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Set in the year 2019 in Neo-Tokyo, the world is still recovering from the ravages of World War III. One night, teen delinquent Kaneda has his biker gang hurtle through the busy city. Kaneda’s friend, Tetsuo, is seriously injured during an accident and is taken to an army hospital. There the military notice Tetsuo’s potential psychic power, so they transfer Tetsuo to a secret government laboratory to awakening his latent abilities. When Kaneda gets involved in an antigovernment guerrilla movement, he encounters Kei, a member of the revolutionaries, and learns that the goal of the fighters is to infiltrate a secret laboratory – the very one where Tetuso is being held. The experiments to awaken Tetsuo’s powers are a terrifying success as he begins to wield psychic energy he cannot control – reminiscent of the emergence of the legendary esper boy "Akira”, which triggered World War III. The stage set, a fierce battle begins between Kaneda, Kei, the army and Tetsuo with the destiny of Earth at stake.
The symphonic music to AKIRA was composed by Dr. Shoji Yamashiro, head of the beloved Japanese musical collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi, and performed by the group. Rerecorded and remastered using the most advanced audio techniques available, this release of the unforgettable score of AKIRA is peerless in quality and audio fidelity.
"There was a time when the strength of a musician's vision transcended all labels; here is a chance to dip into that pool again, and emerge not just refreshed, but alive again with the sense that we all can live in that world again, but most importantly raise the flag for excellence. Fantastic." --Jim O'Rourke
An unholy grail of near-mythical status is finally now available in the form of this first-ever reissue. Masahiko Sato composed this elusive, sensual, psychedelic free jazz score for the stunning 1973 Japanese witchcraft animation Belladonna of Sadness (Kanashimi no Belladonna) directed by Eiichi Yamamoto. Since the mid-2000s, Belladonna of Sadness has risen from the ashes and now shines brighter than ever. Now, on the eve of its third or fourth global DVD release in 2015, fans no longer have to settle for third-generation VHS telecine dubs or stuff their wish-lists into the hands of lucky friends visiting Tokyo. Belladonna has been used as nightclub projections by clued-up VJs and been restored by discerning feminist folk singers and improv bands while influencing illustrators, fashion designers, and other creative types along the way. Original copies of the soundtrack, however, are much less likely to rear their heads, with prices literally doubling each time the original stock copies swap hands among the same Italian dealers at central European record fairs. Italian soundtracks are expensive anyway, but this one, originally released by the Italian Cinevox label in 1975, has extra credentials. Finders Keepers Records and Sato himself agreed that this record should finally be liberated among those who know the magic words. With the decision to keep this album "strictly Sato," a track from the original release has been removed -- the main orchestral love theme by Asei Kobayashi and Mayumi Tachibana -- which in all honesty is very much detached from Sato's psychedelic soundtrack. Kept intact, however, are the songs sung and penned by Sato's wife at the time, Chinatsu Nakayama, including the track titled "TBFS," which only appears on the master tapes and never actually made it onto the theatrical cut of the film (though the theme is briefly alluded to, with different instrumentation, in a cut-scene available on the German DVD release). This reissue project also marks the beginning of a longer intended relationship between Finders Keepers and Masahiko Sato, exploring his recorded work in film music, jazz, and avant-garde composition.
The Caretaker returns with a long-in-the-making soundtrack to acclaimed filmmaker Grant Gee's documentary about German writer WG Sebald. 'Patience (After Sebald)' is a multi-layered film essay on landscape, art, history, life and loss - an exploration of the work and influence of German writer WG Sebald (1944-2001), told via a long walk through coastal East Anglia tracking his most famous book 'The Rings Of Saturn'. The source material for 'Patience' was sourced from Franz Schubert's 1827 piece 'Winterreise' and subjected to his perplexing processes, smudging and rubbing isolated fragments into a dust-caked haze of plangent keys, strangely resolved loops and de-pitched vocals which recede from view as eerily as they appear.
In the mid-1970s, a force of nature swept across the continental United States, cutting across all strata of race and class, rooting in our minds, our homes, our culture. It wasn’t The Exorcist, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, or even bell-bottoms, but instead a book called The Secret Life of Plants. The work of occultist/former OSS agent Peter Tompkins and former CIA agent/dowsing enthusiast Christopher Bird, the books shot up the bestseller charts and spread like kudzu across the landscape, becoming a phenomenon. Seemingly overnight, the indoor plant business was in full bloom and photosynthetic eukaryotes of every genus were hanging off walls, lording over bookshelves, and basking on sunny window ledges. The science behind Secret Life was specious: plants can hear our prayers, they’re lie detectors, they’re telepathic, able to predict natural disasters and receive signals from distant galaxies. But that didn’t stop millions from buying and nurturing their new plants.
Perhaps the craziest claim of the book was that plants also dug music. And whether you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or what have you from Mother Earth on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles (or bought a Simmons mattress from Sears), you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especially for them. Subtitled “warm earth music for plants…and the people that love them,” it was full of bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly, decidedly unscientific tunes enacted on the new-fangled device called the Moog. Plants date back from the dawn of time, but apparently they loved the Moog, never mind that the synthesizer had been on the market for just a few years. Most of all, the plants loved the ditties made by composer Mort Garson.
