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Zyklon B Zombies LP”Skull” – Minimum Stable Stacks

First ever vinyl reissue of this ultra-obscure Japanese post-punk noise unit’s sole cassette from 1993. I’ll leave the rest up to Mr. Tom Lax:
“Zyklon B Zombies ‘Skull’ has been floating around the sub underground for years. Originally released as a cassette on the Japanese tape label, Vanilla in 1993, ZBZ was the musical brainchild of sadly deceased noise legend Hirohito Taneguchi (Seed Mouth) & the equally legendary Junko Hiroshige (Hijokaidan, Genbakukaidan) & if you don’t know it, fear not. It’s now been formated & remastered to vinyl, courtesy of the Minimum Table Stacks label. Much like Michio Kadotani’s Rotting Telepathies recordings, ‘Skull’ possesses great tremors of blurred clamber that comes directly at you, sometimes sideways. It’s hard to know how much is premeditated or just what’s driven by organic impulse, which is what makes it such a great attestation of its era. In an instant, ‘Skull’ can move from a psychotic whoosh not unlike ‘Twin Infinitives’, to an eerie gait similar to that of Dadamah. Plus, there’s everything in between. A true blue-blood of disparate vision, ‘Skull’ ranks right up there in the masterpiece department with un’s S/T lp, New Zealand’s Ziggy Stardust Band & those two solo albums from Eric Hysteric. It’s not for everyone, but for those who embrace the underground’s one percent like a long lost tree, it’s the only way to fly.”—Tom Lax, Siltbreeze Records.

Edition of 300 copies

$25

Nikolaus Utermöhlen LP Karslbad La Scie Dorée

Edition of 500 with 8 page booklet

Reissue of Nikolaus Utermöhlen’s ‘Karlsbad’ album, originally released in 1989. Utermöhlen was a founding member of Die Tödliche Doris and this is his sole solo release. A collection of 23 witty oddball compositions for clarinet, accordion, percussion, recorder, violin, guitar, organ. It definitely has a Doris dose but even more so it shines for its totally singular mélange of tribal dada chamber folk, dilettante dissonant poetry, hard to compare with anything else. A slice of flamboyant wellness.  The recordings of this album were made for the ‘Georgette Meunier’ film by Tania Stöcklin and Cyrille Rey-Coquais.
Issued from the original master tapes and includes the 8 page booklet with engravings from the Karlsbad spa era.

$26

Elodie (Andrew Chalk & Timo Van Luijk) LP Clareté Déserte – La Scie Dorée

Regular edition of 300 copies on black vinyl with offset printed sleeve

New 10 track studio album by Andrew Chalk and Timo van Luijk, recorded 2020-2021 at Impression Lointaine and Kulta Saha.

Forth unobserved I went
In darkness and security,
By the secret ladder, in disguise,
In secret, seen of none,
Oh night more lovely than the dawn!
Lost to all things and myself,
And, amid the lillies forgotten,
Threw all my cares away.

$23

Youri Kun LP Renoir of the Toys

[An’37] Feb 10th

12″LP black vinyl, comes in a silkscreened jacket with obi (black or ivory), inserts and a postcard. Edition of 400

Printed by Alan Sherry & liner notes by Jon Dale

Renoir Of The Toys is a deep dive into the world of Youri Kun, the nom de plume of Japanese guitarist, singer and songwriter Hiroshi Nar. It follows a similar compilation, Unheld Ball, released in 2022 on Japanese label Inundow; like that album, Renoir Of The Toys draws from the rich catalogue of outsider psych-garage and rock recorded by Youri Kun over the past two decades. Deeply wired into the history of Japanese underground music, Nar was a founding member of legendary ‘70s outfit Datetenryu, and a member of both Brain Police (Zuno Keisatsu) and Les Ralllizes Dénudés (Hadaka No Rallizes), appearing on the latter’s ’77 Live.

