Japanese

On April 1, 2022, musician and sound artist Chihei Hatakeyama played to a small, reverent audience in the space formerly known as Commend in the Lower East Side of New York City. In the two long-form improvisations that evening, Hatakeyama maneuvered some well-traveled environments for those familiar with his near two decade career, layering guitar arpeggios in sheets of immersive reverb and allowing the music to generate, and regenerate, in spectral cadence. Later, Hatakeyama would share the inspiration behind the evening’s performance: a conversation with the imagined ghost of his younger self, during his first, and hitherto only, visit to NYC in the late 90s. An unspoken promise to return to the city and perform music was realized as a collaboration between present and former self. “Such emotional feelings abound in this live performance, colored by the time that has elapsed between who I was 24 years ago and who I am today. During the performance, I felt as if my younger self was standing beside me, as if a departed Jedi from Star Wars was speaking to me.” Live at Commend is the seventh volume of performances captured before a live audience at the Forsyth street venue in NYC. Recorded by Maxime Robillard and mastered by Hatakeyama, Live at Commend is available now in a small cassette edition and select digital configurations.

Pecker, a percussionist who created Japan's first salsa band, Orquesta del Sol, created "Pecker Power," Japan's first dub album in 1980, and originally released on a 10-inch disc, "Instant Rasta," and Ryojiro Furusawa's "Moonlight Slumber," also featuring Minako Yoshida, were added to the original "Instant Rasta" and released in 12-inch format!

Side A
A1 BEGGAR SUITE（Part1）
A2 BEGGAR SUITE（Part2）
A3 BEGGAR SUITE（Part3）
A4 DUB JAM ROCK

Side B
B1 KYLYN
B2 MOONLIGHT SLUMBER

Speed, Glue & Shinki's last album is a gorgeous, faithful reproduction of the original, including a full-wrap-around band! Released in 1972. The second and last album of Speed, Glue & Shinki, released in 1972. Famous for its tiger jacket. This album has many songs that seem to be mainly by Joey Smith, but like the previous album, it is full of bluesy rock. Some of the songs are lyrical, but the medley on the D-side makes extensive use of the Mogg synthesizer, which was still very valuable at the time. Guests include Michael Hanopol [ba etc.], Shigeki Watanabe [key], and Hiroshi Oguchi [drums]. The analog version uses a 96khz 24-bit sound source that was mastered in 2017. Jackets include two single jackets, full-length wraparound obi, lyric card, and others. The original has been reproduced as much as possible.

WRWTFWW Records is terrified to announce the first ever vinyl release for the soundtrack of 1988 J-horror cult movie Evil Dead Trap, available as a super limited edition double-sided picture disc LP. 500 copies were pressed and only 350 are being distributed to stores…that dare to carry it!

WARNING! What you are about to hear cannot be unheard! At last! The scariest soundtrack ever released on vinyl!

Fans of horror movies, rejoice, here is the never-released before Evil Dead Trap (Original Soundtrack) by Tomohiko Kira, a gruesome ride of spooky synths and devilish soundscapes, in the pure tradition of 80s terror. It’s minimalistic John Carpenter with a Tokyo underground twist, it’s basement giallo vibes with buckets of slasher blood, it’s EVIL DEAD TRAP, the scariest soundtrack ever released!

Enter now...AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Points of interests

- The scariest soundtrack ever released!

- Official release of the never published before Evil Dead Trap (Original Soundtrack) by Tomohiko Kira, available in a super limited edition picture disc.

Shin Otowa, is a legendary Japanese psychedelic musician who is coveted by psychedelic enthusiasts around the world.
Makoto Kubota and the Sunset Sunset Orchestra participated in the release of his acid masterpiece "Wasuretami" (self-produced in 1974) on LP for the first time in 48 years!

