Astro and Junzo
09.08.06 at the UFO Club in Tokyo by Eric Nielsen
We're just back from an insane tour of Japan and we've seen and heard some amazing music. The kind that rips your eyeballs out and makes you wonder if you even know what music is. The duo of Astro and Junzo played at the storied UFO club in Tokyo and blew my mind, emotive and cathartic. I sat like an insane asylum lunatic, laughing throughout the whole set. No one could hear me because this was the loudest act of over 25 acts I saw on tour. I was laughing at the sheer balls and the incredible attack on the whole body. I couldn't tell if my heart was beating or if it was the attack from Astro's moog that was shaking my whole being. You could see that Junzo's amp was dimed and still it just barely fit into the wall of alien sounds that dropped from the house PA. I looked over at the sound man in the middle of the set and he sat with a fan, trying to blow some life into the overheating PA. This is the kind of set you come to Japan to hear music for. Everyone always asks facetiously, why is Japanese music so cool? Well, this is why. For one thing it's the volume. It's a form of meditation that can only be learned by experiencing. And, it's not polite to walk out on a show in Japan. Take the assault, let it batter you in a way you didn't feel was possible. Let the sound drive you to a place you've never been. And then, in the middle of it, float outside your body, forget where you are, explore the ether. And when you settle back into your body and realize where you've been, that you forgot about the music and the place and the time, laugh your ass off and dig the sounds that blew your corporeal body to bits and left only your mind, floating, timeless, like Japan, one thousand years old.

Astro is formerly of C.C.C.C. where he played with his S & M porn star wife Mayuko Hino, pictured above. Crazy lovely.