"We always like to play good old-fashioned rock music," says Kawabata Makoto, guitarist of Japanese astral travelers Acid Mothers Temple. "Not just psych, but good old-fashioned rock."

Assuming Makoto is referring to the shamanic ancestry of "old-fashioned rock," the stuff that drove kids into spasms while parents suspected demonic possession in the 1950s, the above estimation couldn't be more perfect. Like an anarchic Grateful Dead from Hell, Makoto and his cohorts achieve similar fandom among noise freaks by penetrating the lysergic essence of an extended "Dark Star"-type jam, then ravaging it with nightmarish space effects and primal guitar butcheries hairy enough to make a loin-clothed Ted Nugent wince. Add some truly alien Occitan folk moans and a torrent of wizardly theta rhythmic interplay amid the ear-bleeding feedback distortion, and you have a concoction potent enough to entrance and disorient the audience, ensuring ritualistic dancing and rousing freak-outs from even the soberest attendees. Through meticulously executed aural mind fuckery, equating an Acid Mothers Temple live experience to the ecstatic peaks of an LSD trip is a remarkably common testament of fans.

Yet despite AMT's aura of dope friendliness (i.e., the band name, the bad trip-inflicted song titles, the penchant for brain-death-savvy, Syd and Marty Krofft-infused-with-porn album art), Makoto says drugs are largely insignificant to the musical vision.

"If people depend on drugs to know other worlds, they can't go there forever," he says. "They think it opens the door to the next stage, but it's an illusion, not real experience. It gives hints, but never provides answers. I can reach the next stage by myself and without drugs."

Makoto's initiation into the "next stage," occurred involuntarily at a young age when forces from his sub/superconscious began emitting otherworldly sounds that enraptured his mind. What followed was an incessant series of audio hallucinations described as "phantom ringing," which Makoto believed was UFOs attempting to communicate with him. Alarmed and often surveying the sky for unusual flight activity, Makoto soon realized the shrieking noise was a melodious message derived from his spirit molecule: the cosmos.

"I always listened to sounds like ringing as a boy," he says. "Though I like mysterious things like dreams, UFOs, PSI and the structure of the universe, I believe in only my cosmos. Year by year, I can listen to more of a complete version of sounds from my cosmos. You can hear them in my playing and recordings, but even these are not the complete versions yet."

For 30 steady years, Makoto has vivified the music of his cosmos by founding a horde of influential avant-psych projects (Hedeik, Toho Sara, Musica Transonica, Mainliner, Nishinihon, plus countless others) and collaborating with the most revered names in '70s space rock (Gong's Daevid Allan, Can's Damo Suzuki, Guru Guru's Mani Neumeier), while maintaining a vast and mostly impossible to locate discography comparable to that of Duke Ellington's or Frank Zappa's. This lifelong vocation began at age 10, when Makoto heard Indian classical music on television and was startled by the tamboura, which emanated a drone analogous to the bizarre ringing in his ears. It was a revelation that led to further explorations of fringe genres and a familiarity with German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose cerebral space music amplified Makoto's inner soundscape and compelled him to build and play instruments.

"When I was a junior high school boy, I listened to Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, the Who and progressive rock, but also lots of avant-garde music," he says. "I would soon discover krautrock, psychedelic and prog from France and Italy. At the time it was considered normal to listen to rock music in Japan."

The cultural embrace of rock enabled the 13-year-old Makoto to collaborate with friends and form Ankoku Kakumei Kyodotai in 1978 on the basis of actualizing a frequently dreamt-of fantasy band that conjoined the proto-metal sludge of Deep Purple with the aleatory electronics of Stockhausen. Lacking in the area of musical theory and technical proficiency, Makoto's earliest performances consisted of wild improvisation with guitar and synthesizer and cranking the amps to maximum volume until the equipment caught fire and the audience fled screaming. Confrontational and zealously inept, Makoto was perfecting a style he would prophetically dub "psychedelic noise."

Since then, Makoto remains steadfast in disbursing sonic chaos back into the universal cosmos. He tours extensively throughout the world as the beloved speed guru, ax-wielding headmaster of Acid Mothers Temple and releases close to a dozen hilariously-titled albums with them each year, many of which are imaginative puns on the dinosaur rock that first inspired him ("Starless and Bible Black Sabbath," "Just Another Band From the Cosmic Inferno," etc.). Through ceaseless recording and performing, along with managing several record labels, Makoto adheres to an almost superhuman work ethic and rarely finds time to break (except to watch WWE). Although he abhors religious and esoteric connotations applied to his music, there exists an element of Zen within his strenuous, sub-Gurdjieffian artistic process that's impossible to overlook.

"When I play music, my mind is empty," he says. "I have to keep it empty to catch sounds from my cosmos. If I catch the sounds, I become a radio tuner for people. But of course, I am always catching sounds; even if I am in the bathroom, I am catching sounds."

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Acid Mothers Temple, Danava

9 p.m. Sunday, March 30

Grog Shop

2785 Euclid Heights Blvd.

216.321.5588

Tickets: $10

ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE Drugs not required for this trip.