Takehisa Kosugi
Takehisa Kosugi (1938-2018) was a Japanese composer and violinist associated with the Fluxus movement. Kosugi is probably best known for the extraordinary experimental music that he created between 1960-75, first in the early 1960s with the Tokyo-based seven member ensemble Group Ongaku ("music group") and thereafter as a solo artist and with itinerant octet Taj Mahal Travellers (1969-75). Since 1978, Kosugi has served as music director for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and lives in New York.
Takehisa Kosugi (1938-2018) was a Japanese composer and violinist associated with the Fluxus movement. Kosugi is probably best known for the extraordinary experimental music that he created between 1960-75, first in the early 1960s with the Tokyo-based seven member ensemble Group Ongaku ("music group") and thereafter as a solo artist and with itinerant octet Taj Mahal Travellers (1969-75). Since 1978, Kosugi has served as music director for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and lives in New York.
Member of: The Taj-Mahal Travellers, Group Ongaku
Multiple Musics
**500 copies** Previously unreleased live recording from the Ranta archives. The creative duo of Michael Ranta and Takehisa Kosugi performed many times in the 1970’s and 1980’s. On this outstanding performance, recorded at the Japanese Culture Institute in Cologne in 1987, the application of an advanced multi delay system, independently utilized by both players, plays a central role. The smartly treated cyclic tapestry of the delay system (modulated, transformed, harmonized) injects additional d…
The World of Sound: A New Summer 1996 (Book)
68 pages, large size. Revised 2023 Edition, Japanese/English edition. It can be considered a guidebook to Takehisa Kosugi's activities. Centered on the 2023 Memorial Exhibition of Takehisa Kosugi held from November 10 to commemorate the publication of a revised edition of the catalogue of the "Takehisa Kosugi The Sound World New Summer" exhibition held at the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History from May 18 to July 7, 1996.
The A6 variant has been changed to a B5 edition, and new English transl…
Jacques Bekaert (LP)
Edition of 500. ‘A Late Lunch’ is the soundtrack to Akiko Iimura’s eponymous movie realized in 1978. It is based on acoustic instruments and field recordings, brilliantly reconfigured and mixed by Jaques Bekaert to create a surreal, immersive soundscape. The technique used includes superposition and speed change of recordings, radical sound effects and juxtaposition of sounds. The players were prominent musicians of the 1970’s, including Maggi Payne, George Lewis, David Rosenboom and Blue Gene T…
New Sense of Hearing
Tip! CD Edition. Available from Blank Forms for the first time since its original 1980 release on ALM-Uranoia, New Sense of Hearing documents a collaboration between Takehisa Kosugi and Akio Suzuki, two luminaries of Japanese experimental music in the lineage of Fluxus. Blank Forms’s high-quality reissue of the sought-after, long out of print LP, is produced by musician-artist Aki Onda and mastered from the original tapes recorded on April 2, 1979, at Tokyo’s Aeolian Hall.
Described by Suzuki …
Improvisation Sep. 1975
** Limited edition of 125 copies with mounted text on front and back (as the original 1975 LP), silkscreened by Alan Sherry. This edition includes two inserts, a Japanese text sheet and the English text, translated by Alan Cummings ** Toshi Ichiyanagi, Michael Ranta and Takehisa Kosugi originally got together in the summer of 1975 for an open-air concert in Sapporo. The concert felt like a great success but was unfortunately not recorded. As the desire arose to record together, they managed to a…
Infinite Emanation
Killer! 1st pressing, already sold-out at the label. A duo live recording of Takehisa Kosugi and Mototeru Takagi held at Kunteki Shrine in Kochi City on January 19, 1985. Kosugi radiating a roaring sound using violin, electronics, and voice together with Takagi's sharp saxophone
Echo: The Images of Sound (Book)
**Very rare original catalogue. Comes with the 10 pages original concerts program leporello** Exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with show held November 22 - January 6, 1985. Text by Paul Panhuysen, Ellen Fullman, Godfried-Willem Raes, Anton van Gemert, Bart Lootsma, Arnold Dreyblatt, Leon van Noorden, George Smits, and Hugh Davies. Artists include Max Eastly, Takeisha Kosugi, Walter Marchetti, Ellen Fullman, Godfried-Willem Raes, Horst Rickels, Rik van Lersel, Giancarlo Cardini, Juan…
Sunrise From West Sea
** 500 copies ** Wewantsounds is delighted to announce the first-ever release of 'Sunrise From West Sea', a mesmerising performance by Stomu Yamash'ta accompanied by Jazz pianist Masahiko Satoh (well known for his involvement in the New Herd Orchestra and his 'Belladonna of Sadness' soundtrack) and Taj Mahal Travellers founder Takehisa Kosugi on Electric Violin. The line up, also comprising Hideakira Sakurai on Electric Shamisen, is a spaced-out improvisational soundscape over the two LP sides. …
From the Archives Vol. 7
50 copies. Volume 5 in the seminal series "From The Archives". Another release in the ongoing CCC Archives series with Ray Edward Johnson, a seminal figure of the Pop Art, Fluxus & Mail Art movements, American Beat Generation poet Gary Snider and legend Takeisha Kosugi
Live Improvisations
Slowscan's latest, a stunning, remastered vinyl edition of Takehisa Kosugi's New York, August 14, 1991 - expanded to include an entire second LP of recordings made by the composer with Ted Szànto in Amsterdam during 1979 - Bristles with energy, physicality, and immediacy, representing a highwater mark from one of the most important experimental composers of the last 100 years.
