Way back in the summer of 2001, Justin Simon (now of NY's Invisible Conga People and Mesh-Key Records, and largely responsible for introducing Yura Yura Teikoku to the States) brought his band from Tokyo to NYC to record with James Murphy. This was when DFA was just forming its musical identity and Can and other seminal "Krautrock" was still mostly for those "in the know," but Simon and his unknown Japanese group formed a bond with Murphy, and made two albums in those sessions. One was the very grainy, lo-fi, largely live-recorded, quasi Krautrock/post-punk excursion that became the Pre Acediasts album. Fast-forward to 2012 and we finally have the proper studio LP from We Acediasts, also recorded way back when in the DFA studio but unavailable until now. And though it's more than a decade old, with influences from deep in our "Then" section, it comes across surprisingly "right now."

In the same way Invisible Conga People seamlessly blends vintage synth and Krautrock with modern electronic elements to create its own hypnotic, psychedelic sound, We Acediasts fuse elements of no wave/spazzy art punk with the modern edge of the Boredoms (pre- and post-Kraut influence) and Sonic Youth. While many who drew inspiration from no wave in the early aughts could barely manage to do more than one type of song, We Acediasts took that angular bombast and quite logically wove in the expansive, arching elements of Sonic Youth, P.I.L. and even This Heat (and at times, even some of the casualness of the Fall) to make a very savvy and effective sound of their own. It could have been the musicians' common interest in Phew -- the Can-collaborating Japanese singer who worked with everyone from Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit to Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alexander Hacke -- that gave them the inspiration to make such intensely groovy/subdued, yet angular and artful music. Three Japanese dudes and an American ex-pat taking these erratic elements and harnessing them with the groove of Krautrock and the moody greyness of post-punk had the references to make music that sounds as fresh now as it was probably confusing to laymen's ears then. And that's just the A-side; the B-side flips things a bit and takes a more rhythmic, ritualistic approach, blending the patient groove of Can with the royal/celestial vibe of Amon Duul II, but while adding a few twists and turns of their own. In the end, this record is much more than the sum of its estimable influences, and despite the long gestation period, it is right on time!

Scott Mou, Other Music

Bio from old Mesh-Key website:
I used to live in an industrial town in Saitama, Japan. I woke up to the scent of melting plastic, which caused my throat on several occasions to swell shut. Maybe that’s why I had such a feverish reaction to Masaki Takamoto's brightly-colored, rambling dissertation on "freer music" posted on the wall of a Tokyo record shop. He wanted to start a band and I called him up.

Takamoto and I hit it off immediately. We liked lots of the same music, but more than anything else it was our mutual infatuation with Phew that made us decide to meet.

Takamoto was a wiry, dirty 19-year-old who had just moved to Tokyo from his hometown Osaka. The first time he dropped by he brought a grocery bag full of British dub cassettes and two friends who offered to play guitar and bass. We rented a room in a local studio space in the middle of the night and Takamoto flailed around, removed most of his clothing, and shrieked as if possessed. I was floored. After that Takamoto came over a lot and always brought new bagfuls of music. Photographs of one such meeting appear in Tsuzuki Kyoichi's Universe For Rent.

Takamoto was an inspirational guy. Walking down the street he often burst into song in his high-pitched wail, oblivious to the fact that people passing by were visibly shocked and frightened. He was not modest. He said he was born to sing.

With visions of Jaki Liebezeit in our heads, we tried to find a jazz drummer. A few days after I moved into a showerless and hot waterless one-room apartment in a fancy-pants neighborhood in downtown Tokyo I stumbled into a local bar on bossa nova night and ended up watching the percussionist, Yuta Suganuma, for a couple hours. I called Takamoto and told him we'd found our man. He bolted over on the next train. We introduced ourselves and Yuta turned out to be a near-mute and completely impossible to read. Advertising ourselves as musical geniuses, we smooth-talked Yuta into a studio date. Yuta brought along Fumi Mori, a longtime friend who volunteered to help us out until we found a regular bass player.

Our early practices were raucous fun. Yuta and Mori were machines and pounced on everything I played. These early "jams" were "remixed" (plugged through echo boxes) and sold at shows as the individually-decorated "Wild Tape".

The kids didn’t get us, though, and we had a hard time booking shows. The only club that asked us to play more than once was a total dive called Cymbarine. Ebiko, the owner and a heavyset man, was prone to falling asleep behind the mixing board while doing sound, collapsing onto the controls and pushing all the levels to 10.

When James Murphy came to Japan on tour as a sound man, I passed along a tape. In a blizzard of events that may or may not have involved a beach in Hawaii, mind-altering substances and a flood of sea turtles, James grew very fond of our music. We made plans to record in his NYC studio that summer.

Things started to fall apart around the time we started recording. I was hospitalized for an outbreak of measles a week before our trip and for the first couple of days in the studio I had trouble moving my arms. We overestimated the amount of time we had to mix the songs. Takamoto was not his usual electrifying self, either. In the blazing hot NYC summer, he wrapped his entire upper body including his face in towels and walked around moaning, a kind of "voice training" he said. After we returned to Japan, Takamoto disappeared. For better or for worse, his funk is deeply branded into our record: the lyrics are "dark" and for some people "troubling."

We only played a few shows after that, most of them disasters. Things broke, no one showed up and once, audience members got into an awful, violent fight.

These days, Mori plays in a Grateful Dead-inspired jam band whose sets last three hours, Yuta is a bonafide celebrity playing with chart-toppers Ego Wrappin', and Takamoto is reforming his high school band and starring in a movie. I’m moving home.

Justin S., November 2002