Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Paul Kidney’s long been a curious presence in the Australian underground. I’ve always been fond of his way of moving: colorful, high contrast, excessive without indulgence. He’s one of those characters who’s always sitting somewhere near the periphery, but with enough smarts to make his presence felt when needed. I first encountered him when reading about the group he was part of across the first half of the ’90s, the all-channels-open, mutant rock/noise/funk group Kiss My Poodles Donkey, whose two records are essential to anyone getting to grips with the antic, carnivalesque underbelly of Australian music.
More recently, Kidney’s headed up his own improvised psych rock gang, the Paul Kidney Experience. Extant since 2009, they’ve explored terrain that was perfectly framed by the title of their first release: Flower Punk. Their shifting membership and open-arms aesthetic has served them well across the past 16-or-so years; it’s no surprise to see them shacking up with other collectives as distinct as the free rock/noise crew that circle around the Breakdance The Dawn label, and Japanese shape-shifters Acid Mothers Temple, with whom the Experience have released a split album.
That relationship with the Japanese psychedelic underground’s been particularly productive for Kidney—hence the Paul Kidney Japanese Experience, whose first album does well to capture the errant spirit of these four idiosyncratic individuals. Of course, it helps when you can call on musicians of the caliber, and with the history, of Mitsuru Tabata (Acid Mothers Temple, Boredoms, Green Flames, 20 Guilders, etc.) and Masami Kawaguchi (New Rock Syndicate, Keiji Haino & The Hardy Rocks, Usurabi, Miminokoto, Broomdusters, etc.) They’re both players who can take the temperature of a room in split seconds and play perfectly in response; they’re also both improvisers who respond well to Kidney’s provocations, supported ably by the rhythms of Don Drum.
Kidney’s guttural vocals—groans, grunts, sighs, vocal emanations that are like an avant-punk reading of the kinds of ‘obliteration of the word’ undertaken by sound poetry—twine the instruments here, while Tabata’s bass and Kawaguchi’s guitar are in surrealist consort even as they meander in different directions. It can take a few minutes for things to come together; the opening “Frozen Leopard” drifts indecisively for close to three minutes before spinning on a dime with a final flourish. It’s the longer pieces that tell us more about what the Japanese Experience is capable of, from the unpredictable terrain of “Gargoyle’s Tempest,” locking into a blissed-out, Ash Ra Tempel-esque dream at its midpoint, to the San Fran ballroom jam that lands, unexpectedly, a few minutes into “Mushroom Glory.”
In fact, that seems a pretty good way to map out the world inhabited by Paul Kidney Japanese Experience: renegade SF ’60s acid rock, picked up by blissed-out German kosmische, threaded through the Japanese psychedelic underground, landing with a decisive thud in fried suburban Melbourne. Call it the psychedelic travelogue.
