Tenno
For over four decades, Reiko Omura and Tori Kudo have endlessly woven themselves throughout the avant-garde and underground scene of Japan. While internationally appreciated in countless incarnations and contexts (Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Guys & Dolls), if one were to seek out an early moment in which the two artists created something truly awe inspiring, 1980’s Tenno (天皇) would be it. As Noise, the duo experimented with the juxtaposition of Kudo’s extended organ based dirges (be they eerie and/o…
Backfire of Joy
Black Truffle is thrilled to announce Backfire of Joy, a previously unheard recording from Phew, John Duncan and Kondo Tatsuo, documenting a concert at Tokyo’s Hosei University in 1982. Though the fertile exchange of ‘zines, tapes and records between the Japanese underground and the Los Angeles Free Music Society meant the artists were familiar with each other’s work, this performance (occurring on Duncan’s first visit to Japan) was their first meeting and only performance as a trio.
Duncan is h…
Car and Freezer
* 2021 Stock * Drag City presents Car and Freezer by Eiko Ishibashi. J-Pop, if the J stands for Jazz. Eiko loosens the instrumental reins and cracks her songwriter's code, writing in two languages to achieve the proper remove from her subjects. You can only regain life when you accept death, and throw yourself into the sea!
Virgo Indigo
Studio Mule open the roster towards sophisticated spiritual sounds on the crossroads of electrified jazz, oriental fourth-world spheres and deeply composed experimental sounds. This time, the label welcomes Japanese artist Ya-Sukazu Sato, aka Yas-Kaz, a university-trained percussionist, that gained global success as a composer for the internationally known Butoh dance troupe Sankai Juku which has toured the world since 1975. His infrequent musical amalgamation of ancient Eastern genres, airy sou…
Jomon-sho 縄文頌
Peaceful, percussive and idyllic. Three words that describe perfectly ‘Jomon-sho’, the key New Age album from Japanese composer and expert of gamelan music, Yas-Kaz. This seminal composition is a cornerstone to understand the Japanese ambient and environmental movement, heavily influenced by this record and the whole New Age scene that developed in Japan throughout the 80s. The album features a wide range of entirely acoustic instruments and field recordings and was made for stage performance by…
Sound of Turning Earth
* 2020 Stock. Deluxe Edition. * After 11 albums and unknown quantities of cassettes, compilations and split releases, Sound of Turning Earth is the first release outside of Japan for one of the most original figures in Japanese music, Kumio Kurachi. Recorded by Jim O’Rourke at his home studio, Sound of Turning Earth is Kurachi solo on vocals and guitar, mixing surreal lyrics and theatrical vocal personas with unorthodox tunings inspired by Japan’s national instrument, the koto. Lyrically Kurachi…
Sasanami
"Sasanami" is the result of a dialog between the Japanese photographer Yamamoto Masao and the Japanese musician Uchida Akira (with
Miu Sakamoto at the voice) initiated by IIKKI, between October 2019 and August 2020.
After to have worked as a saxophonist for several years, Akira Uchida, in 2007 learned piano tuning under Mr. Satoshi Yoshida. Planning and holding "Sound workshop" which is to introduce how to interact with various sounds from the viewpoint of sound turning. In 2015 while he was le…
Hakata Shibuya - Live In Japan 2014
Collaboration between Richard Pinhas and Tatsuya Yoshida. Richard Pinhas, founder of '70s legends Heldon, is one of France's best known experimental musicians. He is a key figure in development of rock music processing with electronic music. Yoshida Tatsuya is one of the most important musicians of the Japanese experimental music scene, spearheading at least a half dozen of that country's most important groups, including Ruins, Sax Ruins, Koenji Hyakkei, and Korekyojinn.