Few characters in early electronic music can be both fearless pioneers and cheesy trend-chasers, but Garson embraced both extremes, and has been unheralded as a result. When one writer rhetorically asked: “How was Garson’s music so ubiquitous while the man remained so under the radar?” the answer was simple. Well before Brian Eno did it, Garson was making discreet music, both the man and his music as inconspicuous as a Chlorophytum comosum. Julliard-educated and active as a session player in the post-war era, Garson wrote lounge hits, scored plush arrangements for Doris Day, and garlanded weeping countrypolitan strings around Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” He could render the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel alike into easy listening and also dreamed up his own ditties. “An idear” as Garson himself would drawl it out. “I live with it, I walk it, I sing it.”
But as his daughter Day Darmet recalls: “When my dad found the synthesizer, he realized he didn’t want to do pop music anymore.” Garson encountered Robert Moog and his new device at the Audio Engineering Society’s West Coast convention in 1967 and immediately began tinkering with the device. With the Moog, those idears could be transformed. “He constantly had a song he was humming,” Darmet says. “At the table he was constantly tapping.” Which is to say that Mort pulled his melodies out of thin air, just like any household plant would.
The Plantae kingdom grew to its height by 1976, from DC Comics’ mossy superhero Swamp Thing to Stevie Wonder’s own herbal meditation, Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. Nefarious manifestations of human-plant interaction also abounded, be it the grotesque pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the pothead paranoia of the US Government spraying Mexican marijuana fields with the herbicide paraquat (which led to the rise in homegrown pot by the 1980s). And then there’s the warm, leafy embrace of Plantasia itself.
“My mom had a lot of plants,” Darmet says. “She didn’t believe in organized religion, she believed the earth was the best thing in the whole world. Whatever created us was incredible.” And she also knew when her husband had a good song, shouting from another room when she heard him humming a good idear. Novel as it might seem, Plantasia is simply full of good tunes.
Garson may have given the album away to new plant and bed owners, but a decade later a new generation could hear his music in another surreptitious way. Millions of kids bought The Legend of Zelda for their Nintendo Entertainment System back in 1986 and one distinct 8-bit tune bears more than a passing resemblance to album highlight “Concerto for Philodendron and Pothos.” Garson was never properly credited for it, but he nevertheless subliminally slipped into a new generations’ head, helping kids and plants alike grow.
Hearing Plantasia in the 21st century, it seems less an ode to our photosynthesizing friends by Garson and more an homage to his wife, the one with the green thumb that made everything flower around him. “My dad would be totally pleased to know that people are really interested in this music that had no popularity at the time,” Darmet says of Plantasia’s new renaissance. “He would be fascinated by the fact that people are finally understanding and appreciating this part of his musical career that he got no admiration for back then.” Garson seems to be everywhere again, even if he’s not really noticed, just like a houseplant.
-Andy Beta
Music composed and recorded for the HBO TV series Burden Of Proof, directed by Cynthia Hill. Chuck Johnson’s evocative arrangements utilise a sound palette that includes electronic textures, chamber music and pedal steel guitar to conjure a collection of mood pieces that work both as documentary score, and the most varied and intriguing record that the artist has produced to date.
California-based composer, producer, and musician Chuck Johnson approaches his work with an ear towards finding faults and instabilities that might reveal latent beauty, with a focus on pedal steel guitar, experimental electronics, alternate tuning systems, and composing for film and television. Recordings of his work have been published by VDSQ, Thrill Jockey, Temporary Residence, Kompakt, Ghostly, and Three Lobed, among others. Johnson’s credits as a film composer include scores for the HBO film Private Violence and the popular television series Somewhere South and A Chef's Life.
Music and noise composed and recorded on the photoelectron synthesizer ANS by Edward Artemiev. LP and CD remastered in San Francisco, CA in May 2013. Exclusive photo book with unreleased images of the movie set and essays about music and cinema of the duo Artemiev/Tarkovsky. The cd has the same vinyl tracklist.
A1 Part I 2:48
A2 Part II 2:32
A3 Part III 2:22
A4 Part IV 3:13
A5 Part V 2:27
A6 Part VI 7:18
A7 Part VII 3:55
B1 Part VIII 2:56
B2 Part IX 1:26
B3 Part X 0:38
B4 Part XI 2:09
B5 Part XII 1:42
B6 Part XIII 4:44
B7 Part XIV 0:44
B8 Part XV 4:36
B9 Part XVI 6:19
B10 Part XVII 1:21
40th Anniversary Edition - newly remastered from the master tapes, with an additional bonus LP of instrumentals and the previously unreleased “Narration Theme.”
Daytime Viewing (1979-80) is an extended narrative song, based on a casual analysis of daytime television drama and the audience phenomena such programming addresses. The piece explores the use of fantasy as a survival mechanism against loneliness, illustrating the human compulsion to inflate the mundane to mythological proportions. A central female character weaves tales, using threads of personal experience and the idea of TV as friend, as mantra, and as transformational window between imagined spectacle and the pedestrian plane.
Originally released as a private cassette edition [recorded, 1982; Chez Hum-Boom release, 1983] documenting the collaborative performance piece of the same name by Jacqueline Humbert & David Rosenboom. This heady, thoroughly enjoyable work was first made available on CD and LP in 2013 by Unseen Worlds. Jacqueline Humbert (aka J. Jasmine) is a songwriter of brains and wit on par with Robert Ashley, with whom she's worked extensively. David Rosenboom's complex, harmonic electronic arrangements are accentuated brilliantly by percussion from William Winant. Daytime Viewing can happily be added to a small but significant group of work that, through lesser-known paths, engaged in an equally revelatory reexamination of the Great American Songbook as Minimalism did with 20th Century composition.
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.