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Avant-garde Japanese band Boredoms is taking its electronically enhanced drum circle shtick to the middle of the ocean, where it will provide a live soundtrack to a total solar eclipse.
Organizers of Tokara The Sun & Moon Festival have booked a Russian ferry and hired the Boredoms, along with New York's Gang Gang Dance and Japan's Goma, to play a show during the next Saros 136 eclipse, which will take place July 22. The spectacle is subtitled, "The Lucy in the Sky With Diamond Ring Tour."
The Boredoms are pretty much the perfect choice for such an event. The genre-bending band emerged from Osaka's noise-punk scene in the late 1980s before shifting its style to a percussion-heavy mix of psychedelic rock, trance-heavy beats and sun-worship chants.
Several of the band's albums, including Vision Creation Newsun and Seadrum/House of Sun, explore this style. As the titles indicate, the themes embrace the solar, the aquatic and the cosmic.
A typical Boredoms show finds the band performing as a four-piece, with three drummers sitting in a circle and pounding out thunderous, lock-step rhythms as bandleader/vocalist Yamantaka Eye plays assorted electronic instruments, manipulates various effects and directs the flow of the action. Things get even noisier once Eye starts screaming and pounding away on his custom seven-neck guitar with a pair of meter-long sticks. (See a video of the band below.)
But the ambitious group has been organizing increasingly grandiose performances: Boredoms got 77 drummers together in a park under the Brooklyn Bridge on July 7, 2007 (that's 07-07-07), then pulled a similar stunt with 88 drummers in both Los Angeles and New York on August 8, 2008.
July's eclipse will be extraordinarily long — the totality of the eclipse, the point at which the moon is fully obscuring the sun, will reach 6 minutes, 39 seconds. According to NASA, the umbra of the eclipse will cut a path straight across China and the South Pacific, with the best viewpoint off the southern coast of Japan, at 24.2 degrees N, 144.1 degrees E, when the sun is 86 degrees overhead.
Several tour groups are organizing eclipse-viewing cruises through the South Pacific for July's event, but the Boredoms-led excursion will likely be the most, er, cosmic. Having seen the band perform several times, we can only imagine how such an otherworldly setting would enhance the experience.
Tickets cost a whopping 168,000 yen (about $1,700). But for that money, you get a concert, three DJ sets, organic food, a bed to sleep in and an area for your kids to keep themselves entertained. Oh yeah, and a three-day party on a boat during a total solar eclipse!
Photo of Boredoms at New York City's Terminal 5: trontnort/Flickr
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