Various

Featuring: Onnyk

Vanity Records remains one of the great, irreducible facts of the Japanese underground. Founded in late 1970s Osaka by music critic and Rock Magazine editor-in-chief Agi Yuzuru, the label operated at the precise junction where post-punk austerity, DIY electronics, and the first wave of affordable synthesizers converged into something with no adequate name - a space its founder called, with deliberate provocation, "techno-pop." The catalogue was tiny, the edition sizes smaller still. What it documented, however, was a scene of extraordinary formal ambition.

Vanity Demos is an archival excavation: six CDs of recordings recovered from Agi Yuzuru's personal archive, most of them never previously circulated in any form. The box opens with Densei Kwan's unpublished P' - sourced from cassette tapes held by Aki Joe - a work that pushes the crashing, miniaturist logic of their known output into more intense, compositionally concentrated territory. Disc two widens the aperture with a collection of raw demos by Salaried Man Club, ONNYK, and Den Sei Kwan, alongside an excerpt from the HMN Session: industrial urgency and minimal synth unraveling together, identities half-formed. Disc three belongs to System, a five-piece women's group who surfaced briefly in the Osaka scene with a sound that sits somewhere between Aunt Sally, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and Malaria! - taut, aggressive, entirely its own.

The final three discs are devoted to Tolerance, the solo project of Junko Tange - the label's most singular voice, and the one whose influence has grown most persistently in the years since. The unpublished Dose occupies a threshold between her two released albums, Anonym (1979) and Divin (1981), with an open, unresolved form that reads less like an unfinished work than a different kind of completeness. A second anonymous demo offers something closer to pure texture - desolate, drifting, light dissolving before it settles. The box closes with Today's Thrill, originally pressed on a single-sided flexi-disc as a supplement to Rock Magazine in 1980, now finally given its proper context.

What Vanity Demos reveals, above all, is the depth of material that never surfaced - a scene whose visible archive was always the tip of something considerably larger. Issued by Kyou Records as catalogue number remodel 28, in a limited edition with an 8-page Japanese-language booklet. Remastered from the original tapes.