Echo. The Images Of Sound II
* Original 1992 edition, long out of print. Tri-fold Digipak with 38-page booklet + original concert program extra booklet * This disc documents the proceedings of the Echo: Images Of Sound festival’s 2nd edition that took place in Het Apolohuis and Activiteitcentrum 2B galleries in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, from May 1st until June 14th, 1987. A Fluxus sound and visual artist, Paul Panhuysen (b.1934) founded Het Apolohuis in 1982, an artist-run gallery focusing on sound art that Panhuysen dire…
July 15, 1972
Limited to 750 numbered copies. Comes with poster. For over half a century, Takehisa Kosugi was of the most unique and enduring figures in the Japanese underground. As an art student in Tokyo in the early 1960s, he joined the Fluxus-styled performance unit Hi Re Centre and then founded the improvisational ensemble Group Ongaku, but his most legendary project was The Taj Mahal Travellers – a multicellular organism that included Kosugi, Ryo Koike, Yukio Tsuchiya, Seiji Nagai, Michihiro Kimura, Tok…
Oz Days Live 1973
Japanese experimental group Les Rallizes Denudes are the ultimate rock'n' roll enigma. Sometimes referred to as Hadaka no Rallizes or even as Hadaka no Rarizu, each appellation a variant of the name "Fucked Up and Naked" which equates to being high on hard drugs, they are seen as noise-rock pioneers, yet sifting fact from fiction isn’t easy with their oddball tale.Emerging from the radical hippie communes of Kyoto during the late 1960s, the band was formed in November 1967 by university student …
Roots of Electronic Sound
**500 copies with insert** Futuristic synthesizer specialist and sound designer Matsuo Ohno was responsible for the sound design of a broad range of film, television and radio soundtracks, most famously the animation series Astro Boy, which he began working on in 1963, together with his assistant, Takehisa Kosugi. Ohno was born in the heavily-populated Kanda district of central Tokyo in 1930 and was heavily affected by the repeated bombing raids on the city enacted in World War II, which took pl…
August 14, 1991
Edition of 300 copies, historical recordings from 1991, as the composer wrote "the music was performed by myself, solo. Recorded live at my former apartment in New York". Composer, per former, conceptualist, improvisor, installation artist and violinist Takehisa Kosugi has been an important, though shadowy presence in the world of avant garde music since the beginning of the 1960s. This is one of the few authorized 'live' recordings - Kosugi has long been ambivalent about the value of audio docu…
Catch-Wave
Composer, multi-instrumentalist and mixed-media artist, Takehisa Kosugi has stood on the forefront of the Japanese avant-garde for over six decades. In the 1960s, he was part of Japan’s first improvisational music collective, Group Ongaku, and contributed to Fluxus in New York. In 1969, he founded the influential, experimental ensemble The Taj Mahal Travellers, and in 1975 he would release his first solo album, Catch-Wave. “Mano-Dharma ‘74” features improvised violin drones and voice with vario…
Live In Stockholm 1971
An amazing performance by Taj Mahal Travellers recorded during July 1971 in the geodesic dome at the "Utopia & Visions 1871-1981" exhibition at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden - this CD includes tracks recorded the term. It is deeply percieved the concept of their performance, and it is obviously different from their past 2 discs which were released by major label. You will hear early years of the group's great impromptu. " From Julian Cope's Japrocksampler: "This album is a discorporated, cer…
Distant Voices
Aguirre Records present a reissue of Distant Voices, Steve Lacy's rare Japanese collaboration album, originally released in 1976. Renowned for remarkable solo concerts that confirmed his mastery of the soprano horn and that carried its instrumental language into previously unexplored regions, Lacy also loved to collaborate with musicians who could inspire him to stretch the boundaries of his own artistry. During the summer of 1975 Lacy toured Japan, and on June 24th he entered a Nippon Columbia …
1 - August 1974
**Sold out at the label. Limited edition of 1000 copies, one time pressing, don't miss this one** Aguirre Records present a reissue of Taj Mahal Travellers' 1 - August 1974, originally released in 1975. A monumental work by the Japanese experimental music ensemble. In April 1972 a group of Japanese musicians set off from Rotterdam in a Volkswagen van. As they crossed Europe and then made their way through Asia they made music in a wide range of locations. They also paid close attention to the ch…
Roots Of Electronic Sound
Here’s possibly... ah hell it IS the best looking Creel Pone yet - thanks to an extended spec and much nicer print-stock - a reproduction of a 1979 Victor label reissue of a 1975 LP on the legendary Alm label featuring a series of short tape music experiments, recorded between 1963 and 1966 by Matsuo Ono, with assistance from none other than Takehisa Kosugi. The artwork and libretto on the lp are full of references to “Atom” - better known to westerners as “Astro Boy” - a mid-60s japanese car…