Climbing The Holy Mountain: Bo Ningen Interviewed

Friday night in Dalston. The queue to EartH winds through the chaos of Stoke Newington Road, past endless overflowing bars and Turkish restaurants. Tonight’s show is a sell-out, with attendees finding spaces to sit on the various tiers of EartH’s beautifully decaying theatre hall. The setup comes the closest this writer has ever experienced to a seventies prog rock show, with an audience seated in rapturous awe at the trippy delights on display.

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“This was our favourite performance so far,” explains Bo Ningen bassist and vocalist Taigen Kawabe, over Zoom, two days later. “It was special and quite emotional.” The Japanese band’s two-hour performance, accompanying a screening of the 1973 psychedelic classic The Holy Mountain, is one hell of an experience. A big, heavy and head-scrambling film, tonight it courses with a different energy, courtesy of Bo Ningen’s fabulous, propulsive original soundtrack, which was also released as an album (on triple vinyl and with 40 pages of accompanying artwork) via Alcopop! Records earlier this month.

For the uninitiated, The Holy Mountain follows the story, if such a word is correct to use here, of a Christ-like figure who ascends a titular holy mountain along with a mysterious figure referred to as the Alchemist (played by director Alejandro Jodorowsky) and seven other ‘disciples’. It’s not really a film best served by describing its plot. Rather, it’s a visually arresting and sometimes unsettlingly strange opus in which every character and situation is a symbolic reference to tarot cards, cosmology, the I Ching, ancient mythology and other esoteric delights.

The uniquely surreal film retains its mysterious powers today, some 51 years on from its release. Like many, Bo Ningen’s members first encountered the film at university. “I was 18 or 19 and for a kid, it was pretty intense and graphic,” recounts guitarist Yuki Tsujii. “It wasn’t a perfect or nice experience.” According to Taigen: “I was a bit older, but by now I’ve watched it, no exaggeration, more than a hundred times.” The other members nod in agreement before Yuki adds: “And I still don’t understand it.”

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Bo Ningen’s re-scoring began at a party, where they met London-based cult film specialists Deeper Into Movies, who suggested the band tackle writing their own Holy Mountain soundtrack. “We first performed it in 2019 at the Rio Cinema,” explains guitarist Kohhei Matsuda. For context, the Rio Cinema is just down the road from EartH, which gives Bo Ningen’s Holy Mountain journey a nicely circular shape. “Then this recent performance was just after recording the album,” Kohhei continues. “We now know it better, deeper.”

Bo Ningen’s score demands to be seen alongside the film. The band’s energy oozes from EartH’s giant stage, playing so hard and intensely that, at numerous points, Taigen collapses from his seat and plays while writhing on the floor. “There’s a difference between soundtrack composers making a soundtrack and us making this, knowing we’re going to play it to an audience” Taigen explains. “We always wanted to make it more live friendly.” Their score absolutely thunders through the film. Tracks like “B3 The Duel” and “D1 Uranus” manifest as jittery funk-rock, while the distorted climax “F2 The Climbing” is heavy psych perfection, each imbuing the scenes they’re designed to accompany with a manic vitality.

Without diminishing Bo Ningen’s monumental effort, The Holy Mountain is already constructed a bit like an album. It’s a film of sequences, which generally have clear start and end points. However, that doesn’t make the task of trying to understand its crazed logic any easier. Bo Ningen tackled this by taking different approaches to different sections of the film. “For the middle part with the disciples, we wrote two tracks each,” explains drummer Monchan Monna. Yuki laughs: “We wanted each track to have variety and not be boring.”

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Yuki’s fears are unfounded. There’s absolutely no risk of The Holy Mountain or Bo Ningen’s score ever being boring. As described by Deeper Into Movies head honcho Steven Hanley, who introduced the EartH screening; one minute the score “sounds like Swans, the next Electric Wizard, the next Tangerine Dream.” However, in order for the live performance to remain comprehensible, Bo Ningen had to top this smorgasbord of sound with snippets of dialogue. “We actually didn’t talk much about that,” claims Yuki. “We just went with our instinct. There’s two monologues, those were important, but for the bits with the shouting and screaming, we just thought ‘why not’.”

Instinct is clearly key to Bo Ningen. They’re a band whose music is built on passion and feel, similar to Jodorowsky, a man whose cinema is built on flamboyant madness that defies logic and instead aims straight for the soul. Bo Ningen and his masterpiece feel cosmically aligned, two beautiful forces of nature that have collided in perfect, chaotic unison. Reflecting on the film’s influence on their music, Taijen surmises their connection: “we don’t understand all of what Jodorowsky means. It’s like our music. We sing in Japanese and people don’t understand us 100% of the time, but they understand our passion.”

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Bo Ningen’s The Holy Mountain score is out now on Alcopop! Records.

Words: Tom Morgan

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