Toshi Ichiyanagi, Tadanori Yokoo

2015 restock....Very last copies, long out of print: back in 1969 avant-garde composer Toshi Ichiyanagi hooked up with Uchida Yuya’s damaged psych rock group Flowers and illustrator Tadanori Yokoo to realise a double-LP set that would combine Fluxus-damaged pop art moves with abstract acid rock, avant electronic drone, frail almost-songs, rehearsal sketches, big band marches bisected by iron-blue drones, wildly evocative field recordings and intimations of limitless, hallucinatory space, all in the service of a supremely personal rock opera/audio diary/statement of the world as he saw it. Originally released as a 2 LP picture disc set on the private press End Records, this has long been one of the heaviest rarities to come out of the Japanese underground and Bridge’s limited to 1000 copies 4 CD reissue does it proud.

The whole set is housed in a beautifully designed large LP-sized box adorned with Tadanori’s full-colour artwork. Inside, the set opens out to reveal four mounted CDs (one LP side per CD in order to retain the conceptual unity of the original) on a background of stunningly reproduced pre-1969 posters from Tadanori, with sunken compartments that house a bound collection of 24 full-colour postcards featuring Tadanori’s poster art and a 64 page hardback book (Japanese text) that includes an interview with Ichiyanagi and Tadanori as well as the press release from the time and a host of pics.

The music is something else entirely, a singular journey through huge, reverberant field recordings, beautiful idiot-avant ala Tori Kudo, dislocated fuzz-psych with distorted guitar tones that are as abrasive as steel, Brechtian-folk songs, spoken word, weird TV interference, snatches of news broadcasts, enka and weird acid-classical interludes.

Includes a 50-page Japanese language booklet with artist photos; liner notes by Yoshiaki Tono, Kuniharu Akiyama, Shuji Terayama, Masao Yagi, Fumihito Taguchi, Tadanori Yokoo, and Manabu Yuasa; and the transcript of a conversation between Tadanori Yokoo and Toshi Ichiyanagi / 4 picture CDs + 2 silkscreen posters + 24 postcards + booklet, in LP-size picture box)