Board To Death Ep. 17: Takeshi (Boris)
Aaron Rogers
Twenty-five years. Twenty-four albums. One double-neck bass/guitar.
Their tour schedule is endless and their discography bottomless but twenty-five years of recording and performing haven’t slowed Japanese heavy experimentalists Boris down one bit. A Boris show is an assault on the senses — gentle accordion music plays while robed silhouettes take the stage as smoke billows from under drum hardware and behind guitar amplifiers. A hushed audience crowds the stage in anticipation. Stage lights flicker, amplifiers are switched from Standby to Power, and for the next ninety minutes, anything goes. Boris resists classification — throughout their career they’ve pivoted between nearly all heavy metal subgenres, crust punk, industrial, ambient, psych, garage, J-pop, shoegaze, dream pop, grunge, electro pop, and post-rock, but one detail remains consistent —Boris needs to be seen live.
“I want [the audience] to use all of their five senses. Forget about the daily life,” says guitarist/bassist Takeshi. To aid our forgetfulness, Takeshi plays through a monolithic array of Sunn and Orange amplifiers plus a pedalboard stuffed to capacity with boutique fuzz pedals, one-off noisemakers, Afterneath, Bit Commander, and Palisades.
Extra special thanks to Deltron 3030 guitarist Taka Tozawa for hosting this episode of Board To Death and providing Japanese translations.
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