Burning the House Down (Part 2)

A lot of guitar shredders are boring. Not this one.

Wikimedia Commons, fair use

I have been following this band since I discovered them around five years ago, and have featured them a few times in this column. When I first heard them, they were kids playing in nightclubs where they were below the legal drinking age.

The youngest just turned 20 this past November. From the start, they have written most of their own music, covering a wide range of styles. They don’t play like kids and seemingly never did. They play more like an incongruously melodic tornado.

Asterism are a power trio from Fukuoka, Japan, and consist of:

• Haruka Noma, guitars (“HAL-CA”) (23. November. 2002)

• Miyu Yoshinaka, bass (12. March. 2002)

• Mio Yoshinaka, drums (13. November. 1999)

They were formed in 2014 when Noma was 11 and the brothers were 12 and 14, respectively. Much of their YouTube catalogue is fan-made cell-cam footage from sessions at the Hard Rock Café in Fukuoka. There are also several clips from their tours of the U.S., including stops in Austin, Los Angeles, and New York.

While they are all phenomenal talents, the big draw has been Noma, known by her first name, Haruka, or her stage name, Hal-Ca. She has been likened to a baby-faced reincarnation of Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan, with bits of Joe Satriani, Nuno Bettencourt, and Akira Takasaki, among others, thrown in.

Noma is a born rock star, with the outsized stage presence and sheer moxie of veterans twice her age. And she has the chops to back it up. She stands out even in the Japanese scene, with its overload of extraordinarily technical instrumentalists. She also writes most of the band’s music, which she started doing shortly after first picking up the guitar at age 10.

The brothers are also beasts on their instruments. They bring a lot of jazz and funk ideas into their playing. Miyu plays 4,5 and 7-string basses, which become lead instruments in his hands. Any trio faces a big challenge in filling musical space; these three are adept at doing so without tripping over each other.

Here are three clips from their visit to New York late last year. If you think gorgeous compositions and hellacious shredding are incompatible, you may reconsider after watching this group play. The third piece, “Dawn,” is a true rock masterpiece in three distinct movements.

“Light in the Darkness”

“Blaze”

“Dawn”

The third movement of this piece, which starts after the bass solo, is extravagantly beautiful, but it’s more than that: It is largely improvised. I’ve heard over a dozen performances of this song, and this part is different every time. For them to do something like this at this age is beyond my ability to process.