I first heard about Les Rallizes Dénudés last year when I
read Julian Cope’s excellent Japrocksampler
(which also turned me on to the joys of the Flower Travellin’ Band and Speed,
Glue & Shinki, among others). Since then, I’ve had a bunch of Les Rallizes
Dénudés bootlegs (nearly the entire catalog consists of bootlegs) floating
around on my hard drive, but all of their 2+ hour runtimes kept me from
listening to them. Whenever I was thinking about Les Rallizes Dénudés, I never
had the time to sit down and really listen to the bootlegs, and when I did have
the time I was always more in the mood to listen to Screw tapes or old Stretch
& Bobbito shows or what have you.
I finally got around to them today and randomly picked December’s Black Children, which was
recorded live in the Yaneura district of Tokyo on December 13, 1980 and is one of the only documents of
guitarist Fuijo Yamacauchi’s time with the band. The closest analogue to what
the band is doing here is The Velvet
Underground Live 1969, but while the Velvet Underground was always New York
City to their core, Les Rallizes Dénudés has none of that style. There is no
pretense or carefully crafted image on December’s
Black Children, just noise and dread.
