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An’archives label

Naoki Zushi CD

Naoki Zushi CD Live – Advaita

CD reissue with bonus track (previously released on cs in 2021), mastered to suit the CD format!

The original member of Hijokaidan, Naoki Zushi, one of the most prominent underground guitarists in Japan and currently active in Nagisa Ni Te, will reissue a CD of a trio of live performances at the 2006 Gyuune Autumn Festival.

It features performances demonstrating the quintessence of Japan’s psychedelic underground, represented by “les rallizes denudes” and “Fushitsusha.” A heavy psychedelic version of “May a flower bloom” is remarkable; it makes you feel intense passion, completely different from the delicately blooming beautiful version that decorates the end of the 4th album. It is a masterpiece that Zushi himself said, “It might be the best live performance of this song.”

Special packaging ltd version $20

Les Rallizes Denudes CS

Les Rallizes Denudes CS Citta ’93 Board – Tuff Beats

3 Titles, it’s a different version from the CD and 3LP

$25 sold out

Free Jazz in Japan Book

Free Jazz in Japan Book – Soejima Teruto – Public Bath

Japanese free jazz critic Teruto Soejima passed away on 12 July 2014, at the age of 83. Since the late 1960s he had been a tireless booster of free jazz in Japan. In 1969 together with Masayuki Takayanagi, Masahiko Togashi and Masahiko Satoh, he helped found the New Jazz Hall, Tokyo’s first dedicated free jazz venue. Unusually, Soejima viewed promotion and production as essential components of his job as a critic, and he was closely involved in record production and arranging concert tours. He enjoyed a particularly long and fruitful relationship with the Moers Festival in Germany, where he arranged appearances by over 130 Japanese free musicians between 1977 and 2006. He was equally committed to promoting Japanese tours by Western free jazz musicians (particularly those from Russia and Korea), including Peter Kowald and Christian Marclay.

$40

Les Rallizes Denudes 2CD/ 3LP Citta 93

Les Rallizes Denudes 2CD Citta ‘ 93 – Tuff Beats

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$30 SOLD OUT

Les Rallizes Denudes 3LP Citta ‘ 93 – Tuff Beats

Comes in a slipcase, black vinyls

$70

Masayuki Takayanagi – Kaoru Abe

New Directions for the Arts CD Projection (The Complete Inspiration And Power Live) – Jinya

A miraculous discovery! The complete live performance at “Inspiration & Power 14” at Shinjuku Art Theater in 1973. Uncut live performance of Masayuki Takayanagi’s New Direction For The Arts Discography at “Inspiration & Power 14” held at the Shinjuku Art Theater in 1973. This CD contains all the performances of the day, although only the last part of the concert was included in the album of the same title.
Recently, a cassette tape was discovered among the belongings of Masayuki Takayanagi, and Otomo Yoshihide, who once studied under Takayanagi, has restored the cassette tape to its original state – and claimed: “without a doubt, this is one of Masayuki Takayanagi’s best works

$28

Masayuki Takayanagi – Kaoru Abe CD  – Real Jazz = リアルジャズ – Jinya

Recorded on May – July, 1970, Tokyo

Another “The Disintegration of the Sympathetic”. Masayuki Takayanagi and Kaoru Abe‘s 1970 studio live recording, 40 minutes of miracle! Miraculous discovery of Masayuki Takayanagi and Kaoru Abe’s live studio recordings from 1970! A live studio performance of Masayuki Takayanagi’s New Direction in 1970, which began to be oriented toward immediate improvisation without setting up any notated thematic motifs. 40 minutes of continuous performance.
This work is based on sound reproduction of Takayanagi’s own recordings on open reel tapes. The tapes were in a bad condition due to problems with the recording equipment and age-related deterioration, and have been restored. Although there are some parts that are difficult to hear, we have made this work because we consider it to be an important historical record.

$28

Doji Morita CD

Doji Morita CD 1980.11.28 Sapporo Kyoikubunkakaikan – P-Vine

The recordings released this time are from 1980, and this is the first time that recordings from this period have been made public. It is extremely rare to hear live performances of “Akai Down Parka, Boku no Tomodachi,” “Umi ga Shinde Ii yo Tte Iru,” and “Kirei naita” from the album “Last Waltz.”
This is also the first time that you can hear a live track of the smash hit “Bokutachi no Shippai.”
MCs are also included, and the scene where they talk about Yoshio Hayakawa is extremely rare. 14 songs + 5 MC takes, total 62 minutes.

Live recording from the Sapporo Education and Culture Hall on 
November 28, 1980

Papersleeve

$28

Sayozoku CD

Sayozoku CD Chilhood in the cloud – Tall Grass

Comes in a jewel Case, With artwork by Sayaka Tenjin and Yonju Miyaoka, Liner Notes by Alan Sondheim, Rick Potts, Tori Kudo, Wataru Kasahara, Yu Hirayama, Yoshiaki Kurekawa, and Haruki Sakurai. All translated in English and Japanese.

