Japanese

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

After a small nap, Tokyo’s finest Studio Mule is back on the scene, bringing the world some deeply composed guitar music from Japan, crafted by Shin Sasakubo. Since almost 20 years the guitarist is specialized in classic and contemporary Andean and Peruvian music. a knowledge that he deepened through a three-year stint in Peru between 2004 and 2007. During his time in Latin America, he played live in Argentina, Chile, or Bolivia and researched in the works of Peruvian novelist, poet, and anthropologist José María Ar-Guedas, as Shin Sasakubo’s take on art is not one-dimensional. He also loves movies, painting, photography, writing, and theater - artforms that con-stantly influence his music on many different layers. since his return to his hometown Chichibu City in the japanese Saitama Prefecture, he launched the "Chichibu Avant-Garde School”, a college that looks through art and lectures on the Chichibu region, and his en-vironmental and folkloristic history. As sincerely driven composer, he released three guitar leaning albums in the past ten years. his latest sensation “Chichibu”, originally only released in Japan, now travels the globe via Studio Mule, making his fantastique listening voyage available for all those souls that seek joy through the sound of guitar strings.

Finally! The long awaited reissue of a very rare album that was originally released in 1985 on For Life! One of the last treasures of Japanese music, highly recommended for lovers of Japanese New Age, Japanese New Wave and Avant New Wave. This is an analog reissue of the only work left by MU-PROJECT, a fantastic unit formed by synthesizer player Ryoichi Kuniyoshi, known for his participation in the works of Riri, Yoshikazu Sasaki, and Motoharu Sano, and engineer Kiyoshi Toba! The original was priced at nearly 30,000 yen and has been long overdue for a reissue. Shuichi Murakami (Ponta), Hideki Matsutake, Kiyohiko Semba (Haniwa-chan), Keishi Urata (Aragon, The Seatbelts), and many others participated in this exotic oriental/ Balearic new age album. I recommend this album to a wide range of listeners who are looking for something out of the ordinary, not only Mariah and YMO, but also to those who like Digital Trip and the Synthesizer Fantasy series!

Japanese Balearic Masterpiece ('93) is re-pressed on Clear Blue Vinyl! HIROSHI II HIROSHI" is a unit of Hiroshi Fujiwara and Hiroshi Kawanabe (Tokyo No.1 SOUL SET). This is their chill-out~Balearic classic (EP), which was distributed as a picture disc with a vinyl jacket at the time, and is now a popular and expensive item on the second-hand market. The EP features "H2O," the first track that takes you to a fictional resort with its gentle guitar strumming, and "Beauty & Beast + Bagle (Dub)," an exquisite summer resort dubwise track with melting sounds and the melancholy of the sun in the west. The album also includes six evergreen songs that pioneered the Café Del Mar craze that later spread throughout Japan. The artwork is a faithful reproduction of the CD-era design by Hiroshi Nagai.

The second album released in 1973, with Japanese lyrics on side A and English lyrics on side B. The ensemble with female vocals is also superb on this acid folk masterpiece.

On their first official collaboration, Japanese noise pioneer Masami Akita aka Merzbow and Australian sound sculptor Lawrence English present a harrowing, surrealist portrait of nocturnal industrial activity, spawned by field recordings made in a sprawling factory complex seven hours north of English’s home in Brisbane. He characterizes the area as “uneasy and unsettling,” awash in the sickly glow of smelters and refinement machinery, somehow not of this world – a liminal quality vividly captured in Andrei Tarkovsky’s sprawling purgatorial opus, Stalker, to which the title alludes. Akita, too, described early drafts of Eternal Stalker as feeling “like the soundtrack to a dystopian science fiction opera.” A mood of mechanical dread and ruined futures permeates each of the album’s seven potent compositions. Opener “The Long Dream” sets the stage with steady rain on sheet metal, punctured by thunder and metallic echoes, reverberating to the rafters in a collapsing warehouse. Quickly the tempest rises. “A Gate Of Light” and “Magnetic Traps” both convulse in churning furies of electric demolition and rattling chains, roaring and relentless. “The Visit” and “Black Thicket” operate more at a distance, surveying the topography of steam, rust, and liquid metal from above, their flickers of violence like gunfire swallowed by blankets of darkness. This is noise at its most elemental and unknowable: brooding, bristling, and opaque, stalking forbidden peripheries of chaos and creation. Discussing Akita’s music, English refers to its “intense substrata that is purely psychedelic; it consumes and confounds.” The seasick swells of friction and fracture subsume the listener, forcing an auditory surrender: “this saturation of the senses can be a euphoria.” Proof comes halfway through “The Golden Sphere,” when the howling mayhem subtly recedes, revealing an eerie siren drone hovering in the void, like the resonance of a dead star galaxies away. Slowly a seething, venomous wall of volume returns, shredding the signal until its frequencies fray, whipping away into the eye of the storm. The combined effect merges obliteration and liberation, rapture and ravagement; it’s the sound of dissolution as resolution, uprooted and unmoored, finally freed from form.

Black Truffle is pleased to present Landscape and Voice, a radical new work (and rare vinyl release) from major Japanese sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda. Undoubtedly one of the most influential artists working with location recordings since the 1990s, Tsunoda’s work possesses a rigorously searching quality that sets him apart from his contemporaries. Tsunoda is known to many listeners for the subtle atmospheric poetry of his early Extract from Field Recording Archive series, which focussed on vibrations recorded in various indoor and outdoor environments in his native Miura Peninsula, often inside pipes, bottles and other vessels. In more recent years, his work has explored the implications of his claim that field recording should be seen as ‘depiction’ rather than ‘documentation’. He has explored disorienting editing and processing in his works with Taku Unami, and, perhaps most radically, represented Maguchi Bay as a kind of kinetic sculpture for shaking speakers by removing all but the inaudible low frequencies from a field recording (Low Frequency Observed at Maguchi Bay). One of the recurrent concerns of Tsunoda’s recent work, as he explains in the crystalline liner notes accompanying this release, is ‘exploring how I can establish a subjective relationship with an environment, rather than seeing it merely as an object to be recorded’. This has taken various forms, from documenting simultaneously an outdoor environment and the blood flowing through the listener/recorder’s body (captured with a stethoscope) on The Temple Recordings, to representing his own experience of the landscape as made up of ‘grains of space and time’ by inserting looped fragments into field recordings in Grains of Spring. On Landscape and Voice, this meeting between subject and object becomes an almost mystical union between the natural and the human. As with all of Tsunoda’s work, a relatively simple concept leads to compelling, thought-provoking results. Landscape and Voice combines vowel sounds spoken by six voices with short, looped fragments of field recordings, their noise character suggesting consonants: voice and landscape thus join together in something like words. The record consists of three pieces, each using a different, richly evocative field recording, which periodically freezes, catching on a looped fragment to which is synchronised an abruptly looped spoken vowel sound. The lengths between these interruptions vary, as do the tempi of the loops. The interruption of these lushly immersive recordings of the world – bristling with bird song, rushing water, distant traffic, and clinking metal – only serves to intensify them, as if the depicted environment itself had been returned to the listener each time it abruptly reappears. At the same time, the constant interruption creates an uncannily frozen effect, as if the recorded environment were an object rather than a stretch of recorded time. When combined with the bare human presence of the vowel sounds, the result is both austere and magical. Pressed on 45RPM for maximum fidelity, in a gorgeous sleeve designed by Lasse Marhaug with liner notes from the composer, Landscape and Voice is a radical proposition from one of the deepest thinkers in contemporary sound.