Ballroom Marfa hosted Japanese rockers BORIS along with the psychedelic-folk twosome Damon and Naomi for an evening of underground music at Liberty Hall. In addition, both groups were joined by psychedelic guitarist Michio Kurihara.

Japanese trio BORIS plumb the very depths of heavy rock music, electrifying audiences with titanic cascades of guitars, feedback, drones and amplification. Too conceptual to be heavy metal and too uncompromising to ever be commercial, BORIS remain the quintessential underground rock band.

Formed as a quartet in a Tokyo art school in the early ‘90s, BORIS settled soon into their current line-up of Takeshi (guitar and bass), Wata (guitar and vocals) and Atsuo (drums) and quickly transcended their hardcore punk roots with the ponderous tempos of early albums like Absolutego.

BORIS’S experimental bent and shifting stylistic approach characterize the nearly dozen albums and collaborative projects that have followed. BORIS’S refusal to let their sound remain static foretells, perhaps most importantly, ambitious collaborations like Sun Baked Snow Cave, an hour-long effort with Japanese noise pioneer Merzbow, and 2006’s Altar, the group’s drone-rock project with kindred American spirits Sunn O))). For their appearance in Marfa, the group performed with another recent collaborator, Michio Kurihara of the Japanese psychedelic collective Ghost, a guitarist who added his sinewy ‘60s lines for the 2007 joint effort Rainbow.

For this event at Liberty Hall, Michio Kurihara joined the evening’s other performers, Damon and Naomi. Since Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang’s first exposure as two-thirds of American indie-rockers Galaxie 500, the duo built upon that seminal group’s narcotic atmospherics and literate qualities. On Within These Walls, the seventh in a series of gorgeous psychedelic-folk albums, Damon and Naomi imbue their hypnotic instrumentation with the cinematic shimmer of additional musicians, including Michio Kurihara on guitar. Wholly different than their tourmates Boris, but no less haunting, Damon and Naomi envelop their audiences with falsetto vocals and delicate analog textures rather than monumental distortion.

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