Japan'archives mailorder

Elodie LP “Enteha” A colourful storm

Andrew Chalk and Timo van Luijk embody a bold, free-spirited approach to music making whose improvisational processes can be traced to a distinct period of Europe’s post-industrial landscape: the former’s Ferial Confine project finding a home on Broken Flag (Ramleh, Kleistwahr) while the latter co-founded Noise-Maker’s Fifes, a Belgian audiovisual project employing unusual homemade instruments. 

More than two decades of ambitious solo and collaborative work would solidify both Chalk and van Luijk as masterful craftsmen exploring (and exposing) the tension between composition and free play. Their individual lists of collaborators boasts a certain fin-de-siècle faction of the avant-garde: Christoph Heemann, Giancarlo Toniutti, David Jackman and Colin Potter, to name but a few, have recorded with Chalk while van Luijk has also welcomed Heemann as well as a guard of other artists including Raymond Dijkstra, Kris Vanderstraeten and Frederik Croene.

Elodie’s first documented recording, 2011’s Echos Pastoraux, betrayed a musical interplay of extremely accomplished standards, Chalk and van Luijk’s pastoral mise-en-scène daubed with Daisuke Suzuki’s Asiatic elements creating a sound world at once mystical and eerie. A figment of two imaginations, Elodie materialised almost fully formed with each subsequent recording patiently revealing glimpses into a world concerned with time dilation, the phantasmagoric and spirits of the everyday.

Enteha is one of the duo’s more subdued and melancholic pieces and can be seen as a human response to seasonal transition, foretold by the concluding passages of 2020’s Le Nid d’Ivoire. It’s one of their uniquely longform explorations of mood and atmosphere as an air of romance drifts deftly into mystery and despair. The delicate hues of autumnal haze. The deceptive optimism of morning light. A work of supremely understated beauty, Enteha develops at an hypnagogic, if not unconscious, level and will appeal to anyone who finds solace in Harmonia, Gas, Joanna Brouk, Roberto Musci, Zoviet France and other investigators of pastoral arcana. 

So nice to have a new and beautiful album from this lovely duo

$22

Naoki Zushi 2 x CS Experement Music O.C.O. – Advaita Records

 In 1979, around the time Naoki Zushi joined Hijokaidan, he brought two demo tapes “EXPEREMENT MUSIC O.C.O.” one at a time to Drugstore, an ignition point of the Kansai underground at that time. The existence of these demo tapes was mentioned in interviews with G-Modern and others, but only a limited number of people have been able to listen to them, and although Zushi himself modestly describes them as “imitations and a little originality,” they contain a variety of songs that are the raw stones for the subsequent 1st to 4th albums. Also includes two takes of the original version of “For My Friends’ Sleep,” and intense guitar improvisation that is an important missing link considering the early Hijokaidan. We decided that there was no need for excessive embellishment, so the sleeve design is based on Zushi’s handwritten notes on the master tape, which was digitized by Nakamichi Dragon with minimal noise reduction and no mastering at all, thus perfectly reproducing the master tape from that time. We are convinced that the quality of songs is incredible for a 19-year-old Zushi, who recorded it at home in a small student apartment at the time, and that it is a work of his original landscape.

$35