Filters

Electronic / Experimental

3148 products

Showing 1 - 24 of 3148 products
View
The Cosmic Tones Research Trio - All is Sound (LP)The Cosmic Tones Research Trio - All is Sound (LP)
The Cosmic Tones Research Trio - All is Sound (LP)Mississippi Records
¥3,457
Portland's finest practitioners of Great Black Music offering to the planet! All Is Sound could not be a more apt title for this. Through saxophone, cello, piano, and flutes The Cosmic Tones Research Trio created a truly beautiful record. All Is Sound breaks new ground. At its heart, it's healing/meditation music, but the Gospel and Blues roots are in there too...as well as hints of forward-looking Spiritual jazz. As sincere a record as you could ever hope for. Music is indeed the healing force of the universe.

Women - Public Strain (LP)
Women - Public Strain (LP)Jagjaguwar
¥3,414
On their debut self-titled album, Women embraced sonic brashness that deeper examination revealed to be tinted with sly pop melody. With their second album "Public Strain", the band has honed a sound truthful to that reverb drenched noise while allowing the pop sensibilities to surface into clearer focus. This exact balance of delicate and dense is a pervasive thread throughout the album, reflecting the contradiction of the band's environment buried in urban sprawl framed by prairie landscape. Whether twisting through the urgent krautrock of "Locust Valley", an exercise of harmony through simplicity, or climaxing with the bittersweet melody of "Eyesore", the album somehow builds luminous contrast out of a palette of grays.

Bon Iver - Bon Iver, Bon Iver (LP)
Bon Iver - Bon Iver, Bon Iver (LP)Jagjaguwar
¥3,536
Bon Iver, Bon Iver is Justin Vernon returning to former haunts with a new spirit. The reprises are there – solitude, quietude, hope and desperation compressed – but always a rhythm arises, a pulse vivified by gratitude and grace notes. The winter, the legend, has faded to just that, and this is the new momentary present. The icicles have dropped, rising up again as grass.
Ernest Hood - Back To The Woodlands (Indie Exclusive) (Yellow Vinyl LP)Ernest Hood - Back To The Woodlands (Indie Exclusive) (Yellow Vinyl LP)
Ernest Hood - Back To The Woodlands (Indie Exclusive) (Yellow Vinyl LP)Freedom To Spend
¥3,536
Written and recorded between 1972 and 1982 in Western Oregon, Back to the Woodlands is a previously unreleased, and nearly lost, album made by Ernest Hood during the same era as his near mythical album Neighborhoods. A visionary combination of field recordings, zithers, and synthesizers, Back to the Woodlands offers an unprecedented depth of access to this singular artistic mind. Working closely with his estate to maintain his original vision, Freedom to Spend has restored and remastered this never before released, lost masterpiece by Ernest Hood from the original tapes. Ernest Hood’s Back to the Woodlands will be issued on vinyl, as well as on CD in combination with its contemporary Where the Woods Begin, with new liner notes by Michael Klausman.
Ernest Hood - Neighborhoods (2LP)Ernest Hood - Neighborhoods (2LP)
Ernest Hood - Neighborhoods (2LP)Freedom To Spend
¥4,145

Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods was released some two decades after the Portland, Oregon born and raised musician’s first forays into field recordings. These very recordings, and those captured over intervening years, define the universal sound and aural images of childhood, a theme memorialized by Hood’s privately-pressed opus of 1975.

Freedom to Spend has restored Ernest Hood’s nostalgic masterpiece with the same care with which he viewed his source material, offering a remastered version of Neighborhoods transferred from the original tapes, expanded across four vinyl sides (the original version was crammed on two). The new edition reproduces Hood’s celebratory liner notes in full, alongside new liner notes by Michael Klausman.