Free form music, childish, poetic, strangely dreamy…

$18

Harutaka Mochizuki LP

Harutaka Mochizuki LP Doppelgänger ga boku wo

LP ltd to 315, black vinyl, color  (blue, red & grey) silkscreened jacket with obi (black or grey), inserts and a postcard

Liner notes by Michel Henritzi

Printed by Alan Sherry

Release date : May 31st,  2024

An’archives is proud to present the latest album by Japanese free saxophonist and vocalist Harutaka Mochizuki, Doppelgänger ga boku wo. Since the early 2000s, Harutaka has quietly, yet steadily, released a string of solo and collaborative releases that have allowed multiple perspectives on one of the most singular voices in modern music. In collaboration, he seems to prefer the duo format, and digging through his discography, you’ll find releases where he pairs with Tomoyuki Aoki (of Up-Tight), Michel Henritzi, and Hideaki Kondo. But Harutaka’s solo performances, with their lyricism and physicality, are where the magic truly happens.

If earlier albums, like Solo Document 2004 (Bishop, 2005) and Pas (no label, 2014), were raw documentations of solo alto saxophone performances, in recent years, Harutaka’s solo albums have become more complex, more mystifying. Most significantly, they’ve become more personal; there are few musicians extant whose albums feel quite so much like diaristic interventions, and Harutaka’s music now is deeply moving in its intimacy. Developing that thread of revelation, Doppelgänger ga boku wo offers a still richer exploration of many facets of Harutaka’s artistry.

The two double-tracked alto saxophone performances here feel consummate, with Harutaka shadowing himself, exploring the possibilities of the multiple self: Doppelgänger is me, indeed. The playing here is rich with affect, but still exploratory, voiced with rigour and intent. Two short pieces for keyboard and voice (about Giacometti and Genêt, respectively) are fragile miniatures, with clusters of chords, and passing phrases, wrapping around Harutaka’s untutored but lovely singing.

The ‘karaoke’ performance that closes the album, of “Woman ‘W no higeki’ yori”, speaks to the iterative aspects of Harutaka’s music. A cover of the Hiroki Yakushimaru song, the theme to Shinichirō Sawai’s 1984 film W’s Tragedy, he’s returned to this song several times, and here, his delivery perfectly captures the spirit of what Michel Henritzi, in his typically beautiful liner notes, evocatively details as “one of those sad love songs that accompany lonely sake drinkers in smoky night bars, sharing their spleen.”

Gorgeous, human, heartrending – Doppelgänger ga boku wo is Harutaka Mochizuki in element and in spirit.

25€

Banetoriko LP

Banetoriko LP /DL Kata No Wadachi

LP ltd to 315, black vinyl, 2 color  (gold and black) silkscreened jacket with obi (black or paver red), inserts and a postcard

Liner notes by Aurélien Rossanino

Printed by Alan Sherry

Release date : May 31st,  2024

Kata No Wadachi is the latest album by Banetoriko, the solo noise project of Tamaki Ueda. Her first release both on An’archives and on vinyl, it follows several albums for the Neurec imprint – 2017’s Beside the Sluice and 2022’s Yorioto Hogiokuri – and several other cassettes and CD-Rs. With Kata No Wadachi, the Banetoriko world, inspired by the Yokai (“strange apparitions” – supernatural figures, ghosts, spirits) of Japanese folklore, is at its most resonant yet.

Recorded across 2022 and 2023, the three tracks on Kata No Wadachi have Ueda performing in a particularly elevated manner. Her sound is highly tactile and grittily sensuous, the better to capture the ritualistic repetitions, and hypnotic methodologies, core to Banetoriko. The scrape and scratch of Ueda’s self-made metal instrument, the Banetek, gives these improvisations a unique throb, even as their mood, of introverted focus and elaboration of minutiae, gestures towards broader histories of noise and abstract art. Kata No Wadachi evokes, to some degree, the urban ritual noise of the likes of The New Blockaders, Organum, or Ferial Confine; elsewhere, the abraded, rough-housing textures bring to mind the eighties tape works of Hands To and John Hudak.

Ueda embraces the dream evocation that’s possible when loops of blurred texture collide with the gnaw and groan of energised metal, while mantric, dissociated vocals, and the oppressive weight of deep breath, gather around these compositions like a ghost’s shroud. While she’s been making noise for some time, since the nineties, Banetoriko was formalised as a project in 2011, while Ueda lived in Los Angeles. Relocating to Osaka in 2021, she’s carved out an utterly unique space for herself in Japanese noise, and her music contains an absolutely elemental vibration. Framed beautifully with poetic liner notes by Aurélien Rossanino, Kata No Wadachi is an oppressive, yet quixotically blissful trip.

