Keiji Haino & Sitaar Tah! “Animamima” [Important Records]

1 90-minute track on 2 disks. This album doesn’t demand active listening, it demands deep trances of the kind where 50 minutes mysteriously disappear from your life. I’ve never done acid, but if I did, and I wanted some crazy hallucinations, I imagine this release would do it. While a bazaar of sitars wail in the form of sitar orchestra Sitaar Tah!, various stimuli slowly throb into your subconscious imagination: a mumble of voices, a flourish of flutes, or a patch of metallic screeches, and many other unmentionables/indistinguishables/inextinguishables all provided by Haino. It must be live; why else would the first 13 minutes be so tentative? After Haino and Sitaar Tah! get to know each other, though, this becomes an outstanding psychedelic droning freakout. Find the moments when Haino flutters on the flute, and you’ve found trippy heaven.

-Cujo, KFJC, December 2006