Coil - Queens Of The Circulating Library (Clear Vinyl LP)Coil - Queens Of The Circulating Library (Clear Vinyl LP)
Coil - Queens Of The Circulating Library (Clear Vinyl LP)DAIS Records
¥3,536

Queens Of The Circulating Library stands alongside Time Machines and Nurse With Wound’s Soliloquy For Lilith as a post-industrial pinnacle of sensory-warping long-form drone. Crafted by the distilled duo of Thighpaulsandra and John Balance, the 49-minute piece unfurls in swirling, cyclical waves, tidal as much as textural, channeling the spirit of levitational minimalism pioneered by La Monte Young. Touted as the first part in "a continually mutating series of circulating musickal compositions” upon its initial release in 2000, the album remains a compelling case study in Coil’s exceptional capacity for mutation and extremes. The theatrical introductory monologue delivered by Thighpaulsandra’s mother – a career opera singer, in her 80’s at the time of recording – sets the stage for a grandiose ascension. Written by Balance, the text is declamatory but dreamlike, refracted through megaphone echo: “Return the book of knowledge / Return the marble index / File under "Paradox" / The forest is a college, each tree a university.” As her voice fades, the lulling synthetic infinity deepens, congealing into transient crests of volume and haze, like slow-motion surf misting in moonlight. Thighpaulsandra describes their aesthetic intention as a “bliss out,” static but shape-shifting, an amniotic drift towards an eternal vanishing point. A supreme sonic embodiment of the slogan on the sleeve of Time Machines, two years prior: "Persistence is all." Dais-exclusive Lenticular Limited Editions : Come in lenticular plastic jacket that animates when tilted, using frames of projections from Coil's live performances during the era.

Coil - Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil (2LP)Coil - Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil (2LP)
Coil - Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil (2LP)Dais Records
¥4,937
The first-ever official vinyl edition, completely remastered by Josh Bonati. The turn of the millennium ushered in an apex visionary phase for English esoteric duo Coil. Relocating from the city to the coastal quiet of Weston-super-Mare freed them to follow even more fringe obsessions, fully untethered from peer influence. During a single six-month stretch in 2000 they released the devious underworld sequel to Music To Play In The Dark, arcane drone summit Queens Of The Circulating Library, and a malevolent hour-long synthesizer exorcism prophetically titled Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil. This latter work remains one of the group’s most miasmic and mind-expanding creations, on par with Time Machines – a sustained divination of shuddering, psychoactive noise, rippling with the motion sickness of an all-seeing eye. Thighpaulsandra characterizes the album as “an exercise in brutality,” born from a thorny patch of his Serge modular unit that Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson found entrancing. Processing this sliver of electronics into a ravaged labyrinth was a trial and error process, aided by Christopherson’s visual sense of sound, stretching and manipulating it for maximum spatial disorientating. Frequencies nauseously crawl across the stereo field, burrowing into the ear like a sinister brainwashing experiment. An outlier / centerpiece is the 13-minute alien tribalist sea shanty, “I Am The Green Child,” guided by John Balance’s sung-spoken free verse concerning vengeance, oblivion, and insanity, culminating in the memorable refrain, “We're swimming in a sea of occidental vomit.” But the rest of the record seethes in unhinged instrumental chaos, divided into 18 micro-movements of a composition called “Tunnel Of Goats.” Intended to scramble the functionality of a CD player’s shuffle mode, the piece throbs, thrashes, and flatlines in compressed frenzies of twisted synthesis, at the threshold of some bottomless purgatory, forbidding and unknown.
Coil - Time Machines (CD)Coil - Time Machines (CD)
Coil - Time Machines (CD)DAIS Records
¥1,994
Official remastered edition of COIL's 1998 drone/ambient masterpiece. “4 Tones to facilitate travel through time.” So begins the listeners’ journey into what has become one of the most treasured and revered pieces of COIL history ever released. Each of the four pieces on Time Machines is named after the chemical compound of the hallucinogenic drug that they were composed for, and the album was meticulously crafted to enable what John Balance referred to as "temporal slips" in time and space, allowing both the artist and audience to figuratively "dissolve time". Inspired by long form ceremonial music of Tibet and other religions, where the intent is to lose oneself in the music – to meditate or achieve a trance state – Time Machines became Drew McDowall, John Balance, and Peter Christopherson’s “electronic punk-primitive” answer to this tribal concept. Starting as a rough demo tape recorded solely by Coil member Drew McDowall, Time Machines started to take full form when McDowall enthusiastically delivered these demo recordings to Balance and Christopherson as sketches for a new Coil project with the primary goal of shifting Coil’s sound further into a more conceptually abstract direction. Largely recorded in 1997 using single takes with minimal post production, these four drones contain every intended fluctuation and tone, along with every glitch of the original – “Artifacts generated by your listening environment are an intrinsic part of the experience.”

