My first exposure to this album came in 2012 or so. After a long period of listening to practically nothing but Coil and Burzum, I was getting more interested in “noise” music. When I first saw the cover, I actually wrote it off at first. The cover photograph, though very cool and eerie, just felt like one of the thousands of lame black metal album covers I’d seen where a long-haired guy stands in the woods while his friend destroys the exposure. And when I read a little bit more about Keiji Haino himself, it actually didn’t make things more interesting. Part of what attracted me to noise music at the time was how enigmatic it all felt - the notion that people could make howling walls of pure sound with daisy-chained effects pedals and scrap metal was insane to me at the time, so the fact that Haino played identifiable instruments – in “rock” bands, nonetheless – made him seem a little quaint to my uninformed brain.
It was probably a year before I relented and listened to the album. I sat down in my bedroom, alone, the lights off, and contemptuously hit the play button. Immediately, I was struck by how “dark” the album felt–like, I had listened to a lot of black metal and stuff at the time which was supposedly meant to evoke the experience of darkness, but those basically used a lot of Scooby Doo tropes. Watashi Dake? is an album that sounds like blackness, the experience of total darkness. The first track, “My Refuge” (which we called “My Whereabouts” back then, as was the style at the time), has this atmosphere of total desolation. There are long gaps of silence between Haino’s pained wails, but it’s the kind of silence that you feel compelled to pay excruciatingly close attention to. And then when Haino’s butt hits the piano–classic, baby! It’s the kind of music that one could conceivably use in a hoax video claiming the Soviets accidentally opened a portal to Hell. It’s really great.
One thing I love about this album is how different it feels from Haino’s later releases. While Haino is known for his wild, uninhibited improvisations, most of the Watashi Dake is made up of relatively-conventional songs. It’s not like he’s playing AABA pop or something, but there’s a sense of constrained energy to Haino’s playing here which I just find very bewitching. Tracks like “Rise from the Dead” and “Though I Want to Laugh” are like perfect crystal musical moments, feeling both delicate and dangerously jagged at the same time. “Though I Want to Laugh” is probably my favorite song on the album, and certainly one of the very best performances by Haino. It’s definitely in the “play at the funeral” tier, alongside GG Allin and “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls.
A lot of musicians can do passable imitations of Haino’s later albums – at this point it’s basically a cottage industry. Very few people have attempted, much less succeeded, to match the incredible atmosphere of Watashi Dake. It’s a special album. Please don’t be stupid like me and avoid it.