Keiji Haino detests the frivolous. As a teenager in the late ’60s, the songs he heard about love and peace seemed facile, like they didn’t contain a genuine message. “What I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it was totally different from The Beatles and their ilk,” he said in 1997.
Central to his self-described outsider status was something beyond adolescent edginess: a craving for something new. Years later, he explained that his artistic endeavors and lifestyle are one and the same: “I want to live each and every moment at its best and to the fullest. And I think that to regret is to repeat.” It can be odd to hear about such mutability, as the Japanese avant-rock and free-improv maestro has a vast back catalogue that can be consistently described as…

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