25€

Agencement LP

Agencement LP Binomial Cascades – Pico

All instruments played by Hideaki Shimada
violins, viola, cello, contrabass, piano, electronics, and magnetic tape

I just released a new album as my solo project, Agencement. This is a follow-up album to ‘Six Juxtaposed Works’, which was released in 2017 on the Copenhagen label Tochnit Aleph.
It’s been about 35 years since I produced ‘vinyl’ by myself, so it’s very emotional, although since the 1990s, it has become difficult to manufacture vinyl LPs in Japan and there were no channels to outsource overseas because I was disappointed in the situation.
Musically, I think it’s a further step in the direction of ‘October Variations’, released under my birth name in January 2022 on Glasgow label scatterArchive, but you may listen to it differently.
The work began in Autumn 2022 with the recording in the studio, and the final mix was completed about one year later in August 2023.

$25

Kazuki Tomokawa CD 1989 Live

Kazuki Tomokawa CD 1989 Live recordings – Modest Launch

Gatefold, papersleeve

Nice compilation taken from 2 live recordings with 2 unreleased songs and some nice versions of songs taken from”Umi Shizuka” with a full cast of musicians such Toshiaki Ishizuka, Masachi Kikuchi (shakuhachi), Kazutoki Umezu…

$20

New album is coming in the next weeks !!!

Omit LP

Omit LP – LP IN-Sec – Siltbreeze

Recorded on an 8-track September/December 2013.

Includes a two-sided black and white insert with illustrations, credits.

Omit’s ‘inSec’ is “new,” but not new. Recorded in 2013, the masters lost in the label’s murky somewheresville that always shows up when moving. For those who don’t know, Omit is an experimental electronics artist from New Zealand’s south island who, since 1990, has released thirty-some xerographed cassettes and CDrs in the Dead C orbit for those who do. It’s not enough to say that ‘inSec’ is an ambient masterpiece bringing to mind a John Carpenter soundtrack performed by the Hub because listening to it engineers new species. 
In this century that flatters itself to be of drinking age, it is a queer thing we haven’t come face to face with aliens.  Besides the xenobiological effects, Omit constructs your sentiment through timbral concepts that repeat and shift with minimal reference to harmony, melody, key, or mode. Streams jump and skitter, knitting tightly high and low in a dense rattling driven to the long and most plaintive tones amongst the countless gizmos (that’s including you, but not “you”). This one is for big fans of Anode/Cathode, Papa Srapa, & Insignia refrigerators. 

$25

Tori Kudo & 3C123 LP

Tori Kudo & 3C123

LP ltd to 400, black vinyl, 2 color silkscreened jacket with obi (grey with particles, textured tan, black and red), inserts and a postcard

No digital / DL version

https://anarchiveslabel.bandcamp.com

https://anarchives.com

Label : An’archives

Réf : [An’44]

Printed by Alan Sherry

Release date : March 22nd 2024

Contact – wholesale : anarchives@sfr.fr – anarchiveslabel@gmail.com – clerouley@free.fr

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

Shop in Paris & distribution in France : Souffle Continu

US : Worldgonemad

An’archives are pleased to announce the release of a self-titled album by Tori Kudo & 3C123. A reissue of a cassette that was originally released on Uramado in 2020, this is the first time this live session has appeared on vinyl. The performance, featuring Kudo on piano and 3C123 on clarinet, was recorded on October 18, 2009, at the Uramado venue in Shinjuku. A beautiful and quixotic forty-minute set, it reconnects both Kudo and 3C123 with various musical histories, including those of classical composition and free improvisation.

The performance documented on Tori Kudo & 3C123 is a curious one. While they both appear to slip into improvised ruminations at times, for the most part, Kudo performs pieces by Erik Satie on the piano, over which 3C123 teases an excoriating stream of improvisation from the clarinet. His playing here is wild in its poetry: sometimes lushly nestling alongside Satie’s melodies, elsewhere loosing Ayler-esque squalls from the instrument, it’s a bravura performance that is matched, in an indirect manner, by the poise and pacing of Kudo’s generous, fluent recital.

When asked about the thinking behind the performance documented here, Kudo explains by describing the historical juxtaposition of Satie with Takehisa Kosugi’s improvised violin as “an essence of the Japanese art of collective improvisation.” The playing here, as within Japanese collective improvisation, is about sitting ‘alongside’ each other, not necessarily in direct (or even indirect) reference, but rather sharing the space; “just being there together,” Kudo says, and letting go of the need for performers to engage in interplay.

Tori Kudo & 3C123 is certainly part of that tradition, and this is where its curious poetry resides; in that ‘third space’ that sits in between, but not directly connecting, the two performers. Kudo makes an analogy with Fluxus, which is appropriate. But you can also hear their shared history here, somehow, as Kudo and 3C123 have known each other since the eighties, when they shared a house in Kunitachi City, Tokyo. Their musical paths have been multiple – Kudo, of course, best known perhaps for his Maher Shalal Hash Baz ensemble; 3C123 as a member of Vedda Music Workshop, and with other Japanese musicians like Koichiro Watanabe.

It’s a lovely album that’s as mystifying as it is direct and beautiful.

SOLD OUT