Noise Control

“We make music by jamming,” states Taigen Kawabe, Bo Ningen’s 28-year-old bassist, vocalist and fantastically-fringed frontman. “The way most bands work is that someone composes the music by themselves and then brings in this song to the rehearsal room or the recording studio, and then everyone else plays along. That’s the way every other band I’d been in before was. So, I started this band because I wanted to do things I felt I couldn’t do in other bands. When we started Bo Ningen that was the idea; it’s a band that’s totally free. We never have anything written beforehand. It’s a much more liberating way to make music.”

“We make music by jamming.”

Born in Tokyo to a folksinger mother meant stretches of Kawabe’s early childhood were spent inside recording studios. But it was discovering records as a teenager that turned him onto music and he began playing bass in a school rock band. Falling into the city’s improvised-music scene on moving to London at 19, when Kawabe and guitarist Kohhei Matsuda began Bo Ningen in 2007, they hired a studio and jammed endlessly for 12 hours a day. Then, they spliced together parts, fashioning their first-ever ‘songs’. Where their beginnings were freeform, each Bo Ningen LP – 2010’s self-titled debut, 2012’s Line The Wall, 2014’s III – has grown harder, wilder, more extreme. To put their career progression in terms of ’70s rock icons, they’ve gone from collaborating with Faust to opening for Black Sabbath, yet remained essentially unclassifiable.

“Many people try to categorise us. Acid-punk, prog-rock, psychedelic, metal, we’ve been called so many different type of genre. We’re happy to be called whatever, because we think being called lots of names helps to break down those categories. We’re not afraid to be misunderstood... I think that different feedback, different reactions, different perspectives on our music is important. It means that you’re connecting with people who listen to music in different ways.”