Self-produced album (1974) by a singer/songwriter known for having contributed lyrics to Makoto Kubota's first solo album "Machiboke" (1973).
Makoto Kubota, who made full use of his 12-string guitar and contributed so much to the overall sound that it could be said that he almost produced the album, Yoma Fujita, who created a fantastic space with his slide guitar, and Takashi Onzo, who played the bass guitar in a lighthearted and eerie manner. The members of the Yuyake Gakudan (Sunset Sunset Band), including Makoto Kubota, who contributed to the overall sound, Yoma Fujita, who creates a fantastic space with his slide guitar, and Takashi Onzo, who plays a nice and light bass, all played on this simple but richly expanded world of Otowa's songs, inviting our consciousness into a world that extends far "beyond", but gives a mysterious sense of peacefulness. In other words, it is a masterpiece of acid folk. In this era of rock, this album is a pure and miraculous album of intense rock that abandons any superficial rock sound in order to be rock. Therefore, it has been enthusiastically supported by psychedelic enthusiasts around the world and has been talked about for a long time in Japan, although only a small portion of the Japanese public has heard of it. In 1976, just after the release of this album, Otowa suddenly left for Ibiza, Spain, and is said to have returned to Japan in the mid-1980s.

This innovative work of Okinawan pop music is based on island songs, subtly blended with the essence of reggae, soul, rock, etc., and has a comfortable and unique laid-back vibrato. This is a rare masterpiece that includes many originals, and is finally being reissued this year, the 50th anniversary of Okinawa's return to mainland Japan!

Yamaguchi electronic landscaper Tomokazu Fujimoto aka Multi-Surface returns from an eight-year hiatus with a slow-blooming suite of radiant terrains and looping lullabies, named for a geometric technique utilized in Japanese gardening: Aesthetics of Inequality Triangles. Prior tapes for Lillerne and Patient Sounds explored parallel spheres of smeared tranquility, but his recent work skews even more sun-flared and crystalline, percolating patterns of texture, melody, and circuitry into states of suspended transience. The album’s 10 tracks lull, unspool, and refract, lapping like waves against aerial shores, flickering rainbows glimpsed in raindrops. The titles offer further clues, mapping a morning walk beneath too blue skies along a path lined with ceramics and stones, pastel flowers gently billowing in a breeze blowing from tomorrow.

The inaugural LP by Tokyo Metropolis electronica entity UNKNOWN ME, Bishintai, is a sublime synthetic suite of cosmic wellness transmissions exploring “the unknown beauty of your mind and body,” appropriately named for a kanji compound meaning “beauty, mind, body.” Crafted with software, synthesizer, steel drum, rhythm boxes, and robotic voice by the core quartet of Yakenohara, P-RUFF, H. Takahashi, and Osawa Yudai, the album unfolds like a holographic guided meditation, soothing but cybernetic, framed by subways and sky malls. Latticework electronics flicker with texture, glitch, wobble, and mirage, themed around sensory perception and body parts. A diverse cast of collaborators assist in actualizing the collection's uniquely urban expression of new age ambient, from psychedelic footwork riddler foodman to multi-instrumentalist institution Jim O'Rourke to Japanese underground shape-shifters MC.Sirafu and Lisa Nakagawa. Although the group cites a therapeutic muse (“made for the maintenance of the minds of city dwellers”), Bishintai shimmers with an alien strangeness, too, like decentralized relaxation systems obeying sentient circuits. This is music of utopia and nowhere, channeling worlds within worlds, birthed from a sonic ethos as simple as it is sacred: “in pursuit of beautiful tones.”

