. This was more imaginative, more dangerous, more weird, more fun. Here, guitars were not merely played. They were also abused, cheated, lied to, exalted, obliterated, teased, tricked up, toyed with impetuously, trained to jump through flaming hoops, obliged to sit up and behave, targeted for death, elected President, taken for a reckless betting spree at the dog track, used in ways and for purposes few could possibly have imagined. It was like something out of De Sade or D.W. Griffith. If either of them had an affinity for stringed instruments, amplifiers and the act of lunging sun-drunk into the wild thickets of bliss and blister that constitute the realm of free improvised music.

No one would easily have predicted that this was a harbinger of so much to come, a quiet revolution in noisy music (or music about noise, or noise as music, or "rock-based minimalism," or post-rock, or anti-guitar, or sine waves from Planet X). Table of the Elements was the first of its kind on the block, the first American label of its era, to really root itself in a deliberate (yet playfully vague) aesthetic that embraced avant/outsider/iconoclast/overlooked genius musical stirrings while also conjuring a slyly self-conscious philosophical identity that was clearly and cleverly expressed in the way its discs were designed and packaged. There was a whiff of conspiracy about them, a mystique of sorts, that implied a Dispatch from Someplace Else. It's the type of record label that Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo might dream up, as a way to give face to the fact that the world we think we know—the histories they tell us we should accept—is only parallel to many other worlds, each containing other histories. That which appears to be a recondite hymn in one could easily be the populist anthem in another, and Table of the Elements arose on the premise of flipping that script. But with a fine degree of subtlety, elegance even. These releases were curatorial. Like individual pieces of a larger-scale art project, one whose fuller, lasting image would reflect variations on the notion of what music should do (after Cage or after Hendrix or after Ayler), particularly in the hands of performers so peculiarly individualistic that it's hard to imagine all of them fitting comfortably under any umbrella, let alone sharing one.

The Guitar Series was the square root of what has become one of the most impressive and daring catalogs going. It's a road map, in a sense, not only towards the label's subsequent triumphs and gambits, but also of much that would come to greater prominence in the nearly 10 years since its first releases. At the time, the notion of inviting a perversely eclectic array of improvising guitar heroes (some legendary, some unknown) to record for 7-inch vinyl—a genuine, jukebox-friendly single—and not make a full-length CD, was offbeat. Capricious, even. On one hand, there was yet no Vinyl Renaissance in effect. On the other, how subversively tweaky indeed was any gesture that consigned such frequently gnarly, square-peg eruptions to the ultimate in disposably round-hole pop formats, the 45 rpm (or, occasionally here, 33 rpm) record. Was this the arcana, to paraphrase Claes Oldenberg, that helped budding hipsters get across the street?

It proved to be a great dinner party, one whose guest list sparked with unexpected chemistry. Like the Algonquin Round Table, argued with Orange amplifiers. Volume One boasted British table-top guitar pioneer Keith Rowe (of AMM fame), the very model of the postmodern-day avant-garde heavyweight, and Henry Kaiser, a slide-guitar master adept at recreations of Pacific island musics whose travels far and wide had made him a true cult figure; from Japan, the monstrous noise icon Kaziyuki K. Null, making an extremely rare appearance on a U.S. label, and from Alabama, the unjustifiably obscure improviser Davey Williams, a marvelously wicked player who has done much to strip away pretense from the façade of "the scene" with his irreverent Southern sensibility. Germany's Hans Reichel weighs in, a radical innovator from the early 70s' First Wave of free improvisation; and here, also, is Jim O'Rourke, truly a household name these days thanks to his prolific work as a producer, peripatetic collaborator and singer-songwriter, although the Guitar Series single was then only his second solo U.S. release—pre- Gastr del Sol, pre- Sonic Youth, pre- Wilco, pre- Ubiquity, pre- Et Cetera. Quite a prescient call.

