Kan Mikami
Kan Mikami is a Japanese folk singer. His music, heavily influenced by American blues, was popular in Japan in the 1970s.
Kan Mikami is a Japanese folk singer. His music, heavily influenced by American blues, was popular in Japan in the 1970s.
I'm The Only One Around
*2025 stock* For over 50 years, Kan Mikami has stood as a master of the Japanese blues and outsider folk. His unmistakable, powerfully evocative voice and surrealistic poetry reveal a gritty, transgressive life on the margins shot through with evocations of sex and violence, religion and romance. Released in 1991, I’m the Only One Around was Mikami's first album with Tokyo's legendary P.S.F. Records and heralded an artistic renaissance. It marked the beginning of an incredibly productive and wil…
Live at Cafe Oto
CD version. 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, an actor, an engaging TV personalit…
Barking practice-White lines
Kanryu: Debut Live in Korea 2006 sees Mikami reunited with the masterful Korean komungo player and vocalist Shin Heyon, who played together him on the Fukon group release (PSFD-8001). Eight years on that epochal cross-cultural meeting, Mikami journeyed to Seoul for two nights of concerts. Shin's stringed komungo brings a thick and knotted presence to the overall sound, while Seoul-resident Japanese musician Sato Yukie tosses in swirling metallic blats of electronics and guitar. There's a gorgeou…
Jazz
Incredible screaming voice and guitar sound. New dimensions of real Japanese folk legend.