December 1999. Akasaka Blitz.
I was on the subway with a friend from back then. Part-time wages crammed in my pocket, ticket clutched in my hand. The venue was already full of people clearly older than us — stylish, with that air of knowing something we didn’t yet know.
The moment pre-school’s set began, the crowd moved. I followed, mimicking what I saw, and dove. I don’t remember the landing. All I know is that something started in that instant.
November of the following year. Zepp Tokyo. BRAHMAN’s “thirst” tour. 200MPH as support.
It was the heyday of melodic hardcore, and most of the crowd had come through that lens. But what was happening onstage belonged to none of it. Savage, precise, and impenetrable — the only name for it was chaos hardcore — and it fell on us as pure sonic violence.
The impact felt like being pushed away. But that became the hook. Years later, when I first heard toe, I thought: that’s the lineage of that night’s noise. I still remember thinking exactly that.
Once, on a school field trip to Yokohama, a few of us slipped away after the group disbanded and made straight for a venue.
There was something quietly transgressive about it. But that very constraint transformed what came through the speakers into something that belonged only to us. Even now, I think those years — seized under restriction — were more viscerally real than anything I experienced with the full freedom of being a university student.
That era had what people called the “Nine Samurai” joint tour. CAPTAIN HEDGEHOG, SHORT CIRCUIT, THUMB — three-piece bands, three of them. Opening act: funside. Venue: Akasaka Blitz again.
The grit of straight-edge hardcore, nothing like melodic’s euphoria. A high school kid looking up with awe at adults who lived inside the scene. I can still picture that contrast with unusual clarity, and I’m not sure why.
People say your musical experiences as a teenager form your backbone. I don’t know if that’s true. But I know that what was pressed into me during those years is still sounding inside me now.
The noise of those days still resonates.