Q027:
What is the idea behind Nishinihon?
A027:
The three of us all loved hard rock when we were kids, but over the twenty years of our respective careers we had never had a chance to play hard rock ourselves. So forming the group was like a childhood dream come true. On top of that, hard rock has died or been replaced by heavy metal, so we wanted to preserve good old hard rock. (I believe that hard rock was a form of popular music given birth to by the 20th century, and that it will go down in the pages of history as such). For our first CD release, we decided upon the Japanese title "A new and powerful force in hard rock" (it is worth noting that when the first Pink Floyd album was released in Japan they were described as "as a new and powerful force in psychedelia". And when Cream and Zep were first introduced in Japan, they were referred to as "art rock". No ones uses these phrases any more though.) It was this idea of "art rock" that we really loved. The genre was symbolised by massively extended guitar solos at huge volume that suggested stickiness and heat and filth and noise all the stuff that rock originally possessed and which were such a part of its counter-cultural nature. But once rock started becoming big business, all these elements got less evident until they died out entirely.
In Nishinihon we have no intention at all of creating new music. All we're trying to do is recreate for the 21st century some amazing music that used to exist.