Ragnar Grippe - Sand (LP+DL)
Ragnar Grippe - Sand (LP+DL)Dais Records
¥2,978

Received an 8.1 rating from Pitchfork. Since its original release in 1977, RAGNAR GRIPPE's seminal debut album entitled Sand has been adorned with immense praise and influenced a myriad of ambient musicians and minimalist composers. Grippe’s unique approach of bonding post-modern classical composition into the tape techniques of musique concrète allowed him to be one of the leading experimental electronic musicians of the late 20th century.  Originally trained as a classical cellist, Grippe had relocated to Paris in the early 70’s to study at the famous Groupe de Recherches Musicales (more commonly known as GRM) founded by musique concrète pioneers Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry and Jacques Poullin. Around the same time, Grippe had struck up a close friendship with French avant-garde minimalist Luc Ferrari. It was under Ferrari’s direction and guidance that the young Grippe started to build a shared experimental music studio, aptly named l’Atelier de la Libération Musicale (ALM), in which Ferrari shared his knowledge and instrumental supplies, thus forging Grippe’s implementation of harmonic tone within the confines of musique concrete.  After a brief stint of electronic music study at McGill University in Montreal, Grippe returned to Paris in 1976 to compose with Ferrari at the now fully-realized ALM studio. One of the visiting artists passing through the creative epicenter of the Cité Internationale des Arts during this time was the painter Viswanadhan Velu. Velu’s recent works consisted of various Sand paintings which were to be exhibited at the Galerie Shandar, the avant-garde art gallery and home to the Shandar record label which was the home to minimalist composers Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Cecil Taylor and Charlemagne Palestine.  Grippe was asked to compose a composition that was to be played during the Sand painting exhibition and was then to be released on the Shandar imprint in 1977. This release would be the first official album that would start Grippe’s career as a modern avant-garde composer and electronic musician. After a celebrated release, “Sand” has since been out-of-print on its original vinyl format for four decades and original copies fetch high prices amongst minimalist listeners and collectors.

William S. Burroughs - Nothing Here Now But The Recordings (LP)
William S. Burroughs - Nothing Here Now But The Recordings (LP)Dais Records
¥3,292

In 1980, Genesis P-Orridge and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson of (then-) Throbbing Gristle travelled to New York City to meet up at the fortified apartment, known as The Bunker, of famed beat writer and cultural pioneer William S. Burroughs and his executor James Grauerholz. Genesis and Sleazy started the daunting task of compiling the experimental sound works of Burroughs, which, up until that point, had never been widely heard. During those visits, Burroughs would play back his tape recorder experiments featuring his spoken word “cut-ups”, collaged field recordings from his travels and his flirtations with EVP recording techniques, pioneered by Latvian intellectual Konstantins Raudive. Over the following year, P-Orridge, Christopherson and Grauerholz spent countless hours compiling various edits, each collection showcasing Burroughs sensitive ear and experimental prowess for audio anomaly within technical limitations. In early 1981, Burroughs had relocated to Lawrence, KS to escape the violence and manias of New York City life. There, P-Orridge and Christopherson put the finishing touches on the record that would be known as Nothing Here Now but the Recordings. Released in Spring 1981, the album would end up as the final release on Industrial Records, brought about by the dissolution of Throbbing Gristle. It was quietly out of print until 1998, when John Giorno and the Giorno Poetry Systems included the album on a retrospective CD box set, which compiled the majority of Burroughs's seminal recordings. In 2015, Dais Records worked closely with the Estate of William S. Burroughs to finally re-release, for the first time in 36 years, a proper vinyl reissue of William S. Burroughs Nothing Here Now but the Recordings to celebrate the centennial anniversary of William S. Burroughs. For the 2023 edition, Dais has remastered the audio with renowned engineer Josh Bonati, and restored the original artwork with a new dedication to Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson. Releasing in tandem with Break Through In Grey Room