Japanese bluesman Kan Mikami is nothing less than an unalloyed force of nature. A skin-shredding blast of frozen wind from the poor, rural north of Japan that he calls home. In the late 1960s, like thousands of other Japanese young people Mikami made his way to Tokyo in search of a life different from that of his parents. Since then he has forcefully carved out a space for himself in the culture as a modernist poet, a raging folk singer, an author, a actor, an engaging TV personality, and one of Japan’s most uniquely powerful performers. For most of Mikami’s career as a singer, he has performed solo. Just him and his electric guitar against the world, creating jagged A-minor vamps to drive along the surreal wisdom of his lyrics. But he’s equally at home in more demanding improvisational contexts such as those provided here by John Edwards on bass and Alex Nielson on drums. Their dense propulsive textures seem to spur on Mikami, his voice arcing powerfully into fragmented spaces, his guitar darting, colliding, shedding jagged and angular splinters of sound. A pulsing, raging maelstrom of serrated-edged energy. Gruff, rough, honest and very, very real.

Lily’s early life runs parallel to an untold story of post-war Japan, that of the marginalised hafu - children of half Japanese / half foreign parents. Likely to be a target, a vessel for the bitterness, from
the humiliation of the American Occupation, to the buried guilt
of Japan’s own atrocities, enacted on their Asian neighbours. Her troubled formative years - an absent father, and losing her mother
in her teens - possibly contributed to the development of the bluesy edge of her vocal style, or maybe it was the smoke from the jazz bar her mother ran.

As with many outsiders of the 60s and early 70s, she turned up in Tokyo’s Shinjuku, a famed spot for many a writer, actor, artist
and musician. It was here her songs first aired, and she was swiftly booked to record her music.

With a groove set in stone with her Bye-Bye Session Band - later including Ryuichi Sakamoto and jazz keyboardist Hiroshi Sato - this selection covers her 70s period, with strong seams of soul, funk, touches of folk- and space-rock, and her signature (in Japan) heartbreaking ballads.

Vibrations from the other side of the globe, in the same period as classic Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, Cymande, Sly & The Family Stone, and the rest, all with Lily's voice make this music utterly unique.

Compiled by Howard Williams, whose Japanese music show
Japan Blues has been a mainstay on NTS Radio since 2014. He has released several retrospectives of Japanese music for various record labels, covering traditional folk (Nippon Folk, Japan Blues for The Trilogy Tapes); kayoukyoku & Nihon Indigo (also TTT); 70s female gangster soundtracks (Killing Melody, Ethbo); 50s rockabilly (Nippon Rock’n’Roll, Big Beat); surf guitar and funk rock (Nippon Guitars, Big Beat); soul, funk and disco (Lovin’ Mighty Fire, BGP); and the jazz singer Maki Asakawa for Honest Jons, after co-compiling their Moondog retrospective, Viking of Sixth Avenue.

With liner notes written by Lily’s original producer, Yukiji Teramoto translated by Alan Cummings, and the photography of Jin Tamura.

This is a great masterpiece that further updates the boundaries of what can only be described as his unique style. As a member of the famous hip-hop crew, Origami, he has been active with Nanorunamonai. In 2021, he released his self-produced full-length album "SHINGANGINGA".

This is the second album released from HIFUMI Records in 2000.

Kinichi Motegi (Fishmans, dr) participated in this ambitious album, which was recorded simultaneously with live instruments under the theme of "brown, light blue, and green = sky, earth, and natural trees" to contain the body heat and even the atmosphere of the place with humans and instruments. The album is a unique work with a fairy-tale, nostalgic worldview and experimental musicality full of humor, and the covers of "Give me a good word" by the Fishmans and "Minna yume no naka" by Kounosuke Hamaguchi are also wonderfully expressive!
The analog mastering by ZAK, who recorded and mixed the album at the time of its production, is used for The jacket photo by Masafumi Sanai is also a mysterious one.

A work by Makoto Kawabata, leader of Acid Mothers Temple, and Toyoyuki, cosmic sound synth hermit. It is another extreme sound of Acid Mothers Temple.

