FULL BORE.(musical group The Boredoms)(Concert review)

Yamataka Eye has been leading the Japanese band the Boredoms for almost twenty years. His work as a front man, manipulator of light bulbs, and vocalist (singer would not be the right word) places him in a tradition that includes the jazz bandleader Sun Ra and the reggae producer Lee Perry. Like them, Eye (pronounced "I") is a Dadaist ham: he flirts with lunacy and embraces comedy while undertaking strenuous musical explorations. The Boredoms--which now consist of Eye and three drummers--have never sold more than thirty thousand copies of an album, but they have a deserved reputation as a dogged and inspired cult band. Beck has cited the Boredoms as an influence, and the American underground noise-rock community--currently enjoying a minor renaissance--reveres the band. When Jeffrey Deitch, the gallery owner, heard the Boredoms play at the Bowery Ballroom last summer, he was so impressed that he invited the band to mount an installation in his gallery, Deitch Projects. (The event will take place next year.)

Before the Boredoms' first show, in 1986, Eye didn't eat for three days. He asked his bandmates, whom he had recently recruited, to play the most tedious music imaginable while he moaned--the only sound he could physically manage. "They all quit," Eye told me, through a translator, when I met him at a Japanese restaurant in New York before a performance at Webster Hall last month. "They said it was too boring." When the Boredoms started releasing records, in the late nineteen-eighties, their songs were concentrated spasms of noise. One involved nothing but a toy piano and the sound of burping fed through a broken microphone; another consisted of fast punk rock that stopped and started, the acoustical equivalent of Wile E. Coyote sprinting from boulder to boulder. Most of the tracks featured Eye's vocalizing: a combination of strangulated howls and high-pitched screaming. The Boredoms' music sparked with a youthful intellectual vigor; their records were exhilarating, silly, and sometimes almost impossible to listen to.

The Boredoms found American patrons in the unclassifiable musician John Zorn, who helped get their records released here, and the band Sonic Youth, who brought them on a tour of the United States in 1992. This support came at an improbable moment in the relationship between independent rock bands and major labels. After the success of Nirvana's "Nevermind" (1991)--a record that eventually sold ten million copies--major labels had begun signing all kinds of bands in the hope of finding one that could make a record for relatively little money, promote it live, and inspire millions of people to run out and buy it. Although the Boredoms were unlikely prospects, five of their albums were released by Warner Bros.

It's not hard to understand why radio stations didn't jump at the chance to play music full of unidentifiable noises and lacking in melody. The records are thick with surreal humor. (When I asked Eye about the band's 1988 album, "Onanie Bomb Meets the Sex Pistols," he started to laugh. "It's just so ridiculous," he said. "The name.") The cover of "Chocolate Synthesizer" (1994) features two figures, one with an enormous orange rope of hair in place of a head, and another wearing a plastic bag and speaking into a remote control. Among the songs on the album not to make it to No. 1 are "Chocolate Synthesizer," "Tomato Synthesizer," and "Synthesizer Guide Book on Fire," which, contrary to the implied furor of its title, is a quiet meditation involving bongos, a church bell, and what might be an organ played through an echo device.

These days, the Boredoms rarely perform live; even in Japan, they typically appear just once a year. Earlier this month, however, they were back in New York, at Webster Hall, for a sold-out show that was virtually identical to and just as hypnotic as last year's. Eye began the performance with a bit of theatre that had silenced the crowd at the Bowery Ballroom. He stood in the dark at the front of the stage, wearing jeans ...