135. Kikagaku Moyo

Brewhouse

26 May 2016

A year ago, almost to the day, one of my best pals and I had stumbled into something of a cosmic accident. A punt on a record, bought because I liked the sleeve and rubber-stamped by a conspiratorial nod from the record-store cashier, had landed us in The Lexington, watching a band of Japanese space hippies barefoot their way across the stage and then proceed to melt the room with ninety minutes of kaleidoscopic freak-outs.

After bowing politely, they shuffled straight outside, where we found them huddled in an alley, quite clearly orbiting Saturn courtesy of some Camden-sourced chemistry.

Fast forward twelve months and here we were again, this time in Dalston’s Brewhouse. Any attempt at subtlety was gone. Instead of lurking in the shadows, the whole band was already sat outside in full view, passing around blunts the size of traffic cones, clouds so thick it looked like a new weather system was forming above the picnic tables.

The gig was more of the same. But “more of the same” undersells it, because when Japanese space hippies decide to launch, you strap in and let the ride take you. They play like five separate planets drifting on their own orbits, brushing past one another occasionally before colliding in glorious bursts of psychedelic light.

Time signatures are optional, melodies are more like suggestions, yet somehow, somehow, the chaos coheres into these sprawling, mesmerising freak-outs that feel both ramshackle and transcendent.

It’s confusing, disorientating, and oddly hypnotic, like watching five different films at once only for the endings to line up perfectly in the last ten minutes. The crowd swayed and the band carried on, lost in their own private solar system.

Then it was over. They bowed again, shuffled off, and, predictably, there they were back outside, orbiting another picnic table in clouds of perfumed smoke, giggling amongst themselves.

Once again, we attempted to communicate with these space aliens, but we would have probably fared better if we had attempted it in Klingon. We nodded, they nodded, and once again it felt like we’d been let in on something strange, otherworldly and really rather good, if only for an hour.