In 1997 and 1998, the late great Japanese composer, producer, and DJ Susumu Yokota released two of the most eclectic albums of his decades-long career, Fruits of The Room and Greenpeace. Recorded under his Stevia alias for Tokyo Techno pioneer DJ Miku’s Newstage Records/NS-COM, they were Yokota-san’s homage to the foundational days of club music in Japan. This year, Glossy Mistakes are proud to present the first official vinyl editions of Fruits of The Room and Greenpeace, originally released on CD during the golden days of the format. Packaged in reimagined cover artwork created by the celebrated Japanese visual artist Masaho Anotani, these two albums perfectly capture the diversity at the heart of Yokota-san’s oeuvre. Across Fruits of The Room, he takes us on an expansive odyssey through his personal visions for deep house, street soul, jungle/drum & bass, digital dub and the slipstream moments between genres. A totally inspired dancefloor exploration. When Yokota-san wrote and produced the music on Fruits of The Room and Greenpeace in 1997, he was reflecting on the broader culture that surrounded dance music in Japan in the early to mid-nineties. It was an era when the psychedelic culture of late sixties America, the afterglow of UK acid house/rave, the new age movement and cyberpunk dovetailed together. Within DJ Miku and Yokota-san’s social circles, the thinking of Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs electrified the air. By 1996, the moment, brilliant and blinding as it was, was over. “We all felt that the rave scene fizzled out,” DJ Miku says. As he puts it, there was a collective feeling around him that it had all become too much. From the calm that followed, DJ Miku, Yokota-san and their open-eared peers made the decision to switch tracks and start from scratch. DJ Miku believes that with his Stevia releases, Fruits of The Room and Greenpeace, Yokota-san wanted to express the sweet and sour nature of the passing of those wild early days and his wish for true peace. “At the time, we saw eye-to-eye, with an implicit understanding of each other,” he explains. “Even now, twenty-five years later, I am confident it was like that.”

Studio recordings of "Kobeta Piano" by electronic musician and sound engineer KND, keyboardist Shoichi Murakami, and drummer/percussionist Watz Uematsu. from Kyoto Japan. Jazz layers, Afro-essence, and modular sounds are woven together to create Kyoto's advanced music.

Finally this ghost gem left by Jiro Inagaki's Soul Media has been repressed on vinyl for the first time thanks to Cinedelic Records. ‘Woodstock Generation’ is a masterpiece of Japanese jazz/rock funk/soul that for some it even considered better then the acclaimed "Head Rock" in terms of perfection; surely there are many points in common between the two albums having been made a few months later, in 1970. Behind "The Soul Medium" name hides saxophonist Jiro Inagaki, an iconic figure of the japanese Jazz Rock scene during the late sixties to the early seventies. Jiro is supported by his legendary quintet "Soul Media" under its first incarnation featuring Ryo Kawasaki (g) Yasuo Arakawa (b) Masaru Imada (org) Sadakazu Tabata (ds) with Tetsuo Fushimi & Shunzo Ohno on trumpet in addition. "Woodstock Generation" is a tribute album to the Woodstock Festival including cover of songs performed on the stage by Sly & Family Stone (I Want To Take You Higher) The Who (Summertime Blues) or Ten Years After (Spoonful) but also Woodstock (written by Joni Mitchell in honor of the Festival) and Mamma Told Me (Not To Come) written by Randy Newman for Eric Burdon and The Animals. Titles include also variations on the "Head Rock" theme "The Ground For Peace” and original composition of Masahiko Sato "Knick Knack". All tracks arranged by Jiro Inagaki. Artwork by Eric Adrian Lee. Jiro Inagaki - tenor saxophone soprano saxophone Masaru Imada – organ Ryo Kawasaki – guitar Yasuo Arakawa – bass Sadakazu Tabata – drums Tetsuo Fushimi, Shunzo Ohno – trumpet

A well-known masterpiece that has been further foiled by the recent re-evaluation of city pop has been re-released from Italy's . Haruomi Hosono, Masataka Matsutoya, Shigeru Suzuki, and Tatsuo Hayashi, who have been active as backing bands for numerous works under the name of Caramel Mama since 1973, have been renamed Tin Pan Array and announced in 1975. 1st album. Yoshitaka Minami, Tatsuro Yamashita, Taeko Ohnuki, Makoto Kubota, Masahiro Kuwana and others are participating as luxurious guests! Also includes Haruomi Hosono's self-cover "Choo Choo Gatta Got '75" and the tropical masterpiece "Yellow Magic Carnival" reminiscent of Martin Denny's sound, which seems to have started here three years before the formation of YMO. !!

