The foreign music press has a weakness for weird Japanese music.
While recent pop idols like Hikaru Utada release albums abroad to resounding yawns, records by Acid Mothers Temple (who claim to channel UFOs) or Boris (whose longest track is 65 minutes of drone) are routinely raved about in Western music rags.
The group Ghost, standard-bearer of Tokyo's psychedelic scene and godfather for the current freak-folk revival, has certainly benefited from this fascination, sometimes painfully so. A cover photo for U.K. music magazine The Wire showed its leader, Masaki Batoh, wearing faux Mongolian clothes and staring glassy-eyed at a religious text in a syncretic, Oriental fantasy.
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