Ruins
Hyper-kinetic bass and drum collisions featuring operatic gibberish and impossible rhythms. A high-voltage jolt of Japanese avant-prog and noise rock.
Hyper-kinetic bass and drum collisions featuring operatic gibberish and impossible rhythms. A high-voltage jolt of Japanese avant-prog and noise rock.
Listening to Ruins feels like being trapped inside a high-speed particle accelerator with a drum kit. It is music that refuses to sit still for even a microsecond, characterized by Tatsuya Yoshida's superhuman drumming and a rotating cast of bassists who treat their four strings like a lead guitar and a percussion section simultaneously. The sound is jagged, brittle, and overwhelmingly dense despite the minimal lineup.
What truly sets them apart is the vocal element. Instead of traditional lyrics, they utilize a self-invented, phonetic language that sounds like a frantic, alien opera. It is a nod to the Zeuhl tradition of Magma, but stripped of the cosmic grandeur and replaced with the raw, nervous energy of the Tokyo underground. The songs are often short, explosive bursts of technical precision that border on the absurd.
Start with Hyderomastgroningem to hear the band at their most crystalline and punishing. It is the definitive document of their mid-90s peak, showcasing the terrifyingly tight interplay that makes two people sound like a malfunctioning mechanical orchestra. It is not for the faint of heart, but for those who crave rhythmic complexity, it is essential.
Ruins is a Japanese music duo composed only of drummer/vocalist Tatsuya Yoshida and a bass guitarist (there have been four such bassists in the band's history). The group, formed in 1985, was supposedly intended to be a power trio; the guitarist, however, never showed up to the band's first rehearsal so the group remained a duo. The music touches on progressive rock, jazz fusion and noise rock.
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