BOOM BOOM SATELLITES

BOOM BOOM SATELLITES White Stage set Friday evening at Fuji Rock featured a lot of plateaus, but the long-running outfit did everything they could to never come down from those heights. From the opening song “A Hundred Suns,” the duo of Michiyuki Kawashima and Masayuki Nakano were perpetually building upwards, making space for a few instances of loud release but never settling down afterwards. They just kept getting more and more massive as the set played out.

Contextually, this approach seemed appropriately celebratory. It was the outfit’s first Fuji Rock appearance since vocalist Kawashima overcame a brain tumor late last year. The fans seemed a bit more riled up, while the band sounded more urgent, delivering a big, squalling set that had hands in the air for long stretches of time. The pair stuck to what got them to this point in the first place — they play electronic music, but meld guitars into the mix as while, making for a big blown-out sound that can be appropriately described as “epic.” Breakbeats collided with guitar squall, while Kawashima sang over it all.

It was an often loud affair — in particular a segment late where Nakano played around with his electronics while drummer Yoko Fukuda pounded away at her kit was particularly heavy hitting — but BOOM BOOM SATELLITES balanced out the noise with moments of build — mostly to get to somewhere loud again. Besides the opener, a particularly inspired climb came on “Nine,” starting out skeletal before developing into a full-blown anthem. What made it all works was how the moments where the band got quiet didn’t feel like a come down from previous highs, but rather a mountain being constructed upon the top of another mountain. It was soaring stuff, and fans gave the duo a lengthy ovation once they finally came back down.