Released in 1996 as part of the New Japan series on NYC avant-garde figurehead John Zorn’s Tzadik label, Zubi Zuva’s Jehovah is one of the most bizarre albums I’ve ever heard. An experimental a cappella album sung by a male Japanese vocal trio in a completely made up language; I’ve kept the album in rotation periodically in the years since I first discovered it. I thought of it the other day and was lucky enough to find this amazing video from a 2006 tour. Singing a medley of songs from the first (and only) Zubi Zuva album, Yoshida Tatsuya is joined by Atsushi Tsuyama and Makoto Kawabata of Acid Mothers Temple fame.
Tsuyama (in the middle) and Kawabata (on the right, wearing the Degeneration X shirt) weren’t in the group for the 1996 album — Jehovah was the handiwork of Yoshida Tatsuya, leader of seminal Japanese band Ruins. Straddling math rock, free jazz, post-punk, prog-rock, avant-garde music, and bouts of insanity, Tatsuya has been one of the leading figures in the Japanese experimental scene since he started playing music in 1985. Heavily inspired by 70s French prog-rock band Magma and its founder Christen Vander (who also invented his own language and genre), Tatsuya has had too many styles, projects, and collaborators to keep up with. He is mostly known for scraping together an aural mishmash of punk’s high energy performances, jazz’s free improvisational solos, and prog-rock’s elaborate irregular rhythmic structures.
The journey from Magma to Ruins to Zubi Zuva is fascinating to me, but a lot of my appreciation for Tatsuya’s project lies in its humor. While avant-garde music usually evokes laughter by derisively deriding artists’ seriousness, Jehovah evokes laughter because it’s an experimental album that succeeds at being fun (at least to freaks like me). It’s challenging, uneven, and by no means a masterpiece. Still, it’s refreshing to find the stigmas associated with avant-garde music collide with the type of humor associated with a cappella music (see: Glee, Phish’s a capella “Free Bird” cover, and a million college a cappella groups who fight the good fight coming up with quirky band name puns in between covering top 40 songs).
While I certainly think it’s awesome that the most experimental part of this experimental album might be its boldness to embrace its own wackiness, it seems just as important to address a post from one YouTube commenter (penisreference) who labels the music “hilariously random and super (un?)co-ordinatedly genius.” Processing the math behind the madness is part of the excitement inherent in Zubi Zuva. There is a sense of the impossible behind all the zany polyrhythmic vocal chaos. Maybe you can see it in the video easier than you can hear it on the album. While the songs seem silly, they still feel like the work of an expert composer. Shifting freely from one idea to the next, the styles abound: Gregorian chant, Buddhist Shomyo, 90s rap, athletic fight songs, post-punk wailing, hardcore screaming, Indonesian ketjak. Sometimes the structures even incorporate different styles simultaneously; while one vocalist acts out Raymond-Scott-sounding cartoon noises, the other vocalists start to channel 60s Doo-wop groups.
These highly complex, dissonant, difficult, and manic song structures seem common to all of Tatsuya’s projects. Zubi Zuva is no different. It doesn’t matter if the songs are done a cappella and all the words are sung in his usual made up language. There’s just something special and unique at the core of Tatsuya’s overall artistic approach. Cataloging varied styles, deconstructing language, and challenging genre expectations, Jehovah comes off like the audio sketchbook of a mad scientist noodling around with the knobs of truly experimental music.