Godspeed You! Black Emperor  - NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD (CD)Godspeed You! Black Emperor  - NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD (CD)
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD (CD)Constellation
¥2,374
THE PLAIN TRUTH= we drifted through it, arguing. every day a new war crime, every day a flower bloom. we sat down together and wrote it in one room, and then sat down in a different room, recording. NO TITLE= what gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall? what context? what broken melody? and then a tally and a date to mark a point on the line, the negative process, the growing pile. the sun setting above beds of ash while we sat together, arguing. the old world order barely pretended to care. this new century will be crueler still. war is coming. don’t give up. pick a side. hang on. love.

Teno Afrika - Amapiano Selections (LP)
Teno Afrika - Amapiano Selections (LP)Awesome Tapes From Africa
¥3,049
This is the first album by Teno Afrika, a hot project led by Lutendo Raduvha, a 21-year-old young musician who is one of the most important figures in the latest "Amapiano" movement born in South Africa, where homegrown jazz, boogie, Afro-house, kwaito, etc. are rapidly being revived. This is the first album from Teno Afrika, a project led by Lutendo Raduvha, a 21-year-old young musician who is a key figure in the latest Amapiano movement emerging in South Africa. Born in the townships of Gauteng, South Africa, Teno Afrika has rapidly gained momentum over the past five years, evolving into a nationwide mainstream genre of "amapiano," a new genre influenced by kwaito. Having spent most of his life moving back and forth between Johannesburg and various townships in the suburbs of Pretoria, Gauteng, he has incorporated the influences of these areas into this exciting new collection of Afro-dance tracks.
吉村弘 Hiroshi Yoshimura - Flora 1987 (Transparent Magenta Vinyl 2LP)吉村弘 Hiroshi Yoshimura - Flora 1987 (Transparent Magenta Vinyl 2LP)
吉村弘 Hiroshi Yoshimura - Flora 1987 (Transparent Magenta Vinyl 2LP)Temporal Drift
¥8,250

LIMITED JAPAN EXCLUSIVE "Asagao" EDITION. Flora is an album that is listened to perpetually,
Passed on from one listener to another,
And the charm of the sound- and music-loving figure 
known as Hiroshi Yoshimura,
Just might come drifting through.
Like the scent of a small flower.
—Junichi Konuma

Announcing the worldwide reissue of Flora, Hiroshi Yoshimura’s underrated work originally recorded and completed in 1987 and first released on CD in 2006, three years after his passing in 2003.

Flora is chronologically and stylistically a follow-up to Hiroshi Yoshimura’s acclaimed 1986 works Green and Surround, wherein Yoshimura continues to play with the ambience of sound and the sound of ambience, underscoring his mastery in the field of environmental music. Listening to Flora is like taking a stroll in a park, absorbing the colors and textures of the natural environment—flowers, insects, the swaying of the leaves—as Yoshimura often did at his beloved Edo-era park near his home in Tokyo. As Junichi Konuma describes in his liner notes, Yoshimura’s music “only begins to emerge as it exists at the intersection of passive and active.” Yoshimura's approach to sound and melody invites the listener to hear the intricacies of the music with intent, while simultaneously allowing the aural textures to exist as part of the background of our everyday life.

