Every song on Hai! is completely great, but it’s the cumulative effect of it that makes it such a devastating artifact. The evidence suggests that Hai!, unlike most live albums, really is just a recording of a performance. That’s rare enough; a performance like the one documented here is rarer still. Mallinder does not speak to the audience, though he does scream something in Japanese at one point. Drummer Alan Fish plays Gang of Four-influenced rhythms with the singleminded dedication of a the truly faithful. And Richard H. Kirk -- ah, Richard Kirk! The man who brought the sensibilities of dub reggae to bear on a sort of freaked-out dance music, using his guitar almost exclusively to play repetitive figures that seem to originate in the subconscious. On the set’s penultimate number, “Diskono,” Kirk’s guitar enshrouds Mallinder’s river-deep bass in ghostly wisps of trebly reverb, sometimes dropping out completely so that we can hear the tuneless synth-noise that underlies everything but is generally more felt than heard, mostly playing single-note runs up and down the same string with a calmly psychopathic focus. “Rising to the surface,” says Mallinder again and again, managing to incorporate the role of the vocalist into what is essentially a surrealist enterprise: hard to do, considering that the original surrealists made no music of any real note. The bass burbles, the guitar floats, the synth-noise washes, the drum counts it out for you real simple and nervous-like. “Rising to the surface.” What? Surface of what? Rising from where? “Rising to the surface.” He sounds kind of pissed off about it, too. “Rising to the surface.” All right. “Rising to the surface.” 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 [next]