Brast Burn - Debon LP (Japan 1975) Side One

Brast Burn
Debon
Paradigm Discs

• Debon part 1 (23.28)
• Debon part 2 (22.28)

Debon was originally released on
Voice Records, VO-1001
Reissued 1998

Spend any time immersed in the strange world of Nurse With Wound, and you'll encounter talk of "The List." As central to the NWW mythos as Le Comte de Lautréamont's Maldoror is to the parallel mythology of Current 93, The List is a page of names that accompanied the first NWW album, 1979's A Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella. Reaching out to like-minded outsider souls, NWW doyen Steven Stapleton compiled an exhaustive checklist of Krautrock, European progressive, 20th Century, psychedelic, improv, Zeuhl, concrète, jazz, noise, RIO and avant-pop artists, all of whom met the qualification of NWWs central apothegm: "Categories strain, crack, and sometimes break, under their burden - step out of the space provided."

The Freeman brothers (of Audion Magazine/Ultima Thule fame) took it upon themselves to annotate and extrapolate Stapleton's list, providing a buyer's-guide of NWW-fan-friendly recordings but frequently adding to the confusion in the course of their speculations. Stapleton notes a certain Brast Burn - right between Brainticket (whose music NWW plunders frequently and with glee) and Brave New World. By way of explanation, the Freemans offer only a terse "A Japanese Faust" and posit that the band, along with Karuna Khyal (who, while not included in The List, released an album on the same Voice Records label), must have been interchangeable concerns. If the accepted lore isn't deliberately misleading, Brast Burn and Karuna Khyal are indeed one and the same. Could these Voice Records artists represent a Janus-faced collective entirely at peace with its inherent contradictions? Might the tribal Sturm und Drang and stomping lunatic-fringe revelry of Karuna Khyal's Alomoni 1985 and the beatific grace of Debon be two sides of a single fabulous tale? As both albums have languid slide guitars and tape loops in common, the possibility seems more likely with every spin through Debon.

A telling point of reference here could be Magical Power Mako, another perplexing entity of Japanese origin and synchronous (mid-'70s) activity. Like any good artistic enigma, MPM inhabits a creative realm to which others gain entrance only at his bidding. Since 1974, MPM has charted his own cosmic/kosmiche trail of self and spiritual discovery through music, with each record as different from the last as it is from everything else. It is to the kaleidoscope of MPM's finest work that Brast Burn's helical psychedelic configurations return.

Spread across two lengthy (22+-minute) tracks, broken into shards and melted down, Debon is a mandala of jingling loops, multi-tracked and harmonized lamasery chants, Kenji "Damo" Suzuki-styled declamations, electronic glimmers, gongs, sacred bells, and fuzzed-out synthesizers. Brast Burn further plaits Debon with breathless flutes and recorders, subtle musique concrËte embellishments, percussive shudders, and guitars, guitars, guitars - electric and acoustic, clean and lavishly effects-laden, strummed and struck, slicing and gently sliding. The laundry list of elements, worthy of Ashtray Navigations or Simon Wickham Smith and Richard Youngs, actually evokes a similar effect - at once improvisational yet utterly musical. Nor is it much of a stretch to draw the line connecting Brast Burn with such scions as Ghost or Trembling Strain. Favoring consciousness, clarity, and contemplation (as opposed to Karuna Khyal's fits of angst and drunken choler), Brast Burn communicates sensitivity to the Zen virtue of negative space, layering the natural white noises of wind and water to cancel out lingering entropic traces.

The epic gestures of the earlier track culminate in raga-like repose - a spiritually exhausting, soul-wrenching prayer ritual concluding with the revitalizing serenity of meditation. It might all be too hippie-drippy/sounds-of-the-'70s for some, if not for the full zoological spectrum of curious critter voices (elsewhere identified as Stan Laurel samples!) and toy-like musical accents littering its picked and plucked figures. Tape designs and interrupted narrative aside, there's far more evidence of early Popul Vuh - particularly during the tracks climactic throes of euphoric axemanship - than there is support for Brast Burn's ostensible "Japanese Faust" reputation.

Of Paradigm Discs' Voice Records reissues, the exhilarating Alomoni 1985 may be the more immediately arresting album. But Debons fascinating, multidimensional charms are not to be overlooked by devotees of psychedelic arcana.