“Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the
feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead
calmness of inaction and certainty which follows, and deprives the soul
both of hope and fear.” —Mary Shelley,
Frankenstein, 1817
Boredom is not a particularly romanticized or sought-after state;
it’s repugnant to the capitalist work ethic and the skulking nemesis of
the entertainment-intake-obsessed character of the West. Perversely,
the Japanese band Boredoms have been, since their inception over 20
years ago, riding shotgun with the concept of boredom into
ever-broadening artistic horizons. Boredoms singer/central
conceptualist Eye has spoken in interviews of the elemental value of
the state of boredom, of its potentially transformative effects on
human beings. Their music has regularly employed braying mantras,
repetitive motorik rhythms, and long trenches of droning noise since
the band’s earliest days.
However, despite this potentially stagnant modus operandi, Boredoms’
career arc has been defined by a journeying, visionary creative
evolution. If the “boredom” expressed by the group’s earliest endeavors
could be classified as the boredom of adolescence and of disaffected
and disenfranchised members of contemporary society, then the music
they have been developing since around the time of 1998’s seminal
Super Ae has been occupied with a much grander and more
ego-crushing brand of “boredom”—that of the natural world and its
endlessly patient expanses.
“Dear mountains! My own beautiful lake! How do you welcome your
wanderer? Your summits are clear; the sky and lake are blue and placid.
Is this to prognosticate peace, or to mock at my unhappiness?” So
speaks the understandably perturbed protagonist of Mary Shelley’s
obscenely famous story Frankenstein, when, after abandoning
the city for a nature voyage to clear his mind after creating his
monster, he finds the stillness of the wilderness not so comforting.
Being in a state of existential turmoil and emotional self-torture, he
finds no communion with the enveloping calmness. Indeed, to find solace
he has to look to more violent landscapes: “The awful and majestic in
nature had indeed always the effect of solemnizing [his] mind, and
causing [him] to forget the passing cares of life.”
While Boredoms’ work has grown more and more aligned with nature
(the past decade has found them paying loyal tribute to the sun,
recording drums on the beach with underwater microphones, and trying to
metaphorically transform 77 drummers into a giant dragon), it has
become evident that they, like Dr. Frankenstein, like the rough stuff.
They, too, seek to create ecstatic flights via overwhelming displays of
violent power. Their present incarnation, consisting of Eye and
drummers Yoshimi P-We, Yojiro, and Muneomi Senju, make music of
shuddering catharsis and crippling force, with a
vocabulary of
mana-accelerating musical effects. Their now acutely refined power
comes from a healthy understanding that, dramatically speaking, the
majesty of great peaks is enriched by the numbing treks through the
valleys, and that the long fury of the storm makes the eventual
breakthrough of the sun feel messianic.
When asked about what other music Eye feels is akin to the work of
Boredoms, he cites only traditional Siberian shamanistic music, a form
in which the sounds of nature and animals are mimicked by vocalists to
summon the spirits who will aid them in life. From this perspective,
then, the music of Boredoms takes on a new light, as they perhaps are
not, like Dr. Frankenstein, merely wandering the natural world in
search of its psychic treasures, but making themselves into musical
avatars of nature’s most epic forces. Here then arise some essential
questions about what interactions with nature are most valid/healthy
for the human mind, particularly when the mind in question
belongs
to a creator of such extreme vision as Dr. Frankenstein
or
Boredoms.
Frankenstein’s creation was made in isolation; indeed, no one knew
of his work until it was already well run amok, committing brutal
murders and eloquently espousing mannered hatred for its absentee
father. The glory and the horror of what Dr. Frankenstein made was his
alone and, subsequently, he could only empathize with nature when it
presented a mirror of the horror; its assured calmness offended him,
its tempestuousness soothed him. Boredoms, conversely, make work for
other people, seeking transformative communal experiences for
themselves and their audiences, and embody the “awful and majestic in
nature” to create these experiences. While Frankenstein ended in a
soul-dead death chase across the arctic tundra with his unnatural
creation, Boredoms’ music seems ever soaring toward frontiers of human
experience that are dazzling and sun-drenched. 