Acid Mothers Temple
March 24th, 2008
Johnny Brenda's
Philadelphia, PA


Source: 
Roland Edirol R-09 (on-board mics, low cut on & AGC off, saved as 16 bit 44.1khz .WAV) > WaveLab (stereo channels swapped, normalized to 0dB, SL-1 Stereo Expander @ 100%) > CDWAV (tracks split and saved as .FLAC level 8 ) > foobar2000 (Tags + ReplayGain)

Location: Balcony centerish, right at the first bend

Taper: ZaPenguin (pjzyhfz02(AT)sneakemail.com or 
http://db.etree.org/ZappaPenguin) 


SOUND QUALITY: A/A- (bizarrely enough, the best recording I made of the tour comes from  the balcony. Drums are a little airy, and that's what keeps this recording from the hallowed halls of the flat-out "A")


THE BAND:
Tsuyama Atsushi: monster bass, voice, cosmic joker
Higashi Hiroshi: synth, guitar, voice, dancin'king
Shimura Koji: drums, latino cool
Kawabata Makoto: guitar, voice, speed guru
Philadelphia audience: whistling


TRACK LIST:
CD1 [77:45]
01. Intro jam > Douchebag [10:23]
02. Dark Stars in the Dazzling Sky [17:28]
03. Whistling jam [0:57]
04. > La Novia (incl. La Le Lo) [16:35]
05. Tsuyama's Conducted Improvisation [2:12]
06. > Pink Lady Lemonade > Speed Guru [27:19]
07. audience [2:53]

Note: For those of you still insisting on 74 minute discs (all three of you), the best place to split discs is between tracks 04 and 05. 


MINI BIO:
"Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. (and subsequent offshoots) is a Japanese psychedelic band founded in 1995 by members of the Acid Mothers Temple soul-collective. The band is led by guitarist Kawabata Makoto and early in their career featured many musicians but by 2004 the line-up had coalesced with 4 core members and frequent vocal guests.

The band have a reputation for phenomenal live shows, and releasing frequent albums on a number of international record labels, as well as the Acid Mothers Temple family record label which was established in 1998 to document the activities of the whole collective."
- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia which every 14 year old has edited.


BAND PAGE:
http://www.acidmothers.com


SETLIST:
Intro jam > Douchebag, Dark Stars in the Dazzling Sky, whistling > La Novia (incl. La Le Lo), Tsuyama-conducted meltdown improv > Pink Lady Lemonade > Speed Guru


SHOW NOTES: 
Fucking damn, what a show. 

Getting to Philly is surprisingly simple, so long as you don't hold any objections to being mildly hammered by tolls. Get on I-95. Head north. Occasionally slow down and find a nice lady or man to take your money. Speed back up. Eventually make a left, a right, and another right. Wham, bam, Johnny Brenda's, ma'am, with time to spare.

Johnny Brenda's is definitely what you'd call a "funky" venue. It's got nothing to do with the type of bands they book, either - in terms of layout alone, it's the Fenway Park of venues. The bottom floor is your typical small-sized bar-restaurant, nothing terribly fancy (unless the dinky little lights above the pool table count). 

Head upstairs, though, and you find yourself on the main stage. Well, not quite, actually - head upstairs and you find yourself staring at a second bar, with a tiny opening off to the side that leads to the main stage area. Way off in the back there's yet another upstairs to travel, where you find yourself facing yet ANOTHER bar, along with ample standing space. In terms of total floor space, I'd strongly suggest that this is still the smallest venue of the four I saw the Acid Mothers at - but it'd be hard to find a bad spot in the house.

Danava opened, and while this isn't a Danava info.txt file, I figure it's about time to mention that a) they absolutely shred, and b) they grew on me over the course of the four shows I saw. Definitely an opening band that gets the crowd riled up, in this case, for the Acid Mothers.

