Sometimes you’ve just got to ask yourself: “Why am I doing this?” As I keep scouring through myriad broken links, countless blank pages, and fruitless “archived” information, I keep thinking, “Just what is there to gain from sharing something like Nazoo’s Dear Heavens, Children In His Twilight?”
From the best information I can gather–which, sadly, isn’t much–I think I can accurately say a few things. I can say that Nazoo began as a three-piece outfit in Tokyo around 1991. For such a mysterious band, it’s fitting that their name is a wordplay on the Kanji character for “mystery” (迷), nazo. After banging around various tracks on numerous early Japanese techno and industrial “darkwave” compilations, it was 1994’s Dear Heavens, Children In His Twilight, released on Victor’s alternative music sub-label AJA Records, that remains their sole “official” release.
Nazoo is led by mercurial DJ and guitarist Jota Nazoo, synth programmer NAR, and percussionist Davie Blue. Their early works are impossible to pin down, spanning genres from uptempo breakbeat to hardcore and spacy, almost psychedelic electronic music. Somehow, in some weird Venn diagram between NIN-like industrial noise/rock and New Age, Nazoo–though little known–finds a way to exist.
What’s impressive about their sole release is just how much it harkens back to an earlier age in “dance music.” I don’t know about you, but on songs like “Forces Of The Unknown – Tinglings – Iniclings” and “Growth – Out Of Control – Realization,” I’m taken back to the experimental spirit of groups like early Tangerine Dream, White Noise, or Joseph Byrd’s The United States of America–bands that embraced an embryonic approach to “inhuman” sounds when the musical landscape was barren of ideas for harnessing electronic instruments and electronically created music.
When you hear the first strain of a Roland drum machine kick in on the opening track, you sense that the spirit of exploration has been contemporized with new approaches and technology available to modern music makers. It’s a wonderful thing. It shows that no one needs to abandon their wiggier, more esoteric impulses because of the demands of a four-on-the-floor groove. History has enlightened us to what is possible, yet there are still releases (much like this one) that delve deeper into the little niches others leave behind.
In the year of our lord, 1994, one can’t help but feel that such music must have sounded out of leftfield–even if it’s merely an evolution of something else. As I hear the meditative synth washes of “Energy Coil And Time Space Slip” morph into something new, I hear them lying prone at the Church of the KLF summoning their courage. In the end, humans have to channel the controls of the ghosts in the machines to bring ideas like these back to life.
Once again, in an age where everything seems to have a backstory, it’s wonderfully refreshing to live with and encounter little mysteries that unravel in their own way, spinning their revelations in your mind. Listening with a pair of headphones (or through two speakers) is a great way to discover such revelation.
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