Volume Two of the series (assembled at the same time as Volume One and released a few months later—April 23, 1994, to be precise, at the label's near-mythic Manganese Festival) was equally visionary. Derek Bailey, another legend whose pathbreaking procedures utterly reinvented guitar language, shows up in a surprisingly whimsical mood, putting the lie to the cliché that all improv must be dry and high-falutin'. Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore also make their presence felt, lending their downtown NYC seal of approval to the project-at-large, and indulging in the kind of mischievous clamor they've made an enduring stock-in-trade. Another New Yorker, melancholic mood-scaper Loren Mazzacane (later known by the appended surname Connors) offers his distinctively low-key sonic imprint, one that would come to wider appreciation in the years to come. Paul Panhuysen, interpreter of "long string" instumental installations, forecast his future full-length ToTE release. And, in one of those artistic coups that can justify such an exhaustive effort on its own terms alone, the magnificent Keiji Haino makes his U.S. recording debut, certifying for neophytes and addicts alike the vengeful grace of extremely amplified guitar—one roaring with the mystery of a man who fell to Earth, only to hijack its strangest frequencies.

Taken individually, these recordings offer fascinating asides and insights into the creative process of some of the most original musical thinkers of the 20th century, post-Elvis division. Each performance is like a phrase of audible graffiti, an instance of working-out that can either be heard as a response to a novel proposal—record a "single"—or the seizure of a moment in which radical style is given imperious free rein: an E-ticket ride in the Six Flags of Sound. That, in and of itself, is remarkable. But heard as a cumulative shockwave of amplified ingenuity, these short pieces suggest something more, well, elemental. Beneath the surface noise of contemporary culture, the lockstep groove of technology and advertising, the jittery pulse of global anxiety and the new world disorder, there is something unabashedly liberating about cranking the volume behind some deviant fretnoise. Electric guitar, as someone once said, is the enemy of the state. Long live the revolution.

Steve Dollar
New York City
February, 2002

AMM (UK)
Tony Conrad (USA)
Faust (Germany, First US appearance)
Gate (New Zealand)
w/ Michael Morley + Lee Ranaldo, Thurston Moore, Steve Shelley
Keiji Haino (Japan)
Thurston Moore and Friends (USA)
w/ Thurston Moore + Tim Foljahn, Steve Shelley
Zeena Parkins (USA)
Jim O’Rourke (USA)
Manganese
Table of the Elements Festival no. 1
1994

[Managanese] TOE-25
Table of the Elements/Tula Foundation
Tula Atrium (Georgia Museum of Contemporary Art)
75 Bennett St. NW
Atlanta, Georgia
April 23—April 24, 1994
Two-day tickets: $25.00
Producers: Jeff Hunt and Kris Johnson

“It's easy enough to make romantic claims for an artist like Tony Conrad. He's one of those guys. Ur-Sixties. Quintessential cult figure. Resident outsider. Rebel angel. The minimalist who came in from the cold. He's got the kind of immaculate credibility that can't be bought and can't be sold. [And how else, otherwise, could he have persevered?] Rumbling under the cultural radar since the Kennedy Era, Conrad is at once first cause and last laugh, a covert operative who can stand as a primary influence over succeeding generations, while pretty much conducting most of his business in obscurity. That is, until about 10 years ago, when the Table of the Elements label finally blew his cover for good. And because he'd kept such a low profile, when Conrad did pop up, the impression made was a good deal more spectacular by sheer dint of surprise. Who, exactly, was this guy? It was an unusual weekend in Atlanta, Georgia, when people began to ask—again. Conrad was having one of his first "coming out" parties, and despite some of the odd circumstances, it could not have been staged more memorably. The Manganese Festival, which doubled as a kind of avant-garde debutante ball for Table of the Elements, went down April 23 and 24, 1994, at the exact same time as Freaknik, the "spring break" for students from the circuit of predominantly black colleges. Atlanta became an urban version of Daytona Beach for three days, with traffic grid locked, boom boxes shouting, and provocatively ample derriere-shaking for mile after mile along Peachtree Street—the main stem that runs into the heart of "The City Too Busy To Hate." The festival was sequestered in a complex of art galleries off an industrial side street intersecting Peachtree (and thus, cut off in such a way that anyone who managed to drive in could not possibly hope to drive back out until the traffic jam subsided many, many hours later). This was ideal, for anyone hoping to maximize the singular nature of the experience. You could check out any time you liked, but you could never leave. Perfect for a first encounter with Tony Conrad. He cut a curious figure, Tony did, in his bowler hat and his shorts, prowling the premises with a video camera, documenting the goings-on as if at some family reunion. In a sense, it was: The gathering tribes included Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley from Sonic Youth, electric harpist extraordinare Zeena Parkins, avenging Japanese guitar hero Keiji Haino, the anarchic artistes of Faust—Conrad's long-ago collaborators on "Outside the Dream Syndicate"—and the then-unknown, now-ubiquitous wonder boy Jim O'Rourke. Pioneering British improv trio AMM was in the house, as was New Zealand's rare-to-such-shores Gate. This was an unusual assortment of performers, a Lollapalooza for fringe-dwellers, and a model for further electrical storms—such as the All Tomorrow's Parties festival—that would light up the skies into the new millennium. By the time Conrad finally came to perform, sandwiched between the jet-engine decibel bath of Haino and the ritualized freak-out of Faust, even those not in the know were primed for a paradigm shift. The city was in a gridlock, as surely as if suffering a collective panic attack or celebrating a coup d'etat. What better moment to pump up the volume, and tune in to those strange frequencies."

