Medama Records – mr09 476.67MB FLAC
In the Past Only Geniuses Were Capable of Staging the Perfect Crime (Also Known as a Revolution) Today Anybody Can Accomplish Their Aims With the Push of the Button opens in motion, cutting directly into a performance that already seems close to overload. There is no gradual entrance and no preparatory silence. Oren Ambarchi’s drums are pounding, Jim O’Rourke’s six-string bass is thick with fuzz and Keiji Haino’s guitar and electronics tear across the upper range. The abrupt beginning makes the recording feel less like a carefully framed concert document than a section of a larger event seized while it was happening. From the first seconds, the trio is heard not as three musicians assembling a piece but as a machine already under pressure.
Recorded during a 2015 performance at Tokyo’s SuperDeluxe and released several years later, the album captures the group at a point when its power-trio language had become both recognizable and increasingly unstable. Guitar, bass and drums remain the basic architecture, but each musician continually exceeds the expected function of the instrument. Haino moves between guitar, electronics and voice. O’Rourke plays bass while also introducing Hammond organ. Ambarchi’s drumming can hold a groove with immense physical force, yet he repeatedly loosens that groove from within, using cymbal decay, tom patterns and uneven accents to keep the music from settling into a fixed shape.
The opening piece demonstrates this balance immediately. O’Rourke and Ambarchi generate a dense rhythmic field while Haino fills the remaining space with jagged electric movement. His guitar does not simply solo over the rhythm section. It cuts into the groove, distorts its proportions and sometimes seems to argue against its momentum. The lines are thin, bright and abrasively articulated, often sounding as though they are being forced through the narrowest possible frequency band. When the trio finally settles into a more hypnotic bass-and-drum pattern, the increased regularity does not provide relief. It gives Haino a stronger surface to resist.
O’Rourke’s bass is central to the album’s weight. His tone is so saturated that individual notes can blur into blocks, yet the lines remain unusually mobile. He alternates between repeated figures, knotty runs and low sustained pressure, giving the performance structure without reducing it to repetition. The six-string instrument extends his range upward, allowing him to occupy territory normally reserved for guitar while still controlling the bottom end. At times Haino and O’Rourke seem to exchange roles: the bass becomes the more sharply articulated voice, while Haino’s guitar expands into rough harmonic mass.
Ambarchi keeps the performance moving through drumming that is direct, heavy and alert to every change in density. His playing can resemble the engine of a hard-rock trio, but the beat never feels guaranteed. He repeatedly shifts emphasis away from the obvious downbeat, uses rolling toms to pull the music sideways and allows cymbal resonance to obscure the exact shape of the pulse. Even when he settles into a relentless pattern, there is enough internal variation to keep it from becoming mechanical. The groove functions as a live structure under constant negotiation.
The second piece introduces a more compact and mischievous form. Its title circles around the idea of making something beautiful and then smashing it with proper decorum, and the music follows that contradiction. A recognizable shape begins to form, gathering color and balance, only to be interrupted by abrupt changes in attack and density. The trio does not destroy the music through a single dramatic explosion. It dismantles it carefully, almost ceremonially, exposing how beauty can be produced and undone by the same set of gestures.
The album’s longest central passage gives Haino’s voice a more commanding position. The background initially thins, allowing bass and organ to form a dark, atmospheric floor. O’Rourke’s Hammond does not brighten the ensemble or provide conventional chords. It hangs behind the bass like vapor, thickening the air without establishing a stable harmonic center. Ambarchi responds with restrained percussion, leaving room for Haino’s words and cries to take on physical scale.
Haino moves between Japanese and English, between incantation and eruption. His vocal presence changes the meaning of the trio. Without the voice, the music can be heard primarily through mass, rhythm and electrical texture. Once he begins speaking and wailing, the same materials become theatrical without becoming narrative. The voice introduces urgency, command and vulnerability, but it does not explain the music. It creates another unstable element that the instruments must absorb.
The passage gradually expands from hushed bass and organ into rolling drums, cymbal crashes and searing guitar. The transformation is not a simple climb from quiet to loud. Haino’s voice remains the axis around which the density changes, sometimes exposed and sometimes nearly swallowed by the trio. When the full ensemble finally erupts, the effect is ecstatic precisely because the earlier restraint remains audible beneath it. The climax does not replace the quiet section; it feels like that section pushed beyond its ability to contain itself.
The fourth major section returns to the hypnotic force established at the beginning. O’Rourke fixes on a relentless riff, Ambarchi locks into a deep groove and Haino moves across the surface with psychedelic solos and sharp chordal cuts. This is among the trio’s most openly physical music. The repetition is severe enough to become almost impersonal, as though the musicians have entered a process that will continue whether or not they control it. Yet tiny changes keep the pattern alive. The bass tone thickens, the drums alter their pressure and Haino shifts from roaming lines to violent slashes.
The final piece changes the scale again. Its title invokes a “tranquil void” carried in a pocket, and the music approaches that image without becoming tranquil in any simple sense. Space opens inside the performance. Sounds are more isolated, and the trio becomes attentive to decay, resonance and the possibility that a single gesture might be sufficient. The void is not silence but a portable condition, something that can be introduced at any moment to interrupt momentum.
This quieter orientation also reveals how much attention the group gives to sound after the initial attack. Drum tones linger. Bass distortion continues vibrating after the line has ended. Guitar feedback divides into separate frequencies. The musicians do not merely play into empty space; they listen to the residue their instruments create and make the next decision from that residue. The album’s force therefore comes as much from duration as volume.
The enormous title frames revolution as something transformed by technology. What once required exceptional imagination can now be initiated instantly through a button, but the title does not celebrate that ease. It carries suspicion, dark humor and anxiety about the collapse of distance between intention and consequence. The music reflects that tension. Electronics can produce immediate rupture, but the trio’s real achievement depends on patience, concentration and prolonged physical interaction.
This contrast between instant action and sustained labor runs through the entire recording. A button can trigger noise, distortion or amplification, yet it cannot create the relationships heard here. Those relationships come from years of collaboration and from the musicians’ willingness to remain inside difficult, unstable forms. Grooves are allowed to continue until they lose their ordinary meaning. Quiet passages are sustained long enough for small changes to become decisive. Climaxes emerge not from automatic escalation but from accumulated pressure.
In the Past Only Geniuses Were Capable of Staging the Perfect Crime stands as one of the trio’s strongest demonstrations of collective identity. Haino remains unmistakable, but the record is not organized around him as a soloist. O’Rourke and Ambarchi continually redirect the music, creating structures that invite, resist or overwhelm his interventions. The result is a power trio stripped of routine but not of power: rock instrumentation used to build grooves, destroy them, rebuild them and finally expose the unstable mechanisms underneath.
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