Kawabata Makoto & Michishita Shinsuke — Basement Echo

Basement Echo is the often searing & at times atmospheric sonic meeting of two Japanese underground most respected guitarists: Kawabata Makoto, leader of The Acid Mothers Temple, and Michishita Shinsuke, leader of LSD March.

The album offers up 5 lengthy guitar scapes that sit somewhere between noisy and dense improv, and coarse to sinister discordant moodscapes. None of the tracks really follow your standard harmonic psychedelic jam type route or aimless guitar soloing type pattern, but instead they find the pair building huge often jagged walls of sound or mood setting guitar scaping. One or two moments here even reaching an almost Merzbow type improv guitar noise high as the pair really attack and abuse there guitars in a rapid and manic manner. Yet there are also more spaced out discordant & off centre cinematic wonderings too; that wouldn’t feel out of place as backing for a early 70's Jess Franco film or more jagged cousins of Howard shores soundtrack for David Cronenberg's film version J G Ballards Crash novel.

Considering this features two guitarists this is surprisingly ego free with both Kawabata & Michishita merging their caustic and mood setting guitar playing perfectly together to create something that doesn’t really sound like either parties main project. Obviously of interest to fans of either AMT or LSD March but also to anyone who enjoys creative, noisy and atmospheric guitar music.