The Tokyo Concert Experience

According to Wikipedia, a police force comprised of 35000 members was put in charge of protecting The Beatles during their visit to Japan in 1967. Similarly, on Halloween this year, just a couple of days before this show, Shibuya was turned into an annoying hubbub of police officers yelling into microphones and megaphones, limiting walking transit in general. The reason why I bring this two cases of disproportionate use of vigilance is because of a serious communique posted on Twitter hours before the show and reiterated during it. The post said that crowdsurfing, moshing and taking pictures will not be allowed. That the bands could leave the stage at any point if any of this happened. Imposing these rules at a black metal show seems paradoxical and it goes completely against the rebellious nature of the genre. But then again, the genre is a paradox in itself. Dayal Patterson said it best in the introduction of his book “Black Metal Evolution of the Cult”, when he said tha

Unit, the venue for this show, is in Daikanyama, which is a neighborhood in Shibuya. In recent years Shibuya has become the Halloween capital of the world, but on this Halloween night there were no costumes in sight at Unit. Among the concertgoers it was business as usual. At the same time it wasn’t. This night was an event. This Heat, the band that split over 25 years ago, after recording two of the most challenging and influential albums of the late seventies and early eighties, reunited in 2016 with two of its surviving founding members: Charles Hayward and Charles Bullen. This was the second of their two shows in Tokyo. Due to the passing of third member Gareth Williams in 2001, they decided to go by a Magrittean moniker. This Is Not This Heat fits with their dadaist approach to music. An avant-garde collage of sounds way ahead of its time; one among the pioneers in the use of taped and manipulated sounds in rock music. In their lyrics they questioned conventional per