Haino Keiji's opening set during a two-night stint at Tonic was billed as a classical guitar performance, but the only equipment on stage a black Telecaster, two capos and a row of amplifiers.

He began by laying down two simple vocal lines and looping them, singling lines over the top for a few minutes and playing some clean jazz chordings, then looping another vocal line on top of that. He continued, alternately adding guitar and vocal lines, under dim lights with incense burning, until he'd built a resonant chamber of sound. It was something other than the old Haino. This was monklike Haino. Angelic Haino. Clean and pure, even with three amps, two speaker cabinets and a second p.a. on stage.

Eventually he began to cut the loops and started to build something closer to a rock song, laying down an undistorted rhythm guitar track and looping some descending vocal moaning over it, then turning up the overdrive to solo. Distortion is Haino's friend. He knows how to play through it well, but without it his guitar playing can be limited. That aside, he understands building a song and a weak start will undoubtedly become an interesting world once a couple of layers are added.

He repeated this process a half dozen times or more, abruptly disposing of loops as he began a new guitar piece, building it into something that only became interesting once it was busy enough that the loops were no longer apparent. By the time it peaks, the feeling is very much like being snared on an electric fence.

The second set was closer to vintage Haino. The row of effect pedals went from 8 to 6 and the falsetto cries were replaced with ear-splitting screams. He cranked the volume and made his way toward rock, eventually - as he's been doing the last several years - circling in (but not quite landing) on the glory days.

Haino's rock covers are deliberately obtuse. His version of "I Can't Get No (Satisfaction)" hints at the riff through some approximated sliding chords, never quite getting there but played like he means it. He built it to a crescendo of loud false harmonics and muted strings over a single looped chord, letting distortion ring then settling on another single chord to cement atop the loop. And it's a good joke, too, to imagine someone who is usually more concerned about relieving the pain of existence whining about something as indulgent as being satisfied. He might have followed that up with The Doors' "Roadhouse Blues," but I wouldn't swear it on Jim Morrison's grave, (Someone else guessed Canned Heat, but in any case a bastard grandchild of John Lee Hooker.) Next was the first ballad I have ever heard Haino play. Not a dirge or a procession or a lament but a sweet, sad, nonlinear ballad. He then played two songs which sounded to be traditional Japanese and several others of his own devise, touching slightly on Kan Mikami territory. He is, in a sense, a classic case of "the more things change, the more they stay the same." Whatever the instrument, whatever the song - even dancing or playing cymbals - what he puts across is pure Haino.