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Ongaku Otaku book Mason Jones – Korm Plastics

Hardcover, 524 pages, 21 x 27 cm

In the mid-1990s, four thick, annual issues of Ongaku Otaku magazine were published. Operating from San Francisco, California, the goal was to spread the word about the compelling independent music being produced in Japan. With dozens of interviews and articles, and many hundreds of reviews, the magazine was an influential voice, sharing words about Aube, Cornelius, Yamamoto Seiichi (Boredoms, Rovo, Omoide Hatoba), Shizuka, Jojo Hiroshige (Hijokaidan, Alchemy Records), Melt-Banana, Ruins, KK Null, and many more. This facsimile edition brings the original pages to readers several decades later.

Publisher and editor Mason Jones has run the Charnel Music label since 1988, and has recorded many albums solo, as Trance, and as a member of SubArachnoid Space, Numinous Eye, and Collision Stories. He began visiting Japan regularly in the early ’90s and arranged U.S. shows for many artists from Japan. Ongaku Otaku was a labor of love aided by many contributors to whom he remains grateful.

The 1990s in Japan were a remarkably fertile period for independent music, propelled by the booming bubble economy and by a small network of fiercely independent labels – Alchemy, God Mountain, P.S.F., Tag Rag – whose output had begun to circulate well beyond the archipelago. Breadth was the scene’s defining quality. Punk shared bills with pop. Noise and grindcore appeared alongside psychedelia, jazz, hip-hop, and the unclassifiable hybrids – Tipographica, Demi Semi Quaver, Optical*8, Koenji-Hyakkei – that the Japanese underground produced with such fluency. Ongaku Otaku tracked all of it. The first issue arrived in Winter 1994/95 as a gritty photocopied zine; by the fourth, in 2001, the magazine had grown into a full-bleed periodical with refined typography and accomplished live photography. Across the run, the editorial sensibility remained singular – in-person interviews conducted during touring visits to Japan, dense tour diaries (backstage conversations at the Bears in Osaka, late-night noise sessions with Mikawa and Kosakai of Incapacitants), label profiles of Monellaphone and Japan Overseas, and an unfailingly idiosyncratic stream of ephemera: manga, photographs of Katan Amano‘s ball-jointed dolls, capsule reviews of canned iced coffee and chewing gum, and a guide to Tokyo’s record stores and venues that now reads as a time capsule of a city in flux. The second issue carried an essay attempting to articulate what made the Japanese approach to noise distinct from its European and American counterparts – a less intellectual, more cathartic music that C.C.C.C.‘s Mayuko Hino linked explicitly to butoh.

33€

Shūdan Sokai LP  Live At 八王子 Alone – Aguirre

First time reissue of JP free jazz rarity, pre-Seikatsu Kōjyō Iinkai group. Old-style Gatefold LP with rare photographs & liner notes by Alan Cummings. Limited edition of 500.

In early 1976, Kazutoki Umezu and pianist Yoriyuki Harada — recently returned from New York’s loft jazz environment, where they had played with musicians such as David Murray and William Parker — formed Shūdan Sokai with Mori and drummer Takashi Kikuchi. The name, meaning “mass evacuation,” pointed to their self-chosen exile in Hachiōji. With Alone as their home base, the quartet developed a music characterized by an infectious sense of enjoyment and a willingness to integrate free jazz with elements of song structure. Harada switched between piano and bass; the group experimented with rap-like vocal pieces, jabbering nursery rhymes over bass rhythm.

30 €

Onna : Onna last live 1983

Double LP ltd to 300, black vinyls, 3 color (Silver, dark blue and black) silkscreened jacket with obi (dark blue, paver red or tan), inserts with Miyanishi Keizo notes in French, English and Japanese, lyrics in Japanese and English and a postcard

Label : An’archives

Réf : [An’56]

May 1st, 2026

Printed by Alan Sherry

Onna Last Live 1983 includes the final performance by the original line-up of Onna, the psych-rock project of revered Japanese manga artist, Keizo Miyanishi. Onna’s legend has largely rested, until now, on one self-released and self-titled seven-inch from 1983. Reissued by Holy Mountain in 2009, its rediscovery, along with several archival live and studio sets that leaked out across the 2000s, signalled to a wider audience the power of Miyanishi’s strikingly hypnotic songwriting. With Onna Last Live 1983, though, we hear the group’s perfect line-up performing at its peak.

