Tomoyuki Trio Mars Archives

Review: Tomoyuki Trio, Mars & Modoki, Luna to Phobos

Posted in Reviews on September 12th, 2023 by JJ Koczan

Some context required. The common thread between Tomoyuki Trio and Modoki, who are also a trio but apparently didn’t want to advertise, is guitarist Mike Vest and drummer Dave Sneddon. Based in the UK, Vest also mixes here and might be recognized from any number of mostly experimentalist doom-drone and cosmic projects/collaborations, including BONG, Blown Out, Artifacts and Uranium, Drunk in Hell, Ozo, 11Paranoias, etc. (an offering from his Kaliyuga Express project was just announced for October), while Sneddon, in addition to running Flat Earth Records, has played in various punk bands going back to the early 1980s, including Blood Robots, Generic, Boxed In, and the Vest-inclusive collab Mienakunaru for their first two albums.

The go-anywhere lysergic off-the-cuffism of Mienakunaru is a decent place to start understanding Tomoyuki Trio‘s five-song/39-minute debut, Mars and Modoki‘s concurrently-issued eight-song/36-minute second album, Luna to Phobos, but Vest and Sneddon are not the only common elements. Both are released through Riot Season Records (on the same day, no less), both were mastered by John McBain, and both are remote collaborations with Japanese psych guitarists, Modoki featuring Mitsuru Tabata (Zeni Geva and Acid Mothers Temple, among others), and Tomoyuki Trio taking its name from Up-Tight guitarist Tomoyuki Aoki, who also contributes the only vocals to Mars on 15-minute opener and longest track (immediate points) “Voiceless Cry” and who in the gamma-radiation guitar howl in “Metagalactic” freely demonstrates what happens when you arrive after setting controls for the heart of the sun. You incinerate.

With Vest and Sneddon recording in the UK and Tomoyuki in Japan, Mars was clearly built remotely, but that does nothing to hinder its sense of reach. “Voiceless Cry” even dares some vocals as it oozes and churns through its first half, and the wailing solos on guitar set up the more forward riff of “Transcendentem,” which becomes the bed for another lead as the instrumental procession unfolds. There are hints of space and garage and both come into further bloom on “Metagalactic,” but it’s an unimaginably big infinity out there and even between here and Mars there’s plenty to explore, so Vest, Tomoyuki and Sneddon set themselves to that task. “Universum” slows the movement and (while we’re touring the solar system) is like an ice volcano on the moon Enceladus in its somehow molten, definitely frozen lurch, or maybe, on Mars, like staring down into the Valles Marineris, or looking up from the foot of Olympus Mons. Large, stark and otherworldly. By its last minute-plus, it is noise, and that feels appropriate.

Mars capper “Aether” seems to pick up from similar noise but it’s not a direct bleed. Still, the feeling of diving back in from whence one just came is palpable, and the 3:26 of “Aether” is a dark trip-out. After about a minute, it happens into a solo section that reminds of Earthless if they were into ’60s jazz instead of ’70s rock, and the wash of noise returns on the other side to give Mars the avant garde finish it deserves. “Aether” is about half again as short as the next shortest track, so it’s an outlier on Mars, but Luna to Phobos, with Sneddon, Vest and Mitsuru Tabata operating as Modoki, is shorter on the per-piece average.

Part of that might be the effect of having an album already to their credit and being more solidified in their approach, but the two records were reportedly made at more or less the same time, and calling anything on Modoki‘s sophomore LP solid seems like a bit of a misnomer, since although Earth’s moon and Phobos — which alongside Deimos is one of Mars’ two natural satellites, probably captured from the asteroid belt however many millions or billions of years ago — are both rocky formations, there’s an awful lot in opener “Sick Starliner,” “Mud River,” “Those Disruptors” and the half-speed-Hawkwindian volume surge of the title-track that feels more like subsurface magma heating, melting and cooling, turning rock to liquid and liquid to rock in a convective exchange that creates new compounds and conglomerates — the stuff of stirring planets. A raw, organic, contained violence.

One that grows broad in “Non Telepaths” amid piercing synth noise, casts early psych in its own image in “Multiplied From the Old Days,” and lumbers through weirdo noisemaking in “Benefit of Control” before the eight-minute closer/longest track “Zenith” takes airy float and lets it (d)evolve into a careening charge marked by rising synthesizer and the kind of gravity that leads to total dug-in-itude and a dizzying dreaminess. They do eventually reach what would seem to be the titular zenith, and just past eight minutes in, they seem to let the song go to end it, having arrived at their mark and seemingly accomplished what they set out to do in getting there. Modoki‘s cuts feel more structured, but that might honestly be because they’re shorter than Tomoyuki Trio‘s, but putting the two albums next to each other reveals fascinating differences of personality between them, highlighting the character at play in the respective performances of Tomoyuki and Mitsuru.

It should probably go without saying that something shared between Luna to Phobos and Mars is their extremity. Whether you’re listening to them both together, each on its own, whatever, Tomoyuki Trio and Modoki are both putting a challenge before the listener and before conventional craft. At the most basic level, yeah, this is rock music — guitar, bass, drums, synth, keys, occasional vocals, etc. — but it’s been deconstructed and repurposed to suit these expansive, on-their-own-wavelength ends. It is not accessible or overly friendly. At moments either of these collections can be downright harsh, but both resonate with intention.

I won’t claim to know how Mars or Luna to Phobos was pieced together, but whatever that process was, the parties involved — that’s Vest/Sneddon and Mitsuru and the same pair and Tomoyuki — have found a means to convey a whole-group dynamic and, more impressively, embarked on developing a chemistry without being in the same room. That Modoki and Tomoyuki Trio both gel as well as they do is a credit to the open nature of the creative impulses launching them.