If you were to jump to conclusions based on the artwork on Acid Mothers Temple albums Absolutely Freakout and New Geocentric World—garish prints inspired by ‘60s poster artists such as Rick Griffin and Bob Masse—you might write them off as yet another Jerry-worshipping jam band.
The songs are, at least initially, improvised—and I was certainly tempted to write about AMT in a way that might lure good-vibe-seeking Warren Haynes fans (and perhaps a drug-sniffing City Councilman or two) to the show.
That would, however, be trapping unsuspecting victims into the drop-zone of a musical warhead. The band, according to its founder, the self-dubbed “Speed Guru” Kawabata Makoto, mixes “the music of Deep Purple with Stockhausen” into a meandering, droning groove that Makoto (who says he gave up drugs after he’d “used them to show many worlds”) has dubbed “trip-music.”
Acid Mothers Temple is the abbreviated title of the Acid Mothers Temple Soul Collective, a quasi-spiritual alliance of several different bands. There’s Acid Mothers Temple and the Cosmic Inferno, Acid Mothers Temple and the Pink Ladies Blues, Acid Mothers Temple SWR, Acid Mothers Gong (a collaboration between Acid Mothers Temple members and members of long-running Australian psych outfit Gong), and the most prolific and well-known of the bunch, Acid Mothers Temple and The Melting Paraiso UFO.
“Over a decade ago I became involved with a commune of Japanese beatniks and hippies,” reports Makoto on the band’s FAQ page. (We tried an interview first, but the language barrier proved troublesome. The singer responded to the majority of my questions with “I don’t know” or “Sorry, I can’t understand.” I did manage to find out what the band listens to in its touring van: “Nothing! Just silence.”)
But anyway: “The whole left-wing ethos didn’t really sit right with me,” says Makoto on the Web site. “The members of Acid Mothers Temple have several houses all over Japan, and each of us is free to come and go between [them].
“Our slogan is: ‘Do whatever you want, don’t do whatever you don’t want!’ As a result of this philosophy, we have lost money and the trust of society as a whole, but we’ve gained time and freedom.”
With all of this time and freedom, Makoto has led the Soul Collective in putting out 40-something albums (released on the band’s own label, called, not surprisingly, Acid Mothers Temple) since the mid-‘90s, with AMT and The Melting Paraiso UFO (Universal Freak Out) boasting 30 of these.
Beneath AMT’s otherworldly image, beneath the onslaught of psychedelic art, merchandise and rhetoric, and beneath all of their hair, there is actual music. While definitely grounded in the heavy ‘70s sounds of Deep Purple, the aural explorations (and reeeeeally long songs) of prog-sters like Can and Hawkwind and the proto-metal riffing of groups like Blue Cheer, AMT’s trip music also incorporates synthesizers, ambient electronic interludes and theremin parts that keep it from sounding dated or retro—despite Makoto’s insistence that “It’s obviously retro!”
Whatever he wants.
[Freelance cartoonist/writer Ethan Clark is based in Asheville.]
Acid Mothers Temple plays the Grey Eagle (185 Clingman Ave.) on Saturday, April 21. 9 p.m. $10. 232-5800.
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