This reissue marks the first time the album will be available on vinyl (2LP, 45 rpm) and cassette, and includes liner notes written by music scholar Junichi Konuma and remastered audio by Grammy-nominated engineer John Baldwin. Reissue design and layout was handled by Tiffanie Tran. 

吉村弘 Hiroshi Yoshimura - Flora 1987 (CD)吉村弘 Hiroshi Yoshimura - Flora 1987 (CD)
吉村弘 Hiroshi Yoshimura - Flora 1987 (CD)Temporal Drift
¥3,630

LIMITED JAPAN EXCLUSIVE "Asagao" EDITION. Flora is an album that is listened to perpetually,
Passed on from one listener to another,
And the charm of the sound- and music-loving figure 
known as Hiroshi Yoshimura,
Just might come drifting through.
Like the scent of a small flower.
—Junichi Konuma

Announcing the worldwide reissue of Flora, Hiroshi Yoshimura’s underrated work originally recorded and completed in 1987 and first released on CD in 2006, three years after his passing in 2003.

Flora is chronologically and stylistically a follow-up to Hiroshi Yoshimura’s acclaimed 1986 works Green and Surround, wherein Yoshimura continues to play with the ambience of sound and the sound of ambience, underscoring his mastery in the field of environmental music. Listening to Flora is like taking a stroll in a park, absorbing the colors and textures of the natural environment—flowers, insects, the swaying of the leaves—as Yoshimura often did at his beloved Edo-era park near his home in Tokyo. As Junichi Konuma describes in his liner notes, Yoshimura’s music “only begins to emerge as it exists at the intersection of passive and active.” Yoshimura's approach to sound and melody invites the listener to hear the intricacies of the music with intent, while simultaneously allowing the aural textures to exist as part of the background of our everyday life.

This reissue marks the first time the album will be available on vinyl (2LP, 45 rpm) and cassette, and includes liner notes written by music scholar Junichi Konuma and remastered audio by Grammy-nominated engineer John Baldwin. Reissue design and layout was handled by Tiffanie Tran. 

Ryuichi Sakamoto - Thousand Knives Of (Heavy Vinyl LP)
Ryuichi Sakamoto - Thousand Knives Of (Heavy Vinyl LP)日本コロムビア株式会社
¥4,180
"The origin of techno. The original crystallization of the artists who created the era as big names, immortal monuments beyond the masterpieces." Limited vinyl version reissued in heavy vinyl. The heavy-duty vinyl version in the original jacket supervised by Ryuichi Sakamoto is available in a completely limited edition.
John Glacier - Like A Ribbon (LP)John Glacier - Like A Ribbon (LP)
John Glacier - Like A Ribbon (LP)Young
¥4,558
London rapper, poet, and producer John Glacier releases his long-awaited debut album, Like A Ribbon, on . The album chronicles Glacier's life from a simple upbringing in Hackney, in the northeast corner of the capital's central London, to growing up at a phenomenal rate, with the lead single, “Found,” a floaty sound with a powerful message of overcoming daily struggles. Participating artists include Kwes Darko, the producer of the film, as well as Flume, Andrew Aged, Eartheater, Sampha, and others, all of whom complement John Glacier's unique musical style. John Glacier's sound, which combines contemporary yet dreamlike electronic tones with subtle beats, has the ability to draw out the listener's emotional depths and draw them in.

Masahiro Sugaya - 海の動物園 = The Long Living Things (LP+Obi)
Masahiro Sugaya - 海の動物園 = The Long Living Things (LP+Obi)P-Vine
¥4,620

Masahiro Sugaya, a Grammy-nominated composer whose works have been featured in the Japanese ambient compilation "Kankyo Ongaku" by the US label "Light In The Attic," has received remarkable acclaim from overseas in recent years. The world's first reissue and first LP of the stage music "Sea Zoo" (1988), created for a stage performance by Papa Tarahumara, a performing arts group to which Sugaya belonged at the time!

