Place Kick is Chance Operation's 1985 debut full-length, originally released on the legendary Tokyo independent label Telegraph and reissued here on vinyl for the first time. From the heart of the 80s Japanese underground, the album brings together post-punk, funk and improvising jazz into a singular, propulsive whole: ESG mutated into dub, the Contortions reread by a band thinking in different rhythmic and tonal frames.
Across two sides, the record moves through Razor Blaze, Keep On Drivin' and the rest of a sequence that consolidates the sonic vocabulary developed across the earlier EPs. Higo Hiroshi's bass and vocals anchor the tracks, while saxophone and guitar lines twist around them with an improviser's looseness. The arrangements hold together as compositions while leaving room for the kind of in-the-moment risk-taking that only happens when a band has fully internalised its own grammar.
Spittle Made In Japan completes its Chance Operation triptych with this edition. For listeners who came to the band through Spare Beauty, the LP is the natural next step into a body of work that has waited four decades for its proper vinyl moment, and a record that holds its own alongside the canonical post-punk-funk statements of the era.