Keiji Haino & Sumac American Dollar Bill

Japan’s fearless multi-instrumentalist and cultural provocateur Keiji Haino
has made a career out of his free-form musical improvisations and diverse
collaborations. Whether deconstructing American blues to a few rogue
notes hanging across chasms of empty space in his solo endeavors, sparring
with the nebulous fringes of psychedelia in Fushitsusha, or teaming up with
musicians like Faust, Boris, Jim O’Rourke, Stephen O’Malley, John Zorn,
and Peter Brötzmann for ?eeting aural experiments. Haino’s work is never
pre-planned or structured, but rather a completely spontaneous exploration
of chemistry, texture, and dynamics.
SUMAC’s tenure is much younger than Haino’s, though guitarist/vocalist
Aaron Turner has covered a similarly large swath of musical territory across
numerous projects and collaborations, from the sedated drones of recent
projects with Daniel Menche and William Fowler Collins to the modern
compositions of Mamiffer and all the way back to the restless evolutions of
post-metal stalwarts ISIS. With his cohorts Nick Yacyshyn (Baptists, Erosion)
on drums and Brian Cook (Russian Circles) on bass, Turner has dissolved
the rigid forms of heavy music, searching for a balance between disciplined
precision and unhinged musical barbarism, crafting music that vacillates
between meticulously detailed instrumentation and uninhibited forays into
oblique abstraction.
For American Dollar Bill - Keep Facing Sideways, You’re Too Hideous To Look
At Face On, Keiji Haino and SUMAC met up in Tokyo’s Goksound recording
studio to track a series of unrehearsed, completely non-premeditated
sessions. Captured across several reels of tape, the collaboration harnessed
Haino’s tension-inducing use of empty space on songs like “I’m over 137%
a love junkie, and it’s still not enough” while pushing SUMAC’s dissident
metal vocabulary on “What have I done (I was reeling in something white...)”.
Throughout the course of its hour-plus length, American Dollar Bill pushes
and pulls at the strictures of metal and bends the stylistic formalities of
improvised music to create a sonic purge unencumbered by convention.