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Reviews

Koenjihyakkei — Live at Club Goodman
(Skin Graft GR163, 2020/2025, 2CD / 2LP / DL)

by Jon Davis, Published 2025-07-06

Live at Club Goodman Cover art

The music of Koenjihyakkei tends to attract such adjectives as intense, frenetic, and over-the-top. When it comes to zeuhl-inspired music, this band’s motto has always been “too much is never enough” combined with “anything worth doing is worth over-doing.” Every track is a blast of energy with very little respite for overwhelmed listeners. How leader Tatsuya Yoshida manages to find musicians who can play these tunes is beyond me, and Live at Club Goodman is perhaps the clearest illustration of the group’s capabilities. This is nearly two hours of relentless complexity performed meticulously by Yoshida’s recruits, as it happened on the night of August 20, 2020. The leader himself is on drums and vocals, joined by Kengo Sakamoto (bass, vocals), Kei Koganemaru (guitar, vocals), Taku Yabuki (keyboards), Keiko Komori (soprano sax, clarinet), and AH (vocals). If you’ve heard any of Koenjihyakkei’s other music, you know what to expect, with riffs built up of constantly changing time signatures, irregular unison melodies, and dramatic vocals consisting of nonsense syllables. Yes, it’s like Magma on amphetamines. Musical ideas come and go, rarely lasting very long, then return later. This set of fourteen tracks covers some of the same territory as their live videos (I’ve got 070531 and Live at Koenji High, which are both stellar if you can find them), though this is a more recent version of the band, so tunes from Dhorimvishka are included. While Yoshida is definitely the driving force behind the band (in more ways than one), he’s not the only composer: Sakamoto and Yabuki each have credit on a track, and from listening you’d never be able to tell which ones. Listening to this live album, my mind has trouble comprehending how the musicians managed to maintain such a pace for so long — it’s like sprinting a marathon. But they obviously did it, and here’s the documentation. They finish off the set with their “Classical Music Medley,” which takes dozens of tiny snippets of well-known classical pieces and jumbles them together in sequence for 1:40 of insanity. I’m not sure I’d recommend listening to Live at Club Goodman all in one sitting (though the audience in the venue that night obviously did!), but it’s an extraordinary document of what is possible. Certainly not for everyone, but I love it.

Filed under: New releases, 2025 releases, 2020 recordings

Related artist(s): Koenjihyakkei, Tatsuya Yoshida

More info
http://skingraftrecords.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-club-goodman

 

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