And, honestly, what can I possibly say about this show? Possibly even better than the D.C. show, this show was slick, polished, downright corporate - in a non-threatening, "we're all friends here" way, of course. The crowd was the most eclectic I've seen for an Acid Mothers show yet - maybe that's just Philly for ya. And the crowd was fucking into what they were hearing - check out the "whistling jam", with healthy, and lasting, contributions from all corners of the venue well into the beginning of the Dark Star solo. 

After Kawabata ditched his guitar at the end of the blistering Speed Guru jam (flowing so smoothly out of Pink Lady Lemonade that I haven't yet noticed it, and never would if Kawabata didn't clue me in to the segue), the crowd cheered for nearly five straight minutes (three of which are captured here), but for whatever reason, when the band left the stage after Pink Lady Lemonade, the show was over. But how, oh how, could a band - even the Acid Mothers themselves - possibly hope to top the music already played? They really and truly could not, and hence, the only real downer of the night was trying to get out of Philly. 

Certain big cities were major ports in pre-historic eras. Your New York Cities. Your Bostons. Your Chicagos, even your Saint Loueys to some degree. Fueled by a near-constant wave of immigration, with random people-folk being swept up in the current and strewn throughout a given land area, driven by human nature itself to build apartment buildings, roads, and mini-marts. Other cities - your District of Columbias, your San Franciscos, your Los Angelees - exist for more arbitrary reasons. Whether they be mankind's search for deeper and more lasting bureaucracy, for gold, or for a place to park his car on a thick stretch of road, these cities presented young teenaged travellers with the chance to park their wagons and further their little teenaged dream, whatever that teenaged dream may have been.

Other cities, namely Philly and Baltimore, exist because people cannot get out of them. The Venus Fly Traps of the east coast, luring unwary travellers to their borders with softly-whispered promises of skyscrapers and seafood, only to immediately seal off their exists through a complicated network of one-way roads and obtuse signage. Yes, in case you skipped the word "Philly" in the beginning of this paragraph, Philly is fucking impossible to get out of. I could see the highway quite clearly. No problem there. I could even drive next to the highway, heading north, on a one-way street with no signs of a southbound exit ramp. A damn fool would tell you that all one would need to do is cross under the highway, where one would likely find a one-way street headed in the opposite direction. And that is why many fools are damned to spend their years wandering around I-95 in the search of a comparable one-way street that will never materialize. Some of these damned fools have even put up houses right alongside the highway, in a drastic act which lends whole new meaning to the phrase "close to major transportation". 

For, don't you see, there IS no southbound one-way street to be found. There are several charming little cobblestone-sewn glorified alleyways that head in a southernly direction, but not even a damned fool would dare stick an on-ramp onto these bumpy, narrow paths. 

As it turns out, the only way out of Philly heading south is to go three blocks due west, make two left turns, follow a flirtatiously vague sign, and completely ignore a northbound-pointing "one-way" sign planted ambigiously between a northbound through-road and a southbound highway entrance. Were it not for my genius decision to circle around said one-way sign for nearly ten minutes, waiting for an Alpha Driver to prove to me that the highway entrance was not, itself, subject to the laws established by the one-way sign, I'd probably still be in Philly, like so many poor, hapless souls who no doubt came before me.

Thankfully, as if to pay silent tribute to the few drivers brazen enough to escape Philly, there is one less tollbooth to stop at on the way south. Saving five dollars has never, ever felt quite as satisfying as it did that dark, yet joyous night.


SET NOTES:
This setlist comes straight from Kawabata himself, with various improvisational titlings by none other than yours truly.


RECORDING NOTES:
Fucking damn, this sounds nice. Especially loud. Play it loud and it will sound nice to you.


REQUESTS & REMINDERS:
Do not sell this recording. Do not buy this recording. Do not sell this recording, then buy it from yourself. Some one-way signs were meant to be disregarded. 


Torrented by the taper: ZaPenguin 

email - pjzyhfz02(AT)sneakemail.com 
web - http://db.etree.org/zappapenguin (always woefully out of date)

Band page: http://www.acidmothers.com

