Hanatarash - Biography
Hanatarash is an early project of Japan’s Yamatsuka Eye. That part is simple enough. The rest is complicated. Eye’s discography is as bewildering as his motivations as an artist; his infinite lists of bands, projects and collaborative efforts are as lengthy and perplexing as his “career” as a quasi-musical provocateur; even a compendium of his various aliases is a puzzle. A partial list includes: Angry Noise Fly; The Ass Ess; Electric Toilet Orchestra; I Can Melt for Shit; Miracle Disco Vomit; Pyramid Suicide and Space Maggot. Alrighty, then. Even his “real” name (itself a pseudonym) is subject to change, having wafted from Yamatsuka Eye to Yamantaka Eye to Yamataka Eye. He also deejays as DJ Pica Pica Pica (a loose translation: Sunny Sunny Sunny) and DJ Chaos X. And if the nomenclature elicits confusion, you may not be ready for what transpires once he bounds on to a stage. Eye screams, leaps, gurgles, bleats, howls, babbles, flails, rolls, and flops like an asphyxiating beast. As his career progressed, Eye became the unlikeliest of rock stars. If anything was more insane than Eye, it was the music industry during the brief and greed-saturated era of grunge. In the early 1990s, recently minted luminaries like Kurt Cobain and Thurston Moore sang the praises of Eye’s profoundly weird band, the Boredoms; as a result Eye and the Boredoms got signed to a major label and toured with Lollapalooza. They played the main stage. For a brief moment, the lunatics ran the asylum. The influence of the Boredoms remains far-reaching, but any discussion of Yamatsuka Eye needs to begin with Hanatarash.
Hanatarash began as Hanatarashi; these loosely translate as “snot-nosed.” Eye’s main collaborative partner was guitarist Mitsuru Tabata, who would later join with noise pioneer KK Null in Zeni Geva. Tabata and Eye met in 1984 while working an Einsturzende Neubauten show in Osaka. Neubauten were still in the clangorous industrial phase, performing on junk, scrap metal and even wrecked autos, using power tools, chain saws, homemade electronics and heavy, heavy amplification to pummel audiences into aural submission. Evidently, Eye liked what he heard. Hanatarash would take the Neubauten approach to even further, more combative extremes. Hanatarash gigs were notorious melees, in which Eye would run amok with just about any object that made a lot of noise, was inappropriate for a concert stage, and qualified as a genuine hazard, to either audience members, his fellow performers or, preferably, himself. At one show, Eye almost severed his leg while wearing a spinning electrical saw strapped to his back; at another, he effectively destroyed the venue by driving a back hoe (it’s like a bulldozer) through an outside wall, and on to the stage. By the time Hanatarash broke up, attendees were required to sign release forms, indemnifying the band, club, and promoters in the event of grievous injury.
There are various live recordings of Hanatarash, which the intrepid zealot may be able to track down and own, but there are three primary albums. These are the best examples of the band’s sonic mayhem, and they indicate the more sophisticated — yet equally deranged — approach Eye would chart upon starting the Boredoms. Hanatarash (1985 Alchemy), Hanatarash 2 (1988 Alchemy) and Hanatarash 3 (1989 RRRecords) aren’t easy listening, but they’re oddly inspiring, and occasionally exhilarating. Beneath all the bluster, Yamatsuka Eye’s frenzied outbursts have a slight edge of craftsmanship. “Poetry” is going way, way too far, but at their best, Hanatarash had more nuance than even they probably would have cared to admit. Ultimately, who knows what motivated Yamataka Eye in Hanatarash. Maybe it was a Japanese Thing. But even if you were Japanese, you wouldn’t understand.