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The Rabbits LP Mesh Key

First-ever vinyl release of criminally unknown early ’80s Japanese punk band.
Fully remastered from the band’s original early ’80s cassette releases, and housed in a sturdy tip-on sleeve. Includes a double-sided, illustrated insert. Includes digital download card.

Singer-songwriter Shoichi Miyazawa’s tale is a confounding one. He grew up in a small town in Yamagata Prefecture (in northern Japan), loved Dylan and The Beatles, and had very little exposure to, or interest in, underground music. And yet, shortly after 24-year-old Miyazawa arrived in Tokyo in 1978, he began performing solo shows at tiny clubs in the city, singing and playing guitar. His performances quicky devolved from brisk acoustic jaunts to lengthy, heavy dirges sung in a snot-nosed wail over a blown-out electric guitar detuned to produce a kind of sonic sludge.

At one of his earliest gigs, a mutual friend introduced him to Endo Michiro, who would soon become the legendary front man of Japanese punk icons The Stalin. It turned out Miyazawa and Endo had attended Yamagata University at the same time just a few years earlier, but hadn’t known each other at school. In Tokyo, they became fast friends, moved into the same apartment building, and for years were inseparable. Endo played guitar and drums on Miyazawa’s debut release, the “Christ Was Born in a Stable” flexi disc. But while Endo was social and outgoing, Miyazawa preferred to be alone, avoiding concerts unless he was performing.

$32

Edition of 500.

Archeus LP Kusōzu : Nine Death Stages An’archives

[An’39]

May 19th

12″LP black vinyl, comes in a 2 colors silkscreened heavy jacket with obi (black or kraft), inserts and a postcard by Vincent Guilbert. Edition of 350

Printed by Alan Sherry & liner notes by Jon Dale

Kusōzu : Nine Death Stages is the second album by the Tokyo trio Archeus, which consists of Keiko Higuchi (voice, percussion, trombone, shamisen), Shizuo Uchida (bass strings), and TOMO (hurdy gurdy, voice). It follows their debut, self-titled and self-released CD and cassette from 2021 and is further proof – if any were needed – that these musicians, who’ve known each other for some time, but only started playing together relatively recently, share a telepathic communication, improvising together, fully in the moment, and as one. Where their debut album featured four extended improvisations, Kusōzu is an object lesson in economy and clarity – nine tracks, thirty-three minutes, everything that needs be said and nothing more.

All three musicians are incredibly active in the Japanese underground. Higuchi currently plays with Sachiko in Albedo Fantastica, adding Uchida for Albedo Gravitas; Uchida and Higuchi team up with Masami Kawaguchi (guitar) in vDBG. She’s also recorded with improvisers such as Naoto Yamagishi, Yasumune Morishige, and Shin-Ichiro Kanda. Uchida is also a member of MAI MAO, Kito-Mizukumi Rouber, Hasegawa-Shizuo, UH, and TERROR SHIT, and he’s recently recorded with improvising guitarist Takashi Masubuchi; TOMO has previously been a member of Tetragrammaton and Pouring High Water, and has recently performed live with Mick of Kousokuya, Mitsuru Tabata, Keiji Haino, and Daisuke Takaoka.

While Higuchi and Uchida have been making music together for some time now, they appear careful not to impose their previously articulated lexicon to bear on Archeus. There are trace elements of their playerly voices still present – the stretchy, plastic scrabbling on bass strings from Uchida; Higuchi’s murmurations of tone, and sudden plunges back down to earth, vertiginous and woozy – but there are other things going on here, particularly with TOMO joining in the action. His hurdy gurdy is a wild card in a group of wild cards, here cranking out burred, purring drones, there fidgeting through floods of notes, cranked up really high, ducking and weaving between Higuchi and Uchida as the three pursue the eternal now that is core to the best improvised music.

Archeus seem to work alchemically, transmuting their base matter into gold. Named after the Buddhist art practice of kusōzu, the graphic painting of nine stages of a decaying corpse in the open air, “to demonstrate the effects of impermanence,” as scholar Gail Chin once wrote,

Kusōzu : Nine Death Stages is Archeus at their most rigorously attentive to each other’s playing, and by the end, the music is itself thinking and feeling.

24€

Daisuke Tobira CD ギター (Guitar) Bumblebee records

Sweet and introspective lo-fi avant folk from Osaka and originally released in late 1999, this is considered to be a monumental and yet very mysterious relic: virtually nothing is known about Tobari outside of these minimal recordings and the few photos that accompany them. Tobari’s outsider status only adds to the enigma behind these recordings.

$30, we only have a few copies

Eliane Radigue 2CD Naldjorlak – Saltern

Double-CD album with custom packaging and screen printing by Alan Sherry. Includes extensive liner notes by Gascia Ouzounian, Éliane Radigue, and Charles Curtis, and a reproduction of Radigue’s never-before-published original drawing of Naldjorlak.

Saltern presents a thrilling new live recording of Naldjorlak for solo cello, composer Éliane Radigue’s first piece for an acoustic instrument, paired with a remastered version of the long out-of-print, original 2006 recording. Composed in 2005 in close collaboration with cellist Charles Curtis, Naldjorlak marked a striking shift in the music of Radigue, who has since composed exclusively for instrumentalists with her celebrated Occam series. This album brings together two complete performances by Curtis, recorded nearly 15 years apart (Paris in 2006 and Los Angeles in 2020), drawing attention to the evolution of the piece and to its inherent mutability. The sound and spirit of Naldjorlak are centered around the re-tuning of the entire cello to the wolf tone, a uniquely unstable frequency, creating a haunting, almost feedback-like resonance within the instrument itself.