Masahiro Sugaya has been active as a composer since the early 80's, studying under eminent composers such as Shigeaki Saegusa, Joji Yuasa, and Teizo Matsumura, and also worked as an arranger for NHK Educational TV's "Diary of a Junior High School Student" and for the guitar duo "Gonchichi". This album was produced for the stage performance "Sea Zoo" by the performing arts group "Papa Tarahumara," for which he has worked as a composer since 1987, and was released only in CD format at the time. This album was released only in CD format at the time, and its tracks were included in the Grammy-nominated Japanese new age/ambient compilation "Kankyo Ongaku" by the US label Light In The Attic, and the compilation "Horizon Vol. 1" was released by the US label Empire of Signs, which also reissues leading Japanese ambient artists such as Hiroshi Yoshimura and Inoyama Yamaland. Although there have been reissues of single tracks, this is the world's first reissue of an album, and the first release in LP format! The album includes "Grains of Sand from the Sea" (M2), which is a mixture of delicate piano and soft electronic sounds from "Kankyo Ongaku", and "To the End of the World" (M7), which is full of floating feeling with minimalist soft sequences from "Horizon Vol. 1", This is a historical masterpiece that evokes the essence of Japanese ambient music, which has been reevaluated worldwide in recent years!

Tomioka Taeko - Monogatarinoyouni Furusatohatoi (LP)Tomioka Taeko - Monogatarinoyouni Furusatohatoi (LP)
Tomioka Taeko - Monogatarinoyouni Furusatohatoi (LP)P-Vine
¥4,500

The long-awaited LP reissue of the insane masterpiece "My Hometown is Far Away Like a Story," which was produced by poet Taeko Tomioka and the young Ryuichi Sakamoto, and made a name for itself in music history! The cover by Nobuyoshi Araki, also known as Araki, is a must-have!

The poet Tomioka Taeko's insane masterpiece "Monogatarinoyouni Furusatohatoi" (originally released on CD by Victor in 1977 and P-Vine in 2005) is finally coming to light on a limited edition analog LP! It's too avant-garde and fantastical to be called psychedelic. A masterpiece of insanity that will drive the vestibular canals of all who listen to it crazy!
The music was produced by a young Ryuichi Sakamoto, and the cover was photographed by Nobuyoshi Araki, also known as Araki.

