Leave it to the Japanese to take any medium—comic books, film,
rock—to its logical and extreme conclusion. Just when you thought
nothing more could be done in the jazz-based idiom with a saxophone and
a drum kit, along comes Sax Ruins, a deadly duo featuring
improvisational sax player Ono Ryoko and Ruins skinsman Tatsuya
Yoshida.
For those who don’t know, Ruins was a powerful prog-rock two-piece
featuring Yoshida and a rock bassist. In this latest incarnation, the
language is jazzcore, with Ryoko’s multi-tracked performance giving Sax
Ruins’ debut what can only be described as a
big-band-on-massive-steroids sensibility. Except for a few
tracks—like the nimble yet lethal “Pig Brag Crack”—the 17
instrumentals gathered here are titled via the band’s own made-up
language (e.g., “Hyderomastgroningem”).
The music itself is a scary Frankenstein patchwork of Sabbath, Zorn
and Glenn Miller, shambling its way down a path of free musical
expression. Ryoko reportedly uses “nonbreath circulation technique and
multi-phonics” to generate her awesome noise, but her real strength
lies in her ideas, which are genre-spanning. Is the world ready for the
drop-on-a-dime turnarounds in “Znohjmo,” which goes from Slayer to
“Superfly” to Sinatra in the space of a few heartbeats? Who cares?
These are exceptional experiments any way they slice you.
Sax Ruins demolishes the last remaining walls between musical
categories like no other band.
This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 5, 2009.