Great JPN New Wave /Walearic! This is the first LP reissue of the '88 album by Yukako Hayase, who made a name for herself with her ennui whisper voice, including a cover by Yuko Ando and her influence on Kahimi Karie.

Tender tonkori melodies, meditative dub excursions and hallowed folk vocals combine on Tonkori In The Moonlight, an 11-track collection of mostly traditional songs performed by indigenous Ainu musician OKI. Born on the Japanese island of Hokkaido in 1957, OKI's released his debut album in 1996 and since then he has recorded 11 studio albums both solo and with his Dub Ainu Band and toured internationally -- from WOMAD in the UK to the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington DC via festival appearances in Singapore, Australia and across Europe. OKI is one of only a handful of musicians who play the tonkori, a five-stringed Ainu harp, which is both the pulse of this record and the force that unifies the disparate sounds he introduces such as reggae, dub, Irish folk, throat singing, African drumming and music from Central Asia. Tonkori In The Moonlight features Umeko Ando and Kila. For fans of: Midori Takada, Siti Muharam, Minyo Crusaders, Les Filles De Illighadad, African Head Charge, Mamman Sani. "Supercool Japanese minimalism" --The Observer. "Like nothing you've ever heard before" --The Wire. "The edgy cool of Jamaica meets the kitsch cool of Japan... charming and compelling" --The Independent.

Obscure Japanese New Wave/Dub! The only album he left in 1982 is finally reissued on LP!

The solo album by Satoshi Murakawa "Jimmy" Murakawa, the vocalist of "Mariah", a band internationally reevaluated for its progressive musicality, has finally been reissued straight from the press amidst a lot of WANT.

The minimal beat "Down? Down, Down!", which was reconstructed by Chee Shimizu, the oriental ambient dub "Beauty", and the cold wave "Cat's Eye", which sharply disturbs the auditory senses, are all featured on this album, with sound design by co-producer Yasuaki Shimizu reflected in every part. The album features a total of 10 tracks that reflect the sound design of co-producer Yasuaki Shimizu.

It was created for the "FORESTRO SUMMIT" event space held at Forest Limit in Hatagaya, Tokyo in January 011. The sound was selected from natural environmental soundscapes, sound effects, low frequency, electronic music, and experimental music. It is a 70-minute mix including silent time, which is connected to "SOMETHING IN THE AIR" in 2012, which I personally started to experiment with during this period. I tried to create a "sound prescription" worldview that is not ambient, experimental, new age, or healing, but rather a guide to the air and space, a "sound prescription" that you can listen to and feel with your free senses and imagination, while stimulating your perception to a good degree. It is a record of the first phase of the mind-drawing challenge to explore the space between music, song selection and mix arrangement. Ten years after the recording, we felt that the appeal of this mix could be better conveyed by listening to it on cassette tape. Compuma

Red/White two-color body cassette.
Limited edition of 200 copies.
All profits from this release will be donated to Ukrainian volunteer groups UAnimals and Save Pets Of Ukraine.

