Top 10: Boredoms Side Projects

Boredoms’ core body of work spans musical worlds both terrestrial and interstellar, from rocket-fueled gibberish and guitar self-destruction to transcendent meditations and bleary-eyed nature walks. Unsurprisingly, the band’s rotating cast of musicians have each taken that exploratory tendency with them into their solo acts, and the universe of bands connected to Boredoms is an intricate and ever-expanding web. It might be easier to list the groups and musicians that members of Boredoms haven’t collaborated with, but rest assured that each side project is a direct result of the outsize and unique personalities that help make Boredoms the singular entity it has always been.

Destroy 2

Boredoms frontman Yamantaka Eye teamed with Corrupted drummer Chew Hasegawa in 1995 as Destroy 2 to perform the onstage exorcism We Are Voice and Rhythm Only. Recorded live in Osaka, the singular and extremely short album features 48 “songs” consisting mostly of frantic stop-start skins abuse from Hasegawa and manic gibberish poetry from Eye, all delivered at ear-splitting volumes. Tuneful it is not, but there’s enough energy in each gasp and slam to put you right in the midst of the noticeably appreciative crowd.

OOIOO

Boredoms’ longtime drummer Yoshimi P-We has been releasing collections of spacey krautrock as the head of the all-female OOIOO for longer than Boredoms itself has been releasing albums. Voyages like 1999’s Feather Float and 2006’s Taigai explore the cosmic sun worship and tribal fervor of Super ae and Vision Creation Newsun from a more improvisational standpoint, and they turn the saturation up even further with plenty of goofy charm and friendly melodies. 2013’s Gamel saw the group revisiting their lengthy career through the prism of the gamelan, an Indonesian ensemble that involves a heavy focus on percussive instruments. Unsurprisingly, it serves as a perfect method for turning the group’s tribal jams into even heavier rhythmic workouts.

Z-Rock Hawaii

Stateside weirdos Ween inhabited as strange a corner of the musical world as the more abrasive Boredoms, but that shared oddness didn’t stop the two groups from seriously threatening to break into the mainstream during the mid-'90s. It also led to them inexplicably teaming up as Z-Rock Hawaii and releasing a single, self-titled album that reimagines classic rock as a cacophonous maelstrom of leather jackets and childlike energy. “Piledriver,” the dementedly beautiful “Sunset Over Osaka,” and especially the surprisingly faithful cover of “Bad to the Bone” all reveal a certain shared vision between the two disparate groups that somehow works in between all the screaming and dissonance.

Mystic Fugu Orchestra

Yamantaka Eye lent his unrecognizably quiet voice to a fascinating collection of faux-historical Judaic recordings called Zohar in 1995. Legendary avant-garde composer and kindred spirit John Zorn (here called Rav Tzizit) supplies simple harmonium hums for Eye (aka Rav Yechida) to mumble and strain over, and the entire disc is smothered under a dense layer of record crackle to drive home the disk’s “ancient” origins. The whole thing feels like a lark, but it’s worth it to hear frequent collaborators Eye and Zorn push each other out of their comfort zones and into a completely alien musical world.

Rovo

Guitarist Seiichi Yamamoto is perhaps one of the less visible members of Boredoms, but he has amassed a mountainous body of work with that group and through collaborations with artists from across the globe. His work as leader of Rovo stands out for its hypnotic mastery of rhythm and dub-like sense of space. The danceable motorik grooves that explode out of the middles of albums like PICO! and Sai feel like a blearier, more blissed-out counterpoint to the body of work Yoshimi P-We has accumulated as head of OOIOO.

Audio Sports

Audio Sports’ Era of Glittering Gas, released in 1992, saw Boredoms vocalist Yamantaka Eye working within a surprisingly standard hip-hop context in collaboration with beatsmith Nobukazu Takemura. Though Eye would depart the project following that debut album, his low-key flow gives Gas an oddly endearing rhythmicality that is far removed from the jazzy excursions found on later Audio Sports albums. Most certainly a product of its time, the backpacker vibes are offset by the opportunity to hear Eye vocalize at a normal, conversational volume with nary a scream to be heard.

Noise Ramones

Boredoms’ revered 1992 breakthrough Pop Tatari begins with 30 seconds of sine wave abuse called, cheekily, “Noise Ramones.” Eight years after that first ear-shattering whine, singer Yamantaka Eye (and, reportedly, drummer Yoshimi) released a full EP of atonal bleats and hums under the same banner. Noise Ramones’ Rocket to DNA is pure audio masochism and sounds like a heartfelt suicide note from your speakers, but the four remixes from “DJ Smallcock” reveal a notable sense of humor at the heart of the otherwise aggressively confrontational side project.

Puzzle Punks

Yamantaka Eye’s playful side is the driving force behind Puzzle Punks, his collaboration with Japanese painter Shinro Ohtake. The duo used children’s toys, washes of static, and wildly incoherent guitar playing to smash out a trio of jammy noise-pop albums that all poke fun at themselves just as much as they poke fun at others. Song titles include “ZZ-Topuzz,” “Magic Poopers,” and “Hip Hop Pooray.” That last song, as with all the songs off of debut album Pipeline, is credited to a fake band. In this case, Poo.

Free Kitten

Boredoms drummer Yoshimi P-We went full-on riot grrrl during her tenure with Free Kitten, a supergroup that also employed Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Mark Ibold of Pavement, and Julia Cafritz of Pussy Galore. The ragtag gang found a home on the roster of scene-making giant Kill Rock Stars, and together they bashed out plenty of three-minute missives in the Bikini Kill and Bratmobile tradition. Yoshimi’s rock-steady punk drumming is an interesting change of pace from her usual explosive cymbal flagellation, though the real star of the show is Gordon and her iconic high-pitched moan.

OLAibi

Boredoms and its Yoshimi-led offshoot OOIOO are so similar in sound and mentality that a collaboration between parent band and child shouldn’t come as much of a shock. Surprisingly, OLAibi doesn’t bridge the gap between the two groups so much as it strikes off on its own, even more percussive direction. Hand drums, pianos, voices, rattles, and shards of noise are all utilized with marksman-like precision in the service of the lengthy jams of Humming Moon Drip and the new age woogle of New Rain.