Maher Shalal Hash Baz: Mad in Japan

They're Japanese; their group's name is in Hebrew; their music defies definition. Ben Thompson meets the exotic Maher Shalal Hash Baz

The first time I heard an album by the Japanese kitchen sink chamber orchestra Maher Shalal Hash Baz, it sounded like the same song – a joyous kindergarten epiphany performed largely on toy instruments – played over and over, but with a different error thrown in each time to focus the listener's attention. Forty minutes into this strangely mesmerising experience, it became clear that the CD had stuck on the first track.

Whether the human mind was supplying new mistakes where none previously existed, or just taking a while to get to grips with how many there were already, it was hard to be sure. What did quickly became clear on listening to the whole of the record – 2000's Geographic Records Maher compilation, From A Summer To Another Summer (An Egypt To Another Egypt) – was that this music was the gateway to a walled garden of child-like delight.

The backbone of the record is band-leader Tori Kudo's perversely accomplished guitar-playing. Kudo is a primitive stylist in the manner of Syd Barrett, and his exploratory perambulations are most potently combined with the rocking euphonium of the splendidly named Hiroo Nakazaki. The album's captivating opening selections are culled from a triple- CD box set called Return Visit To Rock Mass, originally released on the Org label in Japan in the mid-1990s. The tortuous history of this landmark recording is as good a way as any into the epic saga of suicidal violinists, religious fervour and botched imperial assassination attempts that lies behind the apparently carefree exterior of Maher Shalal Hash Baz's music.

In the early Nineties, when Org boss Shinji Shibayama decided to help Tori Kudo realise his dream of recording all the 100 or so songs he had written for Maher up to that point, he had little idea what he was letting himself in for. The suicide of violinist Mr Watanabe was just one of a number of pointers to the turbulence attending Kudo's unique muse. A penchant for recruiting novice percussionists was another ("I would stop the first passer-by and ask them to play drums,"Kudo later told The Wire).

"At first, the recording went winningly," Shibayama noted, "and then we realised we were quite old." By the time Rock Mass was finally completed, several years later, the thread of continuity holding together its Bayeux-scale stylistic tapestry – from homespun vocal vignettes to instrumental symphonies – was a very single-minded brand of innocence.

This apparent naivety turns out to be the product of a musical odyssey lasting over a quarter of a century. A veteran of the Japanese avant-garde – having cut his teeth in the late Seventies at the same Tokyo Minor club that spawned the improvisational eminence Keiji Haino – Kudo had a formal background in Joe Henderson-style jazz piano, and was on the fast track to a conservatory in America, but then the music of Velvet Underground knocked him off the rails.

Alongside numerous different musical incarnations, including short-lived synth-punk tribute band Tokyo Suicide ("There was Tokyo Beatles and Tokyo Rolling Stones," Tori explained, "so why not Tokyo Suicide?"), the Eighties also found Kudo getting entangled with notorious anarchist group Eastern Asian Anti Japanese Armed Front.

Meeting Tori and his wife Reiko on a recent rare visit to London is an experience unlike any other. The couple's handshakes are as gentle as the brush of a moth's wing, but their presence is entirely indomitable. My questions are translated into Japanese for Tori by Reiko, then answered by the former in an English that seems considerably better than his wife's.

A lively sense of mischief pervades the early exchanges. "In London", observes Reiko, indicating her husband with a fond look, "he had his heart opened to lyrical melody through Virgin Radio."

"I was working as a bricklayer in north London for two years," Tori picks up, "and my transistor is only AM, not FM. Besides", he grins, "builder have to listen to such kind of radio." On the more serious matter of the origins of Maher's unique brand of pastoral Fauvism, Kudo has plainly thought more deeply. "It was a very special situation for me in middle Eighties," he explains gravely. "I was trying to stop my political activities, I had to say goodbye to my old colleagues and attempt to make music that harnessed the same energy."

What happened to make him give up politics? "Briefly," he laughs, somewhat mirthlessly, "the student protest movement was declining and terrorists took it over and some of them tried to kill the emperor, so everyone that had been associated with the group I was a part of was being investigated by the government." Beyond their anarchist antecedents, Tori and Reiko's subsequent embrace of a religious faith close to that of Jehova's Witnesses casts a still more mysterious light on their antic and uplifting music. (The name Maher Shalal Hash Baz is a transcription of a Hebrew phrase from the Book of Isaiah.)

But Tori and Reiko's project is perhaps most easily understood as a gleeful rejection of the ideology of self-control, mass-production and corporate fealty that for so long underpinned the Japanese economic miracle.

Maher Shalal Hash Baz play Stirling, Tolbooth (27 April), London, 93 Feet East (1 May), and Bristol, The Polish Club (2 May)

A new record, 'Maher On Water', is out on Geographic next month