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Stone Music (Tokio Hasegawa) CD July 15, 2022 – Room 40

The first LP by the Taj Mahal Travellers was recorded at Sogetsu Hall in Tokyo on July 15, 1972, which became the title of the work and was released the same year by CBS Sony Records.

A live performance celebrating the 50th anniversary of this album was held on July 15, 2022. The only original members of the Taj Mahal Travellers who attended were myself and Seiji Nagai. This is because two of the six members passed away, two are religiously active and they can not play music according to their belief, and the last one has lost touch with us. Therefore, young musicians were recruited to perform with us. This performance was a spark of improvisation that broke 50 years of my silence.

Let me recall a little about the day of the concert. The venue was a live house called Forestlimit Hatagaya, about 20 minutes by car from Shibuya. In the pouring rain, we ended up entering a narrow alley from where it was impossible to reach the place by car, so after unloading my instruments, we had to head back to a wider road and find another route. The venue was small and located on the basement floor. Among performers and stuff members we were more than 10 people, and including the audience, in total about 60 people.

Performers:
Tokio Hasegawa (Voice, Rubab, Stone)
Seiji Nagai (Electronics)
Ken Ikeda (Electronics)
Tatsuro Murakami (Guitar)
Hikaru Yamada (Saxophone, electronics, percussion)
Tyler Eaton (Double Bass)
Munna (Electric Percussion)
Hiromi Yamada (Keyboard)
Hitomi Nishimura (Stone)
Ruka Fujiwara (Gorrilla Voice)
Shuichi Yamada (Bamboo)
Kyou Matsumoto (Shadow)

a very few copies $19

Dead C 2 LPHarsh 70’s reality – Siltbreeze

“Originally seeing the light of day in April of 1992, Harsh 70s Reality was not just a high water mark for that year, but for the ages. Technically this was the band’s fourth long-play outing, and as a double-album, it followed two formidable dual juggernauts of the early 90’s: Twin Infinitives and Lake. But it was Harsh 70s Reality that left the decade stronger and more resonant than it came in. A 2012 anniversary edition-replete w/gatefold jacket-came & went fairly quickly, so in 2023 it was agreed that it should stalk the earth yet again, this time akin to original packaging & viola; this time w/a flat matte jacket finish, insert + updated audio shepherding courtesy of Josh Stevenson (Cindy Lee, Famous Mammals, Puppet Wipes, Alastair Galbraith, etc). To hear it is to understand why one scribe back in the day referred to their sound as “a garbage truck backing over the abyss.”

$27

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

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

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

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

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€