CULT HEROES
JAPAN’S UNKNOWABLE AVANT-ROCK ENIGMAS LES RALLIZES DÉNUDÉS BREAK COVER!
“Unique, unworldly”: Les Rallizes Dénudés’ Takashi Mizutani with bassist Kiyohiro Takada.
© Gin Satoh
IN 2019, Tokyo musician/producer Makoto Kubota received a call from Takashi Mizutani, Les Rallizes Dénudés’ mysterioso-in-black, a man whose extraordinary guitar-playing took up from where Hendrix’s demolition of Wild Thing left off. During the band’s spasmodic lifetime, roughly 1967 to 1996, the ‘Rallies’, as he calls them, had appeared just once on record – an anachronistic, side-long howl of acid rock on a 1973 various artists album. In 1991, three Mizutani-authorised retro CDs, issued as grunge was breaking, spread the word. But by 2019, says Kubota, the band’s bassist between 1969 and 1973, the Rallies had become “famous in a strange way” Some 100 LRD recordings, mostly live, were in circulation.