Felis Catus and Silence is a breakthrough release for Tokyo composer-guitarist Leo Takami, following the milestone albums Children’s Song (2012) and Tree of Life (2017). Takami counterpoints the soothing aesthetics of prime-era Windham Hill New Age guitar-heroism with meditative, intellectual compositions comprised of ambitious, process-oriented arrangements. While Takami largely wears his genre influences on his sleeve -- jazz, classical, Japanese gagaku -- the influence of ambient music is a tacit foundation of his work. Working diligently outside of any established communities for fringe musics, Takami conjures this association through a patient focus on generous musical intervals. Steady, kaleidoscopic unfolding of his compositions reflect Takami’s creative intent to “become aware of precisely the time and place I am living.” The unabashedly sweet, tuneful virtues of his music in concert with this reflective form provide an artistic relief of Takami’s thematic harmony. “Each song is based on birth and death, and moving onto the next stage...”

Leo Takami, born 1970, studied guitar under Hideaki Tsumura (aka Kamekichi Tsumura) and performs regularly in Tokyo.

Finally, His First Album: The Flower of Youth / Souls / Yumiko’s Spring / Song from the Void / Grave / Hail the Wonderful Law of the Lotus Sutra / Phone Call / An Akita Fox Song Run Amok / World School / Resistance, Age 23 / Mr. Ishimori / First Bon / A Cat Burglar in the Night / Bright Night Straight from the Throat: Grampa / Goddam Winter / American Kuyuran / Dagadzugu / A Fitting Adolescence / Footbridge / The Spring is Here Again Song / Fridge / Smithereens / Don’t Kill the Sea Lions / Harmonica / A Little Ditty / Stone A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth: Try Saying You’re Alive! / Kill or Be Killed / Memory / Got a Problem? / Namahage / My Hometown is Also Inside a Dog / The Boys of Hachiryū / The Donpan Song Goes Off the Rails / Runaway Boy / Missed My Time to Die A poet, soothsayer, bicycle race tipster, actor, prolific drinker, self-taught guitarist, and living legend of Japanese sound, Kazuki Tomokawa catapulted into Tokyo’s avant-folk scene in the mid-1970s, forging a sound and sensibility marked by throat-wrenching vocals and searing ennui. Among his musical peers in postwar Japan, Tomokawa distinguished himself as a pioneer of radical individualism. He had “the personality of a hydrogen bomb”—as the notorious ultraleft band the Brain Police once put it—and a sound to match. Now, Blank Forms Editions gathers Tomokawa’s earliest records for the first time in a deluxe three CD box set comprised of Finally, His First Album (Harvest Records, 1975), Straight from the Throat (Harvest Records, 1976), and A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth (Harvest Records, 1977). In each record, Tomokawa shouts, cries, wails, and croons, his folk stylings tinged with psychedelia and swelling into ground-shaking rock.. Many tracks are performed in his native Akita dialect, a highly regional vernacular of north Japan rarely heard beyond the prefecture, and even less often used in music. Matching his guttural, all-out vocals are profoundly existential meditations on everyday life and the world around him; this is, as record executive Kiichi Takara dubs it, “I-music.” It looks toward the interior, the quotidian, and the domestic with piercing and ever-honest eyes. The accompanying liner notes (here translated for the first time) include introductions by Takara, a round table discussion with Brain Police, and lyrics for all three albums—tracking the rise of Tomokawa as the “screaming philosopher” of Japan. The box set will be in conjunction with the release of each record in LP format in 2022, and the musician’s 2015 memoir, Try Saying You’re Alive! (Blank Forms Editions, 2021), the first-ever English translation of his prose; together they provide the definitive introduction to the singular world of Kazuki Tomokawa. Kazuki Tomokawa (b. 1950) is a prolific singer-songwriter from Hachiryū Village (now the town of Mitane) in the Akita Prefecture area of northern Japan. Since his first release in 1975, he has recorded more than thirty albums. The 2010 documentary about his life, La Faute des Fleurs, won the Sound & Vision award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, and that same year saw the Japanese release of the book Dreams Die Vigorously Day by Day, a collection of his lyrics spanning forty years. His most recent albums are Vengeance Bourbon (2014) and Gleaming Crayon (2016), both on the Modest Launch label.