Recorded live at several…
Live At Tusk Festival
* Edition of 500 * French psych-experimental-rock genius Richard Pinhas in collaboration with Sax Ruins drummer, Tatsuya Yoshida, and saxophonist, Ryoko Ono. Recorded live at Tusk Festival, at Gateshead Old Town Hall, on October 10, 2015. Richard Pinhas, the founder of '70s legends Heldon, is one of France's best known experimental musicians and is a key figure in development of rock music fusing with electronic music. Yoshida Tatsuya is one of the most innovative musicians of the Japanese exper…
Mountains Are Mountains
Mountains Are Mountains is a solo album that presents the sound of many moments scattered all over a period of Berke Can Özcan's (Ex-Konstrukt, Big Beats Big Times) personal time on this planet. He is a drummer, composer, writer, producer who keeps experimenting with all that is available to his one ear. Gongs, aquadrums, a vibraphone, a steel drum, a prepared piano, a vintage harmonium which smells exactly like a vintage harmonium, log drums, kalimbas, as well as his self-made instruments made …
Kofu
* Limited edition CD including 16-page inserts with words in Japanese and English from Meitei and design by Kitchen.Label founder Ricks Ang * It began with ‘Kwaidan’, a simmering study on the lost art of Japanese ghost story-telling. Then there was ‘Komachi’, baptized in the earthly winds and static that define its comforting sonics. On ‘Kofū’, Meitei masterfully closes his trilogy of lost Japanese moods with an engaging interrogation of artforms and aesthetics as a provocation — or, as fashion…
Vertigo KO
A compilation of unreleased material from the Light Sleep and Voice Hardcore sessions alongside specially recorded new material, including a cover of “The Void” by The Raincoats. Both formats include a 20 page zine designed by Studio Tape Echo featuring photography from Masayuki Shioda and writing from both Disciples and Phew. It follows on from a limited edition cassette and digital release of Phew’s music on Disicples called Vertical Jamming, which compiled some of the cult Japanese artist’s l…
Horizon, Volume 1
* Online Color Vinyl Edition: “Clear” – Includes Limited Edition Art Print. 2020 stock * Almost completely unknown in the west, Masahiro Sugaya has been composing and producing music since the 1980s in an exceptionally wide range of fields and practices. From arrangements for musical acts like the acoustic guitar duo Gontiti to acousmatic diffusion at spaces like Paris’s Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), Sugaya’s reach is almost exhaustive in its breadth, but it was in the 80s bubble-era kan…
Commissions: 1977-2000
Makoto Inoue and Yasushi Yamashita’s Inoyama Land project spans nearly four decades, still active to this day. A portmanteau of their family names, the “Land” of Inoyama hovers between imagined mythical space and concrete reality, extending beyond physical releases into installations, site-specific sound design and theatre scores.
After their famed Haruomi Hosono-produced 1983 release Danzindan-Pojidon, the duo became involved in the budding environmental music business that was taking shape in …
Fischgeist
Fischgeist is the third solo album by Tomoko Sauvage, a Paris-based Japanese experimental musician and sound artist. For more than a decade, she’s been working on her unique ‘natural synthesizer’ by combining water, hydrophones and glass or ceramic bowls. The album was recorded in a former water tank in Berlin, a building with a special architecture and acoustics. Sauvage was inspired by the building’s history that she discovered by coincidence during her recording sessions. bohemian drips, a Be…
Trails to the Cosmic Vibrations
*2020 stock. Edition of 300, last copies. Comes with custom-made foil which transforms the special cover art by acclaimed artist Takashiro Kurashima into a kaleidoscopic trail of electric vibrations.* 1 continent, 2 bands, 42 musicians! Trails to the Cosmic Vibrations is a split LP that brings together two bands from Asia with outwardly contrasting dispositions, while sharing sympathetic resonances.
On Side A, hailing from Osaka, Japan, we have the ever exuberant postmodern psychrock legends, Ac…
Authority is Alive
Recorded live at the Playfreely Festival in Singapore, November 2019, Authority is Alive is a potent performance mixed from an intoxicating brew of poetry, philosophy and sonic alchemy. Bearing the theme “The Transparency of Turbulence”, the festival featured a strong line-up of East Asian and Southeast Asian artists and bore the ambition to be “an alternative to how we coalesce and navigate a region that is continuously torn apart by words, egos, greed and ideologies.”
“Everything... living... …
Toho Sara
Black Editions present a reissue of Toho Sara's self-titled album, originally released in 1995. A mystifying work of Japanese avant-garde shamanism, Toho Sara's 1995 debut introduced a radical new sound from Asahito Nanjo (High Rise), Makoto Kawabata (Acid Mothers Temple), and Hisashi Yasuda - playing an array of ancient instruments including tabla, piri, harmonium, biwa, shakujo, and hansho the group evokes an otherworldly ritual music, meditative and haunting. Originally released on CD by P.S.…
Far And Wee
Black Editions present a reissue of Kazuo Imai's far and wee, originally released in 2004. Kazuo Imai is one of the few artists to traverse both Japan's early avant-garde and free jazz movements. Though he began performing in the 1970s, his 2004 P.S.F. album far and wee was only the second under his name. In a series of thrilling acoustic guitar improvisations -- Imai's playing crackles with dynamic tension and physicality as well as a subtlety and nuance that reveals him as one of the instrumen…
Musica Transonic
Black Editions present a reissue of Musica Transonic's self-titled release, originally released in 1995. Musica Transonic was comprised of three of the most crucial artists to emerge from the 1990s Japanese underground: Nanjo Asahito of High Rise, Makoto Kawabata of Acid Mothers Temple and Tatsuya Yoshida of Ruins. The group's music was a supercharged combination of complex rhythms, blistering guitar attacks, and enormously deep bass momentum. Pushing the rock power trio to its miasmic, overdriv…