7FO - 竜のぬけがら (LP)7FO - 竜のぬけがら (LP)
7FO - 竜のぬけがら (LP)Em Records
¥3,800
Captain Ganja + Haruomi Hosono + A. Russell !? This is the rumored Pure Land Dub New Age Base! A natural talent who fell in love with that Tapes, a new album of all 7FO songs has been completed !!!! A fluffy daydream experience with Nirvana BGM with a faint grassy scent. Offers from leading labels such as RVNG and Bokeh Versions are coming in, and the attention is rising overseas overseas, but Japan is left behind? I hear a voice saying, but wait! We kept waiting for this talent to stone and explode, and finally it was time to awaken !!!!!! The decisive difference between 7FO and conventional electronic music writers is that it treats ambient-new age synth electronics with natural ethnicity like dub-reggae, with a feeling that Westerners do not have. That's the point. That sense is the reason why it produces the sound that the times demand, and is supported by RVNG-like new age-electronic music, new roots revival to extreme bass music, and La Monte Young to Equiknoxx fans. In a metaphorical way, what would happen if Haruomi Hosono from the YEN-Monad period appeared in the 2010s base scene? That is, it still has a mysterious potential. If you tell someone who doesn't know anything about the charm of "Ryu no Nukegara", you can get the true value straight away! ?? Natural high additive-free chill-out decision board that will be a landmark of 7FO that told that Tapes "There is no reason for me to make music ..." (The binding by Hiroto Higuchi is this sound Successful visualization.)
Karavi Roushi & Aquadab - BLADE N (LP)
Karavi Roushi & Aquadab - BLADE N (LP)Em Records
¥3,960
“BLADE N” is the long-awaited new album from Japanese rapper Karavi Roushi, who appeared on the Japanese hip-hop scene with his debut solo album “Kiyosumi Kurokawa”. This, his second solo album, is a collaborative release with Aquadab, the Japanese track maker/sound designer who co-produced “Kiyosumi Kurokawa”. The album showcases the preternatural mind-meld between rapper and track maker.Karavi Roushi came before the public as a member of Nagoya hip-hop collective Hydro Brain Gang on Nero Imai's album “Return Of Acid King” (2017). He then launched the label Super Lights with Aquadab and released his first solo album “Kiyosumi Kurokawa” in 2019 with graphic design by Takara Ohashi. Although an unknown newcomer, the album reached #15 on the iTunes Hip Hop Japan album chart and received plaudits not only for its music but also for the artwork by Ohashi. After the album, Karavi Roushi dropped his first collaboration tune with Aquadab on “S.D.S =Zero=” (2020), a compilation of Generation Z Japanese underground artists produced during the Covid pandemic. That tune, “Tokyoite”, became a favorite of the participating artists."BLADE N” was created by the three-person team of Karavi Roushi, Aquadab & Ohashi. Consciously developing their musical methodology, they intentionally use instrumental tracks to interrupt the rappers' voices and flows, something which has traditionally been avoided, and explore the possibility of creating a style that puts the rapper and track maker on equal footing in complex, woven tracks. On the album, Karavi Roushi's paranormal voice, which sometimes sounds like a mutant synthesizer, adds incisiveness, and in the artwork Ohashi visually extracts the story world hidden in “BLADE N”, giving the cover art the same impact as that of “Kiyosumi Kurokawa”.
Karavi Roushi & Aquadab - BLADE N (CD)
Karavi Roushi & Aquadab - BLADE N (CD)Em Records
¥2,970

“BLADE N” is the long-awaited new album from Japanese rapper Karavi Roushi, who appeared on the Japanese hip-hop scene with his debut solo album “Kiyosumi Kurokawa”. This, his second solo album, is a collaborative release with Aquadab, the Japanese track maker/sound designer who co-produced “Kiyosumi Kurokawa”. The album showcases the preternatural mind-meld between rapper and track maker.

Karavi Roushi came before the public as a member of Nagoya hip-hop collective Hydro Brain Gang on Nero Imai's album “Return Of Acid King” (2017). He then launched the label Super Lights with Aquadab and released his first solo album “Kiyosumi Kurokawa” in 2019 with graphic design by Takara Ohashi. Although an unknown newcomer, the album reached #15 on the iTunes Hip Hop Japan album chart and received plaudits not only for its music but also for the artwork by Ohashi. After the album, Karavi Roushi dropped his first collaboration tune with Aquadab on “S.D.S =Zero=” (2020), a compilation of Generation Z Japanese underground artists produced during the Covid pandemic. That tune, “Tokyoite”, became a favorite of the participating artists.

"BLADE N” was created by the three-person team of Karavi Roushi, Aquadab & Ohashi. Consciously developing their musical methodology, they intentionally use instrumental tracks to interrupt the rappers' voices and flows, something which has traditionally been avoided, and explore the possibility of creating a style that puts the rapper and track maker on equal footing in complex, woven tracks. On the album, Karavi Roushi's paranormal voice, which sometimes sounds like a mutant synthesizer, adds incisiveness, and in the artwork Ohashi visually extracts the story world hidden in “BLADE N”, giving the cover art the same impact as that of “Kiyosumi Kurokawa”.