Excerpt from “Tony Rocks”

Steve Dollar
New York City
March, 2003

Keiji Haino
I Said, This Is the Son of Nihilism
1995

Table of the Elements
[Argon] TOE-CD-18
Compact disc, laser etching, die-cut insert, obi

Keiji Haino is the most notorious and enigmatic icon of the Japanese underground. His career spans thirty years of solo recordings, improvisational collaborations and group work with Fushitsusha and Lost Aaaraaff.

I Said, This Is the Son of Nihilism confirms Haino's uncompromising stance and draws on the full range of his talents. Beginning with an extended blast of incendiary guitar, the disc slowly segues into a more reserved series of quiet passages, highlighted by Haino's evocative vocals. This performance features Keiji Haino at the peak of his artistic prowess, balancing interludes of gossamer delicacy with crushing electronic crescendos.

“Most all of Haino's work occupies that instant-eternity between waking and dreaming."
Biba Kopf

“The great and terrible thing about Keiji Haino's music is, once heard, it's well nigh impossible to settle for anything less intense."
The Wire

“Keiji Haino doesn't do anything halfway, and in concert plays louder than audiences are used to; like The Who, he only performs with supersized Marshall amplifiers, and his guitar is so highly processed that the merest touch of a string sends off shock waves. It all looks like rock, but Haino's electric guitar music is to heavy metal what Stan Brakhage is to Hollywood. He makes a delicate art with all this heavy hardware, based on a piercing picking technique, repetitive, slowly mutating phrases, and a commitment to long-haul exegesis. Haino is compellingly sincere: stay with him, and he will move you."
Artforum

“The performance begins with an overwhelming overture in which the guitar sounds like a bullet train blasting through a very long tunnel at extreme velocity, its roar ornamented by high wordless keening. After 12 minutes of nihilism, the artist brings it down, his guitar spraying brittle shards before settling to a desolate strum over which he essays otherworldly vocal excursions (some in Japanese, others untethered to any linguistic post). The music rises and falls with a keen sense of drama and timing, evoking a sense of tragedy that is resolved by renewed bursts of high-tension guitar noise. He spoke; those willing to be transported to somewhere wild and strange listened."
Magnet

TONY CONRAD (USA)
JOHN FAHEY (USA)
GASTR DEL SOL (USA)
BRUCE GILBERT (UK)
BERHNARD GÜNTER (GERMANY)
KEIJI HAINO + FUSHITSUSHA (JAPAN)
THURSTON MOORE AND FRIENDS (USA)
LOREN MAZZACANE CONNORS (USA)
JIM O’ROURKE (USA)
SPECIAL GUESTS

YTTRIUM
TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS FESTIVAL NO. 2

Table of the Elements
November 7, 8 and 9
1996

[Yttrium] TOE-29

The Empty Bottle
1035 N. Western Avenue
Chicago, IL
Three-day festival pass: $25.00
Producers: Jeff Hunt and Kris Johnson