$23

Shizuka 2LP Heavenly Personae + CS

Deluxe Double LP Tri-Fold w/ Laser Etched Side

& Direct Only Edition with Limited Shizuka “4” Cassette

Heavy tip-on tri-fold jacket with ink pigment foil stamping, gloss film laminate finish with mounted booklet and printed inner sleeves. 

Black Editions presents Shizuka’s sole studio album, 1994’s Heavenly Persona, a monumental, transcendent work originally issued by P.S.F. Japan on CD in 1994; Now newly remastered and in its first ever vinyl edition on double LP with a laser etched fourth side. Presented in a deluxe tip-on tri-fold jacket with ink pigment foil stamping, gloss film laminate finish and printed inner sleeves and mounted booklet. It includes her extensive, heart wrenching final interview, translated for the first time to English alongside high-resolution archival images.

SOLD OUT

Jean Noël Rebilly & Andrew Chalk CD Tsilla – An’archives

Edition of 300, comes in a mini handmade gatefold jacket

Catalogue number : [An’41]

Mastered by Denis Blackham

“On Tsilla, Jean-Noël Rebilly and Andrew Chalk pay homage to the late French writer and engraver Cécile Reims. While she may be best known as interpretative engraver for surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, and she also worked with Leonor Fini and briefly for Salvador Dali, Reims’ most powerful and enduring works were made either in collaboration with her husband, the writer and artist Fred Deux (who signed their collaborative work “cf deux”), or by herself. Later works by Reims, like the L’Elan Vitale suite, or the Histoires Naturelles series, manifest denuded, obliterated landscapes; spiralling abstractions; engravings that shiver with an unearthly radiance, where etchings of great intricacy hint at intimacy and the velocity of rapture, before opening out to aching empty spaces. The music on Tsilla is similarly evocative, a tender weaving of emotional complexity carved with the hand-held and simple tools of artisans. Much like Reims, Rebilly and Chalk enact a similar transfiguration of base materials. For Reims, natural order is made “more sinuous and curious through the rounded flow of her graver,” Kate McCrickard once noted. For Rebilly and Chalk, these seven pieces, cast under the shadow of a great artist, inhabit that sinuousness, and tease out the eternal flow of tone.”

Jon Dale

Contact – wholesale : anarchives@sfr.fr / clerouley@free.fr 

Distribution / wholesale : France : Soufle Continu shop & label : contact@soufflecontinu.com

and available from ;

UK : This Ain’t Distribution / Japan Blues / ICR Distribution

15€

 

Francis Plagne & Andrew Chalk

CD The Painter’s Family

 Label : Mould Museum

Catalogue number : MM 03

Edition of 300, comes in a mini handmade gatefold jacket with obi

Recorded 2008-2016, released on cassette in 2018.

Recorded 2008-2016 and originally released on cassette in 2018.

The Painter’s Family is the first duo release from Andrew Chalk and Francis Plagne, recorded intermittently, both together and apart, over eight years, in Hull, Melbourne and various places in Japan. Eight pages from the sketchbook, sequenced into two languorous side-long suites.

Mastered by Joe Talia.

“He tried by every means to come close to nature, lying in the fields before daybreak and until nightfall in order to learn to represent very exactly the red morning sky of sunrise, sunset and the evening hours”

Available from ;

andrewchalk.bandcamp.com

distantimpression.com

icrdistribution.com                (UK)

anarchives@sfr.fr / clerouley@free.fr 

Soufle Continu shop & label : contact@soufflecontinu.com   (FRANCE)

Distribution/wholesale please contact ;

anarchives@sfr.fr / clerouley@free.fr

or

ordersfarawaypress@yahoo.co.uk

andrewchalk.bandcamp.com

15€

Andrew Chalk CD Dreams

 Label :  Impression Lointaine / Faraway Press

Catalogue number : FP 037

Edition of 300, comes in a mini handmade gatefold jacket

Dreams, subtitled Scenes I-XV, captures imaginary scenes and sequenced into a full album of 52 minutes length at Impression Lointaine.

Dreams being archaic and unpredictable in its composition, such as dreams themselves that make little sense upon waking and assembled using time limited constraints.

And while immersed, and in privacy, form a thread of personal communication like a nostalgic memory-a painting of which we inhabit ourselves.

 Many things of the past

Are brought to my mind,

As I stand in the garden

Staring at a cherry tree.

Piano by ;

Tom James Scott (Scene VIII)

Timo van Luijk (Scene XIII)

Mastered by Denis Blackham

Available from ;

andrewchalk.bandcamp.com

icrdistribution.com                (UK)

anarchives@sfr.fr / clerouley@free.fr 

Soufle Continu shop & label : contact@soufflecontinu.com   (FRANCE)

Distribution/wholesale please contact ;

anarchives@sfr.fr / clerouley@free.fr

or

ordersfarawaypress@yahoo.co.uk

andrewchalk.bandcamp.com

15€