Keiji Haino, Dark Wizard Of The Avant-Garde, Enjoys A Good Snack Cake

It took Oren Ambarchi more than a decade to approach his hero, the eternally mysterious Japanese improviser and avant-garde icon, Keiji Haino.

In the late '80s, Ambarchi was a fledgling free jazz drummer in New York City. He was obsessed with the outermost edges of experimental music, reading the zines of the day and going to the downtown shows that seemed strangest, no matter how little he knew about who was playing. One night, he slipped into The Knitting Factory and was stunned by the sight onstage — a beautifully rail-thin man, with a porcelain face framed by impenetrable sunglasses and straight black hair that matched the color of everything else he wore, from his shiny boots to his collared shirt. It was Haino, playing solo electric guitar.

"I thought 'Who is this person?' His presence was riveting, and what he was doing was so personal and unique," Ambarchi recalls nearly thirty years later, from his home in Melbourne. "I remember confusion and not knowing if it was good or bad. I was baffled by this person: What did I just see? What did I just hear?"

Over four decades, Haino, who will turn Across the next quarter-century, he steadily emerged from Japan's underground as an experimental extremist, often pitting torrents of distortion and walls of noise against shards of poetry that he would shriek and repeat like some coded prayer. After a string of cutting-edge labels in the United States and Canada began to catch on and issue his music in the west during the '90s, his reputation as one of and spread to the point that he even became a model and muse For some, working with Haino — or, for others, simply seeing him live or finding one of his albums — has became an avant-garde holy grail.