Browse by Artist: CAESAR, J.A.

Artist:	CAESAR, J.A.
Title:	Kokkyou Junreika
Label:	PHOENIX RECORDS (UK)
Format:	CD
Price:	$17.00
Catalog #:	ASH 3042CD

Tokyo playwright, director and artist J.A. Caesar sprang to prominence in the early '70s largely through his work with Shuji Terayama's Tenjo Sajiki Theatre, specializing in vaguely sinister music reminiscent of a Hammer House Of Horrors soundtrack. 1973's Kokkyou Junreika release, often considered Caesar's finest work, was culled from the 5 hours of music written for the original play, distilled down to an album's worth of ageless chants, Buddhist mantras, heavenly invocations and fuzztone guitar vamps supported by Caesar's droning electric organ and the eerie female vocals of Yoko Ran, Keiko Shinko and Seigo Showa. An album that sits comfortably alongside early Ash Ra Tempel, Cosmic Jokers and Atem-period Tangerine Dream. Those that like their music with a healthy dose of gloom, look no further. Digitally remastered. Numbered, limited collector's edition housed in a gatefold sleeve.

Artist:	CAESAR, J.A.
Title:	Jashumon
Label:	PHOENIX RECORDS (UK)
Format:	CD
Price:	$17.00
Catalog #:	ASH 3048CD

"This mighty soundtrack for Shuji Terayama's nihilistic movie of the same name contains all the elements necessary to reach J.A. Caesar's intended pleasure-centers. Here, turmoil, mind-numbing repetition, abject misery and grisly partriarchs abound, and all orchestrated by Caesar's damaged proto-metal and choral-led psychedelic sound. Mind-infesting in the truest sense, this soundtrack played in the dark is as certified a Gateway to the Underworld as any acknowledged classic by Faust, Magma, the Cosmic Jokers, Ash Ra Tempel or early Amon Düül." --Julian Cope, Japrocksampler; Digitally remastered. Numbered, limited collector's edition housed in a gatefold sleeve.

Artist:	CAESAR, J.A.
Title:	Den-en Ni Shisu OST
Label:	SHOWBOAT/SKY STATION (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$28.00
Catalog #:	SWAX 057CD

First reissue of this 1974 J.A. Ceasar-performed theatrical underground classic. "The early '70s in Japan are often painted as an era of political and artistic disillusionment. On the one hand, the state rode roughshod over widespread opposition by renewing a mutual security treaty with the US, forcibly purchasing farming land near Tokyo for the construction of a new airport and stamping down hard on student occupations of universities. In the face of the implacability of state power, the protest movements' fluffy dreams of peaceful revolution were viciously scalpel-sculpted into new and violent forms by Red Army hijackings, lynchings and hostage taking. The sense of confusion and lost innocence was further emphasized by teenage thrill killers, coin locker babies and the bizarre coup d'etat-cum-public suicide of novelist Yukio Mishima. Against this background Japanese youth music began to discard the perky Western imitations of the Group Sounds boom and the college folkies, and slide into more appropriately brutal forms of self expression. Folk turned angry and personal, while rock groups like Las Rallizes Denudes, Flower Travellin' Band and Keiji Haino's Lost Aaraaff discovered bad acid, dissonance and heavy electric blues.

       Some of the most exciting and evocative music of the time, however, was born out of the avant garde theatre groups that had played such a central role in the '60s ferment. One of the most important was the Tenjo Sajiki Company (its name taken from Marcel Carne's wartime occupation fantasy Les Enfants Du Paradis), formed by poet, film maker, boxing fan and all-around agent provocateur, Shuji Terayama. Renowned for Living Theatre-inspired audience participation happenings and extreme street theatre designed to shock the bourgeois, by 1970 the group had already become a haven for runaway teens, and a focus for police investigation. Terayama was canny enough to realize that co-opting their music was an ideal way to hijack adolescent energies, and he consistently used heavy amplified rock to jump-start his chaotic, socially critical acid operas.

       Heard today, even independent of their lyrical message, they're astonishingly powerful as pieces of music, deploying huge Magma choruses alongside juggernaut organ, guitar, bass, drums and fully out-there vocalizing. The pick of this bunch is the soundtrack to Terayawa's 1974 film Den-en Ni Shisu (Death In The Country). Described as a fictional autobiography, it tells of a sensitive adolescent poet who later becomes a film director, stuck with his neurotic mother in a rural northern backwater, who dreams of running off first with a neighbour's wife and then with a traveling freakshow. The film's fractured narrative of awakening sexuality and severing of parental bonds is captured in hallucinatory imagery and an equally ambitious soundtrack by J.A. Caesar, which binds the whole film together with a subtle, subconscious logic.

       The deployment of disparate elements in an all-consuming flow, which works even independently of the images, is masterly. The familiar psych guitar, organ and choral chanting are heavy enough in places -- as on the disc's definitive reading of Caesar's massive and haunting 'Wasan' -- to approach Sabbath levels of dense pounding, and there's also a frighteningly visceral vocal turn from folk singer Kan Mikami. But the score also sees Caesar expanding his instrumental palette, scoring some tracks for sideshow brass band or gently plucked guitar, weeping violin and chant. The weird intervals of his sparse, medieval-influenced melodies linger in the memory with the force of nostalgia for a past not directly experienced. It's an amazing performance: from street hippy who'd never picked up an instrument to film soundtrack composer in five years. Caesar's soundtrack for Den-en Ni Shisu lost out by a single vote to Toru Takemitsu for the best film soundtrack of 1974." -- Alan Cummings, The Wire.

Artist:	CAESAR, J.A.
Title:	Saraba Hakobune OST
Label:	SHOWBOAT/SKY STATION (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$28.00
Catalog #:	SWAX 063CD

"Another rarity is this original soundtrack album to Terayama Shuji's last movie with music by JA Seazer (Tenjo Sajiki, JA Caesar). Released in 1984, it was Terayama's last completed movie and Seazer's last contribution to his visionary and reactionary world. Saraba Habobune's soundtrack is just stunningly beautiful, far removed from Seazer's trademark bombastic scores. Instead it ventures into more pastoral and almost meditative psychedelic realms filled with traditional string plucking, eerie flute, shahuhachi flirtations, esoterically floating beneath-the-surface female Orff-like choruses and ethereal shamanistic sense of poetry that create memory flashes towards a forceful nostalgia of a past not directly experienced. The whole is endowed with beauty and an austere intimacy spiced up with occasional echoes of circus side show callers that seem to recall aspirational surges out of a concealed depth of former delinquent activities. A deceptively intense, casual in feel, yet meticulous in its musical detail and lyrical transmigrative eclectic beauty. A true astonishingly beautiful and ear-filling piece of consummate art that is so hard to come to terms with. Housed in eye-popping hard cover mini-LP styled gatefold sleeve art, complete with reproduction of the original inserts."

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