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Yuki Fuji LP one Butoh – Akuphone

Ltd to 500, 28-pages A5 Portfolio

A musical immersion into the most exciting avant-garde dance style of the past century. Created in Japan in the 1960s by Tatsumi Hijikata, butō is the “dance of the obscure body”. It broke with the traditions of classical Noh and Kabuki Theater, which, at the time, seemed outdated in the national context. Nourished by a European artistic avant-garde, butō stands out as a mirror of the socio-political turmoil of a post-World War II Japan. One Butoh resonates as a perfect acoustic introduction to this subversive art and propels the listener deep into his own soul.

Fuji-Yuki is a Japanese vocalist who uses her voice like an instrument. With special vocal techniques, glossolalia and electronic pedals, she creates a wide variety of sounds. Inspired by the spirits of Buddhism and Shintoism, she creatively transforms her vocals into an ambient drone or prayers resonating in a church-like space. Her live performances are always different, depending on the place and space they take place in. She is also known as the vocalist of the experimental band Sarry.

$25

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.

HUH LP “You don’t need magic “An’archives

[An’36] March 31st

12″LP black vinyl, comes in a 2 colors silkscreened jacket with obi (black, red, green tea), inserts and a postcard. Edition of 285

Printed by Alan Sherry & liner notes by Jon Dale

HUH are the wild, freeform duo of Kyosuke Terada and Takuma Mori. Based in Tokyo, and playing together since 2007, HUH have released a clutch of cassettes, CD-Rs, and digital albums; they’ve toured Europe (in 2017) and Australia (2019); and they count amongst their collaborators the likes of T Mikawa of Incapacitants, ASTRO, and Government Alpha. You may know Terada from his duo with Shizuo Uchida, MAI MAO, who recently released an LP on An’archives, but he’s super prolific, performing solo and in groups like The Obey Unit, Bay City Rolaz, Praymate, Terror Shit, Death After Death, and more. Takuma Mori also records solo and is one half of duos Cosmetic i and Don’t Let Me Fantastic.

So, they’re busy, energetic musicians – but even that doesn’t quite explain the bustling energy and furious dislocation of the music they make together as HUH. It’s incredible, brain-blatting stuff, moving at a fierce clip between ideas, instruments, and styles – on a track like “Jewels in blue pee”, for example, a plunking banjo riff is repeatedly effaced by stumble-drunk drums, rumbling bass, and incongruous, high-wire blasts of electronics. There are voices in here, but they’re often mangled and distorted; rarely comprehensible, they melt into the unpredictable structures Terada and Mori build out of their junk kit.

HUH call themselves ‘free-form freak-out / noise improvisation’, and there’s a touch of the Familiar Ugly in the collective stammer and stutter central to their music. They’re remarkably untroubled by anyone’s expectations, resulting in a music that’s as confusing as it is compelling, full of clamour and vigour, but never for the sake of it: these seven improvisations, sometimes song-like, sometimes careening and hyperactive, sometimes smeared and abstract, all make their own kind of perfect un-sense. Line them up next to similarly puzzling yet enthralling gutterpunk improv units: Smegma, Bone Cure, Nihilist Spasm Band, Crayon Skidder. 

24€

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€

AD feat Akio Suzuki & Atsumi Yasuda CD Ta Yu Ta I – Hören

AD (Akinori Yamasaki&drowsiness）- All Guitars and Sounds
Akio Suzuki – Stone Flute（1,5）Analapos（2,4）Glass Harmonica（3,6）
Atsumi Yasuda – Voice (3,6)

I listened to the demo recordings for the “Ta Yu Ta I”CD.
The track begins with the sound of a stone, and, for a moment I doubted my ears, thinking that it was the iwafue stone flute that I had lost overseas in 2005.
The flute actually used on this recording was a replica on an ancient flute, one of three that have been handed down within my family. But until that moment when I heard the sound of it echoing inside my skull, I had completely forgotten about it.
It was my living flesh that breathed into this flute, but even so I was overjoyed to have been gifted with this awakening for my distant soul.
H2AD* choosing to place this particular sound at the opening of the piece makes me feel a sense of invigoration, a sense that I have successfully discharged my responsibility to the world.
I have enjoyed long friendships with each of its members, but for me this was a most unexpected first sharing of sounds. If I were to compare the group to a river, it would be like multiple tributaries, each with their own unique colouring from the properties of the different geological strata they have flowed through. Each those tributaries with their own individual characters then flowed into and were interwoven naturally into one single river. A process of unforced interaction.
“Engage with naked ears, please”. This is a phrase that I, with my complete lack of confidence, have often demanded of others in situations of sound creation, asking them to listen in ways unaffected by any pre-existing music.
In this session, it was precisely because everyone felt their way with “naked ears” that a chemical reaction took place, and I believe it was this ability that gave birth to the miracle you can hear.
I am immensely grateful to have been able to participate in the session and to have been reinvigorated in this way.
Akio Suzuki (sound installationist / sound object creator)

H2AD* are a stage performance group formed in September 2022 by Hiromi Miyakita (dance), Akio Suzuki, Akinori Yamasaki, drowsiness, and Atsumi Yasuda.  

$20

Akio Suzuki 2CD Odds and End – Hören 2002

An archival collection including recordings made from 1975 to 2001.

$25