After going to ground during the 1980s, Nar started making music with Niplets in the mid-90s, and releasing music at a prolific pace in 2000 – an excellent run of (sometimes archival) CD-Rs on the Hello Goodbye Studio label, both solo, and with his groups Molls, Niplets and Port Cuss; an album on P.S.F. by Jokers, where he was joined by fellow Rallizes member Yokai Takahashi, and drummer Toshiaki Ishizuka (Brain Police, Vajra, Cinorama, etc.); and sixteen albums (and counting) as Youri Kun, for labels Gyunne Cassette, Inundow, and Hören. He’s also fallen in with the Acid Mothers Temple crowd, guesting on a few of their albums, and recording a live set with Kawabata Makoto’s Nishinihon trio.

All Nar’s music shares a deceptive primitivism; it moves with the simplicity of the best 1960s garage punk, but its edges are blurred and stretched, allowing for all kinds of weird, elliptical, and psychedelic moves to happen in its margins. His guitar playing on songs like “Kakunin” (from 2011’s Yamaimo Boogie) shimmies and slurs magnificently; “Kurokami”, from 2012’s Su, has clanking six strings scrawling over loose, spaced-out synth; there are clunky psychobilly moves (“Oshiro no Ninjya”), spirited rave-ups for rattling organ and sputtering guitar (“Totsugeki”), and some lovely, drowsy, melancholy moments (“Sora”). The constant throughout is Nar’s blues-blurred, drawling voice, as unique a tool as the non-idiomatic speak-sing styles of solo Syd Barrett, Jad Fair, or Dave E. McManus. There are also three Les Rallizes Dénudés covers here, where Nar locates the pop genius at the heart of songs like “Shiroi Yoru” and amplifies this with his simple garage-reverential take on things. Renoir Of The Toys is yet more evidence that Hiroshi Nar was, and is, one of Japan’s musical visionaries, a lonesome voice dedicated to a singular, streamlined vision, one that’s in eternal pursuit of the joy and kicks at the heart of rock’n’roll, and a reminder of what a great, unpretentious rock’n’roller truly

OUT OF PRINT

Kawashima Makoto / Mochizuki Harutaka / Michel Henritzi CD Chinmoku wa ishikure ni yadoru bouryoku – Trost

Makoto Kawashima – alto sax on 1 and 3
Harutaka Mochizuki – alto sax on 1 and 2
Michel Henritzi – lapsteel on 1 and 3, guitar feedback on 2

the title is inspired from the poem « Nachtlied » by Georg Trakl

dedicated to Takayuki Hashimoto (1969 – 2021)

‘Chinmoku wa ishikure ni yadoru’ is a tough album to define. Led by the extraordinary sax duo of Makoto Kawashima and Harutaka Mochizuki, with Michel Henritzi padding out the space in-between using lapsteel and guitar feedback, it’s a record that feels indebted to the free improv scene but not beholden to it. Henritzi’s cloudy textures provide a subtle inky backdrop for Kawashima and Mochizuki’s expressive overblown alto blasts, that dip and spray like screams in the night. 

Reference points might be scene originators like Anthony Braxton and Peter Brötzmann, or more recent acolytes such as Mats Gustafsson, but Kawashima and Mochizuki also touch on the frothy freewheeling noise of Les Rallizes Denudes, and Henritzi’s contributions strike a chord that’s not a million miles from Heather Leigh’s sacred dissonance. ‘ Boomkat

$16

Guillaume Belhomme + Harutaka Mochizuki book + miniCD “Eugène”- Lenka Lente

LIVRE + CD, 36 PAGES, 10 X 15,5 CM

Peintre et lithographe, Eugène Carrière (1849-1906) a, pour citer le Larousse,
« surtout peint des maternités et des portraits, réduisant les couleurs à une sorte de camaïeu fluide de brun, d’où les formes essentielles se dégagent par contraste lumineux. » Devant l’une de ses toiles, Degas osa : « On a fumé dans la chambre des enfants. » C’était assez pour brouiller les cartes, au point de confondre bientôt les frontières de la France et du Japon.

12€