Yasuhiko Hamachi and Yukihisa Nakase have got a car. It's a nice one. The kind you'd like your company to give you if you'd actually got one and you'd wasted a good few years inside it, a Citroen XM-X. Hamachi and Nakase's car is a bit different however. It's got a name, "Rogues' Gallery: drive vibration sound system". According to a flyer, "The Citroen is equipped with a high-generating power audio system with microphones attached to various parts of the car which they use to collect, mix, and modify the sound of the drive in real-time."

Rogues' Gallery - a name picked at random from a dictionary of English language slang - take people, two at a time, on night drives through the city that they live in, Osaka. For a road system it's got one of the most spectacular in the world: The Hanshin Expressway. A feast of concrete and steel that makes Birmingham's Spaghetti Junction look like a spoon of pot noodle. An hour's treatment in the drive vibration sound system means vast arcs of concrete and light, stacked arrays of tunnels, more neon than makes sense, air you can chew, immense - still working - docks, driving ranges like enormous bird cages, housing projects blending into vast industrial cityscapes like the jewelled night-time city of Port Talbot, and miles of it. It also means sitting in a car with the motor brought right into the cabin.

A contact mike is taped to the engine. There's another catching the movement of air over the skin of the car; another picking up the indicator. The sound from these mikes is fed into a mixing desk and a clutch of effects pedals resting in the lap of Yukihisa who deals with them whilst Yasuhiko drives.

In the heavy traffic which is inevitable when you start up in the middle of the city, revs are low. The sound is nauseating. As an experiment in rogue frequency generation the thick hot metal of the engine becomes the skin of a self-battering drum.

Osaka is famous for the activity of its Bososuku, teen car clubs that cruise the streets of a weekend in awesome custom jobs modelled on SoCal low-riders, (Mega-fins, criss paint jobs, fun fur interiors, gravity-fucking hydraulics, UV detailing). Here, the custom is re-customed by the addition of the tackiest pop music available on Earth, (J-Pop) and as many fluffy Hello Kitty dolls as the car or van can accommodate. They also have a fan-economy which circulates tapes of particularly cool sounding engines. The Rogues' Gallery on the other hand are into conserving the noise, going unnoticed. The driving is tame, the windows are up, the car doesn't make an impression. It stops, moves and behaves just like all the others. This is not a display noise, it's a capsule.

Getting onto highway, picking up the toll ticket, the face of the guy in the booth doesn't move. The sound is incredible, a total ablation of musicality and he doesn't check it. The sound is integral only to the drive, the shared experience. Everyone stays inside their own hearing machine.

The volume and treatment of different channels is manipulated according to location. Torque and braking feed it. As the traffic frees up and the car can move, the howling begins. Sliding from stacked tunnels out onto a giant suspension bridge, the car hums as the wind courses over it. Sound is hollowed out and chambered, then dive bombs itself. At certain points the eardrums seem to loose the ability to make the conversion and behave just like pieces of flapping membrane. Along with the dials and lights of the dashboard, the vibration of the scalp, fingers, throat, stomach, become another read out of the car's functionality.

The drive lasts for about an hour. Rogues' Gallery are constantly changing the particular routes they take through the city and the configurations of their system. They are also looking to take things onto the road in other cities round the world. Basic essentials: interesting roads.

After about forty minutes the kit is gradually taken apart. You're still moving. The sound disappears and is gradually replaced by that being sucked in through a window along with the frozen air. Silence comes as a luxurious respite into traffic noise and upholstery.

Matthew Fuller