While Miyanishi was the core member and conceptualist of Onna, the other members of the group would also go on to make significant contributions to the Japanese underground. Guitarist Michio Kurihara would eventually be known for his membership of YBO2, Ghost and White Heaven, and collaborations with the likes of Boris and Damon & Naomi. Drummer Ken Matsutani formed Marble Sheep & The Run-Down Sun’s Children and The Mickey Guitar Band, while also running the Captain Trip label. Joined by the late bass player Yasui Yutaka, to whom the album is dedicated, this quartet only performed live in 1983; the live set here was recorded at Silver Elephant.

It’s a different line-up to the Onna duo that’s documented on their single. After Miyanishi and fellow manga artist Mafuyu Hiroki recorded that material, Miyanishi decided he wanted to start playing gigs; Hiroki left, and Kurihara, Matsutani and Yutaka joined soon after. This line-up allowed Miyanishi to significantly expand Onna’s powers, leading to a sound that Kurihara once described to Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine as “repetitive and heavy, yet quite orthodox.”

The songs here are simple yet deeply effective in their repetitive power, generally revolving around two or three simply strummed chords for guitar. Bass and drums repeatedly lock into mantra-like grooves as Kurihara’s guitar scales the walls, with Miyanishi’s consumptive moans and sighs sent torquing through FX. The cumulative effect of the seven songs here is very heavy indeed; if the prologue “Always…” drifts beautifully through five minutes of placid, beseeching melancholy, the epilogue, “Never Seen A Light Like This”, spirals out into sixteen minutes of glazed-over psych-rock, completely monomaniacal and thrilling in its slow-motion tumult.

Throughout, you can hear Miyanishi and co. reaching for something ineffable, something beyond and between the notes. It’s a phenomenal performance; it’s also no surprise that the group disintegrated after this show, given its intensity. Matsutani and Yutaka left after the Silver Elephant show, with Miyanishi and Kurihara continuing through the first half of 1984 firstly as a duo, and then a trio with new drummer Yoshiki Ueonyama. Kurihara left soon after. But Onna Last Live 1983 is proof plenty of the powers of the original Onna quartet, sending their Rallizes/Velvets dream-mantras off into darkened, stormy skies.

SOLD OUT

Marginal Consort 3CD Box 06 06 16 (St. Elisabeth Kirche, Berlin) – 901 Editions

Marginal Consort is a Japanese avant-garde improvisational group comprised of sound artists Kazuo Imai (a student of Japanese free jazz linchpin Masayuki Takayanagi and occasional performer in both Taj Mahal Travellers and Takayanagi’s New Direction Unit), Tomonao Koshikawa, Kei Shii, and Masami Tada (also in group GAP). Formed in 1997, the four members of Marginal Consort attended Takehisa Kosugi’s music classes at the Bigakkō art school in Tokyo in the mid-1970s, where they teamed up with other students to record East Bionic Symphonia’s debut album “Recorded Live” in 1976.

Since its inception, each year Marginal Consort holds one (or more when invited) annual concert at spacious venues in which they perform continuously, without interruption, for over three hours. Their extended set explores forms of sound and ways of playing that never coalesce into music but create a group dynamic of ebb and flow, exploration and fluidity. Their performance, which is completely free from abstract, political or sometimes mystical ideas about improvisation, neither contraposes the immediacy of action or anonymousness of sound against music nor dramatises the dialectics between the individual and the whole. Even the general idea of the words “collective”, “improvisation” and “project” do not really tell the way they work.

30€

Izumi Hirakawa LP “3” – Enban

Last album from the the musician from Hokkaido (and she’s regularly played with Ikuro Takahashi), comes in a nicely handmade jacket.

Some lovely Lo fi pop songs with piano, violin and guitar, some strange arrangements with a 80’s feeling à la Luna Park Ensemble We only have a very few ! Back in stok sold out at source for months !

38€

Jac Berrocal – Vincent Epplay – Timo van Luijk LP Ste Cy – La Scie Dorée

Ste Cy, the latest studio offering from the trio of Jac Berrocal, Vincent Epplay, and Timo van Luijk, ripens like a forbidden fruit—born of an improvised instrumental session captured in the secluded hush of Kulta Saha by Timo van Luijk.
These raw recordings were later reshaped into 12 songs by Vincent Epplay at Studio Villejuif in Paris. And over it all drifts the poetry of Jac Berrocal— sensual and incendiary, seeping into the music like spice into flesh.

As always it’s superbly produced and has a surrealist and a film noir vibe.

25€

Cheru LP Omamori – Gingembre records

Released in 2021, Cheru is not very well known on our shores. What is life with her ? Some songs, only with a voice, a guitar and a few discreet environmental sounds. It couldn’t be more direct and simple on the paer. Sometimes she can remind us Eddie Marcon or remembering how magical is seeing,looking at a sky and being lost in our thoughts & memories.

23€