The Taj-Mahal Travellers
The Taj-Mahal Travellers (also given variously as Taj Mahal Travelers, Taj Mahal Travellers, etc.) were a Japanese experimental music ensemble founded in 1969 by former Group Ongaku leader and Fluxus member Takehisa Kosugi. The rest of the group were several years younger than Kosugi, and were all inspired by the spirit of the day. They chose mainly to perform their music out of doors, often on beaches and hilltops, creating spontaneously improvised drones (compare with Dronology), often using standard musical instruments, albeit in unconventional ways
The Taj-Mahal Travellers (also given variously as Taj Mahal Travelers, Taj Mahal Travellers, etc.) were a Japanese experimental music ensemble founded in 1969 by former Group Ongaku leader and Fluxus member Takehisa Kosugi. The rest of the group were several years younger than Kosugi, and were all inspired by the spirit of the day. They chose mainly to perform their music out of doors, often on beaches and hilltops, creating spontaneously improvised drones (compare with Dronology), often using standard musical instruments, albeit in unconventional ways
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…
Oscillating Stars
Archival release, composed and improvised by Seiji Nagai (Taj Mahal Travellers). Mastered by Taku Unami. For more than two decades, Seiji Nagai has been creating experimental sounds with a computer, and when he improvises, he mixes them in real time. This work was created with sounds that have been organically accumulated within the past 10 years.
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. …
Stone Music
Unprecedented cosmology music arrived by Tokio Hasegawa, who lives in the forest of space after completing the "journey" with the Taj Mahal Travelers.
The Sun Of The Night
Tokio Hasegawa was an original member of Taj-Mahal Travelers. After the band, he has organized Mithila Museum, a small museum for Indian vernacular art, in forest area in Niigata pref. since 1982. His action of introduction of the art is well-known and respected by India nowadays, however, he is still a musician.
This CD was released as realization of his cosmological thinking and sound. All instruments are played and mixed by himself (except voice and rhythm, by his daughter).
Early Electronic Works
* Edition of 100 * In August 1979, ONNYK planned an event called “The Fifth Column Week!" = Daigoretsu Week!, he was o ne of leader of the expanded category group. It was a gallery event where 22 participants from Tokyo , Kyoto, and Morioka hold exhibitions of objects and graphic works, performances, poetry readings, p hysical workshops, theatrical events and improvisations. As part of that, I asked Seiji Nagai to per form a live performance of sitar solo. This special edition #1 consists of reg…
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…