JUU4E & Friends - Somutamu-samuraiGOLD (LP)
JUU4E & Friends - Somutamu-samuraiGOLD (LP)Em Records
¥3,630

Somtam Samurai GOLD”, the ultimate hyper-enhanced mini-album featuring the very popular killer tune ‘Somtam Samurai’ featuring stillichimiya from the JUU4E masterpiece album ‘New Lukutun’ (2019), with the participation of Monaural mini-plug! The album is a mini album with a DL code! Limited release on LP with DL code!

JUU4E - IS (CD)JUU4E - IS (CD)
JUU4E - IS (CD)Em Records
¥3,000

The third album from the renowned Thai producer/rapper JUU4E is “IS”. The “be” verb. A celebration of existence and openness after the deadly constrictions and restrictions of Covid, fusing “global” hip-hop and pop rhythms with “local” Thai instruments and lyrics. A further fusion and celebration exists in the lyrics themselves, which feature a Buddhist worldview joyously infused with the emotional and physical pleasures of the world. A work of both enlightenment and dance. JUU4E, born in Bangkok, now living Khon Kaen, Northeastern Thailand, is a loved and respected Thai hip-hop OG, affectionately known as “Master JUU” among Thai hip-hop fans. This release, with songs recorded 2023-24, sees the continuation of JUU4E’s fruitful collaboration with Japanese co-producer Young-G of stillichimiya/OMK fame, who also contributes liner notes. Available on CD or digital, with liner notes in Japanese and English, and lyrics in Thai, Japanese and English. Get together with your friends, play it loud, and celebrate!

Lippard Arkbro Lindwall - How do I know if my cat likes me (LP)
Lippard Arkbro Lindwall - How do I know if my cat likes me (LP)Blank Forms Editions
¥3,998

How do I know if my cat likes me? is the first offering from organists Ellen Arkbro and Hampus Lindwall with visual artist Hanne Lippard, an existential meditation on the empty expanses of our automated everyday. First developed during Arkbro and Lippard’s 2023 residency at La Becque in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, the album satirizes, in prim deadpan, the stultifying aesthetics of corporate life, from hold music to online banking. How do I know if my cat likes me? extends the lineage of Roberts Ashley and Barry’s droll concept poetry, hammering at the sounds of language until they dislodge all signifieds through pleasurably numbing repetition. Listening to the record is like doing a Captcha over and over until all the characters fuzz to hieroglyphs, or finding yourself mired in a tautological customer-service argument—except that, after you dead-end at nonsense, you stumble into an unexpectedly transcendent beauty, where language flips from pure function to pure aesthetic, shimmering with possibility.

Even subtle ruptures in lyrical or musical patterns can trigger a fundamental shift in the world of the song. Throughout the record, strict formalism and minimalism beget narrative. “The long goodbye” imagines an excruciating dialogue between acquaintances who can’t politely disengage: “It’s my pleasure!” deadpans Lippard, who replies to herself, “Pleasure is all mine! / See you soon! / See you next time! / See you then!” Though the lines recycle the same few parting words, a mysterious causality accumulates in the minute variations, creating a narrative arc less for the characters of the song than for the listener, who might confront despair, nihilistic humor, or profound gratitude at the capacity of art to encompass any of this—not necessarily in that order. Elsewhere, as “Modern Spanking” free-associates its way from the phrase “online banking” toward “breathing down your neck banking” and “sexy but bankrupt banking,” a whole world of perfunctory pleasures comes into focus. While minimalist movements in music and visual art foster a certain situatedness of the view, “Modern Spanking” evokes the slick, frictionless minimalism of an upscale mall: a crowd of desultory passersby drifting between sex and money, fantasy and reality, scattered attention and intense distraction. In a world like this, the distinction between banking and spanking becomes negligible.

RIYL: Jacqueline Humbert and David Rosenboom, Robert Ashley, Robert Wyatt.

Recently viewed

Merzbow + Agencement - Rilievo (CD)