"If I count to four, can you make yourself feel angry?" asks bass player Kentaro Kawaguchi, founder and visionary of the band 54-71. "One. . . two . . . three . . . four . . .."

I give him my best scowl, and conjure up the most violent thoughts I can muster, but he's right: The anger isn't really there.

"If you can do it, then it is only a pose." Kentaro has been reading a lot of samurai books lately -- not the newsprint ones with blood-spattered drawings and intermittent sex scenes, but what he calls real stories of real samurai.

"I like their way of thinking," he explains. "They lived by a code that wasn't the same as that of the commoners."

He insists that samurai, when they were not at war, were not just high-level residents. They had to maintain their concentration, their training, in order to improve themselves.

"On stage, it is the same," Kentaro says. "We can't expect to live a different life on stage than we do every day . . . that would be posing."

Yagyu Hyogonosuke, the "father of modern kendo," was famous for integrating many styles. He advocated strict training of one's attack by putting oneself into hard situations.

"Nintai," Kentaro says, nodding his head. "Suffering, showing emotion or 'angst,' on stage is posing . . . unless you're enduring that sort of thing for real."

Nintai is explained as a noble attribute whose English equivalent might be "long-suffering," a concept largely scoffed at nowadays, but once a very lauded characteristic in Japan.

"Heavy rock or heavy grooves are not really our goal," Kentaro explains. "Pedals often give power to musicians, but we want a natural sound. We may use pedals, but the music must have power in itself . . . more power in a single note than on an entire Korn album."

54-71 play heavily emotional music, but it isn't hardcore or emo. They are intense and hypnotic, but can be called neither ambient nor trance. As with any other truly original music, fans have to be content to call it "rock," and leave it at that.

Kentaro likens a guitar riff to the methods of kendo: "Complex strategies in one swing of the sword."

54-71 often repeat a simple, singular riff for an entire song, but are still able to speak volumes with its tenure and manipulation. You don't sing along to their music, you don't even tap your feet . . . you move with it, or rather it moves you.

If Kentaro is the visionary, then you'd expect the other band members to either share an equally grand sort of drive, or to just play along in a sort of follow-the-leader discipleship. Neither is true, however, of 54-71.

The remaining members all but carry on the show without him, and why not, since he always has his back to the audience, looming in the shadows behind the largest available amp.

Every show starts out the same. They tune, get the settings right and then they go dead silent while vocalist Shingo Sato glares out above the crowd for several very long minutes.

This can be daunting. The crowd whispers back and forth, "Does he want us to be quiet?" or "What are they waiting for?" followed by a subtle barrage of "Shshshshsh!" behind the cupped hands of those in the know.

Then, out of the silence, the drummer hits it with one big beat, the bass and guitar kick in with the reverb and Shingo's off on his personal crash course with latent epilepsy.

"We just wait for the right moment," says Shingo. "It's impossible to make everyone quiet -- that's not even what we want -- the silence just induces everyone to wait with us."

"We practice for it," Kentaro adds. "We get a sense of the intros from feeling the background."

Everything about the band, right down to their chosen name, seems at once random and exquisitely executed -- the exact science of madness.

Shingo sings with an atonal fervor, controlling the pitch more with the volume of his voice than with melody. As he belts out the lyrics, he appears to be sorting out a full range of rather inexplicable emotions within himself. First he loathes the crowd, hovering menacingly above it on the monitors, then he's embarrassed by it, cringing in on himself and finally he breaks into a funky little dance with a broad smile smeared across his face, hell-bent on entertaining. No forethought, no logical flow, but every bit the realism that the band unwittingly lays forth.

"Shingo has invented many dances," guitarist Noriaki Takada jokes. "We don't understand them either."

"You see," Shingo demonstrates, "first I go like this: (he thrusts his hands away from his hips and draws his lips into a smirking grimace), and then maybe I go like this: (he points both forefingers up into the air and makes large circular flapping motions, while kicking at what appear to be attacking geese)."

The samurai must have been a very odd breed indeed, if 54-71 is an accurate modernized replication, but hey, at least they can play.

Real samurai, on the other hand, got paid for their trouble, something that this quartet has unfortunately yet to accomplish.

54-71 has released one album, one unbelievable album -- not only for its musical content, but for the fact that it is free. Yes, FREE. Anyone can sell 1,000 CDs, but it takes the huevos of a feudal warrior to give 1,000 CDs away, with naught but the hopes of accidental notoriety as payment.

It's a shame, really, that their Jack-and-the-Beanstock marketing technique has not yet paid off. After seeing them live, I simply wish I had a printing press and a disposable budget.

As the philosopher Renauld Scarabeaux once said, "Art and poetry are nothing more than drawing nearer to the essence of the human thought process by eliminating the pollutants of coherent interpersonal communication."

That may be reason enough for the band's allure, and the band's obsession with legitimacy makes it all the more honest; noble, as samurai were meant to be.

As far as 54-71 is concerned, their reason for being is this: Kentaro said "54," Noriaki said "71," and they simply became what they said.