By Kimberly Chun

WHEN YOU THINK of Japan, chances are you picture kimonos, Hello Kitty, and, Kannon forbid, Lost in Translation. When I think about Japan, I remember the goth Lolita-Stevie Nicks Jr. girls parading around Harajuku as bands of all stripes – soccer hooligans, rockabilly slicks, earnest rockers – played on the boulevard outside the Meiji temple. I remember cozy little bars called, say, Eat a Peach/Trouble Peach in the Tokyo neighborhood of Shimokitazawa, where the mood was gently student hippie, the floors and walls were weathered, dark wood, and you paid $20 for the privilege of sipping your wine and listening to bearded oldsters play equally aged rock vinyl. Magic mushrooms and hash abounded, despite Japan's strict antidrug laws, and life there was a giant loophole of vegetarian nabe (stew), retro toy shops, and good trips into the past.

I also flash back to the most memorable show I ever saw in Tokyo. The occasion was probably one of the many national Japanese holidays – White Day, Golden Day, maybe National Hairbrush-Cleaning Day – and I decided to go to a club called Eggman to see Copass Grinderz, a loud, proud, thrashy, Amphetamine Reptile/Forced Exposure sorta number, who rocked our pom-pom socks off. Except, in the grand tradition of local audiences, no one moved, no one danced, barely anyone clapped. Something obviously had to be done, so a little fireplug with horn-rim specs whipped off his shirt midway through the last song, dashed up onstage, grabbed a plastic cup, unzipped, and turned around, cup placed close to the family jewels.

Sipping our orangeade, we all wondered, what next?

He turned around, raised his plastic cup of warm urine to his lips like it was a victory goblet of the finest grog, drank, and started scanning the audience. The crowd of generally cute, natty young women immediately began backing into the farthest corner of the club – as did I – and he proceeded to spray the audience with the piss, head rotating like a sprinkler.

Pee Man scampered out the back, and the band packed up. Show over.

It was yet another example of that strange paradox of Japanese society. Order – be it related to hierarchy, tradition, or general pee-free cleanliness – is always maintained, but within certain contexts all is permitted. Even things that would get a band like Copass Grinderz banned from a stateside venue forevermore. Which explains the Acid Mothers Temple and their phrase to live by, "Do whatever you want, don't do whatever you want," the title of their 2002 Earworm compilation. In the hands of Acid Mothers Temple, Ghost, High Rise, Haino Keiji projects such as Fushitsusha and Vajra, as well as early legends the Mops and Les Rallizes Denudes and related frenzy dealers the Boredoms, Ruins, and Merzbow, free-floating Japanese psychedelia, tethered loosely to a particularly coruscating brand of noise, has found a way to carve out a space in a teeming pop-culture landscape that mimics the densely packed cities of Tokyo and Osaka. Propagated by the PSF label in Japan and introduced to American audiences by music zine Your Flesh and advocates such as John Zorn, J-psych, in its natural habitat, functions as an escape hatch, a passage and a mode of space travel. While providing a less pop, more space-rockin' alternative to the Zep and Sabbath worship going on in the States in the early '90s, Japanese nouveau psych has also doubled as a time machine forward to some otherworldly future of acid-laced, dreadlocked communards – or backward to an Anglo-agrarian idyll or perpetual Japanese folk festival.

Acid Mothers Temple, much like the Bay Area's Lo-Fi Niesens, dive into that ecstatic frenzy of those manic village celebrations – you can imagine AMT leader Kawabata "Speed Guru" Makoto invoking his brand of electric heavyland in front of some ancient Shinto shrine as surely as he's pictured reveling in front of Stonehenge in the art for the band's 1997 debut, Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. (PSF). His latest dispatch from the Temple and U.F.O., Mantra of Love, is less furious and more forthright than that initial album – it's as if the band are on their best behavior. They start in a ritual state of high formality and attempt to go even higher. Restraining themselves to two tracks and bookending the levitating cacophony of the first, "La Le Lo," with monkish chanting by AMT synth siren Cotton Casino, they turn down the noise of their previous albums further with "L'ambition dans le miroir" as glassy synths dart between channels and background bells clang as if the Buddhist priests at the aforementioned temple were on meth. If Acid Mothers Temple announced the band's emergence with a blast of free-form noise, and later albums such as 2002's Univers zen ou de zero a zero (Fractal) loosely connected scattershot dots with submerged blues riffs, à la a damaged Blue Cheer or heaven-bound Hawkwind, then Mantra shows a new love and reverence for tempered sonic tantrums.

Perfecting the folk-psych of 1999's Snuffbox Immanence (Drag City), Ghost's gorgeous recent Hypnotic Underworld (Drag City) and its opening song cycle of the same name seemingly pick up from AMT's contemplative outro, starting with "God Took a Picture of His Illness on This Ground" and its minimal, partly recognizable, partly undiscernible haunted house of shudders, scrapes, and whines. That sounds like a theremin and a sax, but was that a slinky being dropped off a two-story building? This gives way to the ascendant post-bop of "Escaped and Lost down in Medina" before everything collapses into cricket chirps and Korg whorls. Ghost next resurrect the celestial Moody Blues-style boogie operatics of "Aramaic Barbarous Dawn" and then take off for the next planet with the psycho-drone thrust of "Leave the World." It's a transcendent trip that's smoothed by the rest of the album, from the sublime Fairport Convention-at-Muscle Shoals harpsichord-and-Gibson SG reverie of "Hazy Paradise" to the Zamfir and Ian Anderson shout-out of "Piper."

Kicking against the pricks and stabs of convention and offering a backdrop, even indirectly, for the experimental new school attended by such improv/noise animals as Wolf Eyes, AMT and Ghost prove this underground – or have it your way, underworld – is just another heaven. Eardrums haven't been the same since.