95. Kikagaku Moyo

The Lexington

8 June 2015

I will admit I have ventured down some questionable musical wormholes in my time, the sort of detours that end in a basement with a man wielding a theremin and a delay pedal. But few tunnels go quite as deep, or as gloriously weird, as the one that led me to Kikagaku Moyo, a Japanese psychedelic rock band.

So it was that I dragged my long-suffering, genre-sceptical gig buddy, up to the Lexington, a North London venue whose upstairs room has witnessed the start of many young bands first steps. On stage, five long-haired Tokyo hippies padded out barefoot, sat down cross-legged like they were about to start a group meditation, and promptly launched into ninety minutes of blissed-out, transcendental psych that felt like it had been piped in from another dimension.

Their album Forest of Lost Children gives you some idea. It’s part ambient meditation, part sonic séance. The songs are loose and fluid, sometimes fraying at the edges like a patchouli-scented jumper, only to suddenly cohere into a kaleidoscopic storm of chiming guitars, motorik rhythms, wordless vocals and sitar-flecked freakouts. There were moments where half the band seemed to be playing different songs entirely, and then, as if tugged by the invisible hand of some higher stoned consciousness, they’d lock in and summon a groove so hypnotic you felt your pineal gland doing a freak out.

We drifted with them, somewhere between Osaka and outer space, as four twenty-minute epics unfurled like incense smoke in slow motion. It was cosmic. It was chaotic. It was completely charming.

Then, just as calmly as they arrived, they stood, bowed politely to the audience, who responded with a mixture of awe and mild confusion, and filed off stage like they were late for a herbal tea convention.

Outside, they stood quietly huddled, passing around a “cigarette” in the North London night. We wandered over to say thanks, only to realise they didn’t speak a word of English. What followed was a five-minute mime routine of mutual appreciation, awkward bowing, and signing a record I’d just bought at the merch table.

Then, as mysteriously as they came, they vanished into the night, barefoot, beautiful, and almost certainly very, very high. Kikagaku Moyo levitated the Lexington that night. And for ninety glorious, shamisen-drenched minutes, we were all floating right there with them.