10 PM last night (Tues., Mar. 19) found me in the basement of

the Tokyo club Milk, face to face with Boredoms singer Eye Yamatsuka, who would

be performing later in the evening in a Boredoms side project known as Destroy

2. We were sitting in the kitchen bar, with Clockwork Orange music blaring out

of a portable stereo, cases of adult toys tastefully displayed along the walls,

and flourescent light casting a metallic glow on stainless steel

countertops.

The Boredoms, who are based in Osaka, are known for their

explorations at the primal edges of sound, and their association with

like-minded musicians such as Sonic Youth and John Zorn. Eye is known for being

able to scream. I asked him what to expect from Destroy 2, a duo consisting of

Eye and Boredoms drummer Yoshimi. "We're going to try to do 100 songs in 10

minutes," he said, "all improvised.

I asked him to elaborate. "We've done

this once or twice before, but in the past, we would only do 50 songs in 5

minutes. Each song was an actual composition, with unique words and themes.

Tonight is going to be more songs, and more improvisational.

Eye,

dreadlocked hair decorated with colorful ribbons piled high on his head, wanted

to talk about what he is listening to these days. "Do you know noisecore? I'm

listening to a lot of noisecore music, but more than that I'm listening to the

sounds of the street." His favorite sound? "The escalator in Shin Osaka

Station. Escalators make the coolest sounds." Yoshimi joined us and we ended up

talking about other bands that they liked. They mentioned the Minutemen, and in

particular the bass duo of Mike Watt and Kira known as Dos. "A big influence,"

said Eye.

The evening was billed as "Damage Express," and Milk was packed

with a mixed crowd of curiosity seekers, underground scenesters, and

unsuspecting business people, all out for an endless night of drinking (today

is a Japanese national holiday in celebration of the Vernal Equinox). Destroy 2

was sandwiched between two other bands on the bill, The Gaia, and Non, both

all-female noisecore bands from Osaka, and when there wasn't a band on the

stage, there were DJs spinning a mixed selection of hardcore, German techno,

and Miami hip-hop.

So what does two people doing 100 improvised songs in 10

minutes sound like? Here's a brief rundown of Destroy 2's set (keep in mind

that it is taking me far longer to write this than it took them to do

it): Eye

connected a few microphones to a series of guitar amplifiers. Yoshimi joined

him on stage. The crowd surged toward the front. The lights dimmed, and Destroy

2 began without fanfare--blasting head-on through fast, jerky songs, Eye

screaming into two microphones (one that seemed to alter the pitch of his

voice), contorting his body in what appeared to be some kind of ritual release,

stops and starts (many, many of these), audience undulating as the sounds moved

them, Yoshimi pounding away adding punctuation to Eye's glossalia, starts,

stops, feedback, screams and more screams--and then they were done. It was

intense, loud, and very very short, in a sense, the polar opposite of the

Grateful Dead.

The whole evening was the first in a series of "Damage

Express" events presented by an eclectic, hole-in-the-wall Shinjuku record shop

called Los Apson?. Los Apson? (the name is from a Mexican hardcore band, and

the logo from a Mexican pro wrestler known simply as Climax) has a deep and

varied "non-genre" based collection of mostly obscure music from around the

world, and is one of a handful of similar small, independent record shops that

have sprung up around town recently to serve the increasingly varied tastes of

the Tokyo underground.