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Reviews
Nissennenmondai / The Freebutt, Brighton
Words Ben Graham
What in the blue blazes is this, I wondered? I was all set for a quiet Sunday night watching assorted friends go through their usual improvised performances (nods of acknowledgement here to Bad Orb, Little Creature and Vitamin B12), alongside, let’s be frank, a sparse hardcore of the more chin-stroking breed of music fan: us few who were neither still raving nor cripplingly hungover after Brighton’s legendarily hedonistic gay pride weekend. True, there were some mutterings about a Japanese band headlining, but I had no reason to suspect that the night would turn up anything as arse-shakingly tremendous as Nissennenmondai.
Nissennenmondai’s Western admirers apparently include Lightning Bolt and Battles, and they share the raw repetitive attack of the former with the rhythmic, trance-dance contortions of the latter, if Battles were three tiny Japanese girls in matching white linen sleeveless dresses, and not a rather po-faced bunch of math rock muso blokes. Once begun, Nissennenmondai’s neo-mystical, psychedelic groove also triggered atavistic recollections Holy Fuck or Boredoms, or of the thunderous intensity of Liars coupled with the naïve (and feminine) rhythmic genius of ESG, or of a perfect, suddenly inevitable collision of Krautrock and no wave: percussive, primitive, abrasive, instinctive, hypnotic and utterly danceable.
Despite struggling with borrowed equipment (the result of having to navigate their entire UK tour by National Express coach), Nissennenmondai conjured three lengthy instrumental pieces driven by the amazing, diminutive Sayaka Himeno on the kit, a blur of swinging ponytail and flailing sticks. She maintained a solid disco pulse on the kick drum beneath a blizzard of hi-hat beats, hitting snare and toms only when absolutely necessary, and so locking into that sexualised pattern of tension and release that distinguishes all great dance music.
Yuri Zaikawa restricted her bass playing to the most minimal of punk-funk figures, while guitarist Masako Takada almost seemed to be playing high school metal riffs, repeating them through a loop pedal and a relatively minimal selection of effects. Yet the combination was so much greater than the sum of its deceptively simple parts.
We staggered out utterly enervated by their too-short set, and next morning cursed the fact we’d failed to buy CDs from the merch stand, that are otherwise impossible to acquire in the UK. But this can’t last long. Nissennenmondai are far too good to retain the element of surprise forever.
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