Browse by Artist: HAINO, KEIJI

Artist:	HAINO, KEIJI
Title:	Abandon All Words At A Stroke, So That Prayer Can Come Spill
Label:	ALIEN8 RECORDINGS (CANADA)
Format:	2CD
Price:	$20.00
Catalog #:	ALIEN 027CD

2011 repress. "We are very pleased to announce two new recordings by Keiji Haino, focusing on hurdy-gurdy and wave drum. Continuing in the vein of our previous release with Haino (the 66 minute drone So, Black is Myself ) this double CD remains very dark and very ambient for the most part. Each disc features one long piece using one of the two different instruments and each is individually titled. The main title as well as the individual track titles perhaps give the best insight into the mind of this enigmatic performer and the message he is trying to convey. Keiji Haino is easily one of the most exciting live performers of our time, exuding a passion and an intensity rarely matched. Disc 1 is a solo piece for hurdy-gurdy and is an absolute gem. It is among the most gentle and beautiful pieces of work we have been graced with by His Darkness. At times comparable with elements of the Affection recording that came out PSF in the early nineties and like disc two recalls the work of Nijiumu, another project of Haino. Disc 2 starts off really quiet with metallic resonation, slices of treated voice fragments and loops of feedback. It continues with rattling and bursts of vocal shrieks, with periods of absolute silence shattered by jarring belches of sound. Out in anyone's Keiji Haino collection. This is certainly one of Keiji Haino's most psychedelic sounding solo releases, at times reminiscent of early works by Amon Duul's Psychedelic Underground and Experimante recordings and at times it recalls some of the work by pioneering psychedelic ensembles from Japan such as Kawabata Mokoto's Acid Mothers Temple, East Bionic Symphonia and Taj Mahal Travellers."

Artist:	HAINO, KEIJI
Title:	21st Century Hard-y-Guide-y Man
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	PSF 068CD

"Solo hurdy-gurdy improvisations. Haino has long been a fan of medieval music, which is one of the few places where the hurdy-gurdy makes an appearance. It's a pity that the instrument isn't more used since it has great possibilities for higher-minded multiple drones that can vary in sound from a high-pitched violin-like scraping and squealing to deep quaking resonances. The beauty of the instrument is that you can combine the various drones to build up a multi-layered effect...He's been experimenting with them over the past year or so in various permutations -- solo, with Fushitsusha, with Vajra and in duos with other musicians. The sounds produced have ranged from gentle accompaniment to a dense brain-altering fug that blows everyone else off stage...Five tracks of beautiful late-night drones, suffused with instantly recognizable Haino atmosphere of mystery." --Alan Cummings

Artist:	HAINO, KEIJI
Title:	Mazu Wa Iro O Nakuso Ka
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	PSF 8014CD

(Translation: First Let's Remove the Color). "Gorgeous new bag of home-recorded mystery from Haino. Apparently recorded alone, late at night and at minimal volume, these latest recordings tremble with the same deep-welled emotional sensitivity and sense of veiled threat that animated classics like Watashi Dake?, Affection and Era of Sad Wings. With the trademark roar of his guitar held in check by necessity, Haino instead builds up a base of gently fractured looped riffs, over which he unfurls snaking, jagged ribbons of blue notes, layers of choral chant and whispered warnings. The atmosphere is replete with suggestions of medieval music, delta blues, and jazz - but glimpsed through a constantly shifting, dark and alien fog. The effect is entirely beautiful, managing to be impossibly touching, deeply meditative, and truly scary all at once. This is one that will suck the air out of the corners of your room late at night." -- Alan Cummings.

Artist:	HAINO, KEIJI
Title:	Hikari Yami Uchitokeaishi Kono Hibiki
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	PSF 8017CD

"First album of solo guitar by Keiji Haino in quite some time, but very much a departure from the mountain-levelling, continent-sundering, weather-system huge electric guitar releases of years past. Hikari yami... is played just on acoustic, gut-strung guitar, entirely forsaking the effects and extreme amplification characteristic of his electric work. Over three lengthy improvised pieces, recorded in clothes-rustling close-up, Haino explores the full dynamic range of the instrument, working abyss deep into his eternal preoccupations of duration, decay, sustain and resonance. Vast spectrums of reference, from Bailey and Fahey to flamenco, oud music and bluegrass are invoked in single notes and brief phrases, only to be dismissed with confident authority. Another masterful piece of work from Haino, as replete with mystery and the sadness of existence as ever. The title roughly translates as 'Light darkness melting into one this vibration'. Haino advises the listener to play as loud as possible -- surely a first on an album of acoustic guitar." -- Alan Cummings.

Artist:	HAINO, KEIJI
Title:	Uchu ni karami tsuiteiru waga itami
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	PSF 8020CD

Keiji Haino (digital theremin, air synth, air FX, etc). Another step into previously unexplored territory for Haino -- his first ever all-electronic album. Uchu ni karami tsuiteiru waga itami (the title means roughly 'Tangled up in the universe, my pain') sees Haino using a bewildering range of electronic instruments. However, these are not the vintage synthesizers and analogue modules so beloved of some other Japanese electronic units. Rather Haino has chosen instruments whose user interface is close to magical: theremin-like devices such as the air-synth and air-FX, both of which are controlled by hand movements in three dimensions. Recent live shows have seen him hovering and jerking wildly over these devices, like some demented conjuror trying to levitate a table. The results are as purely Haino as everything else he lays his hands to. Sub-atomic particles and dark matter collide endlessly in the black and coiling chaos space of some just-appeared proto-galaxy." -- Alan Cummings.

Artist:	HAINO, KEIJI
Title:	Global Ancient Atmosphere
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	PSF 8021CD

Keiji Haino (drums). "Rhythm, duration and silence lie at the foundation of all of Haino's music. After a clutch of documents of his hair-raising solo performances for both acoustic and electric percussion, this latest album presents Haino's first recorded outing behind a regular drumkit. Haino has long desired to release a solo drum album, and he has been playing a regular kit occasionally live for several decades now. Global Ancient Atmosphere (the alternative Japanese title means 'These signs, a sealed beginning') contains nine tracks that showcase an austere yet thrilling investigation of attack and decay on nothing less than the molecular level. As inimitable, and as life-affirming as ever." -- Alan Cummings.

Artist:	HAINO, KEIJI
Title:	Yaranaiga Dekinaikotoni Natteyuku
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$19.00
Catalog #:	PSF 8024CD

"Following Keiji Haino's recent experiments with acoustic guitar, solo Theremin and electronics, and percussion, this is his first guitar and vocal album in a couple of years. Emotionally devastating, gorgeously intense free-floating atmospherics that hark back to the folk-ed out genius of Affection, with a caustic blending of the layered, late-night guitar extrapolations of First Let's Remove the Colour. As masterfully singular as ever." --Alan Cummings

Artist:	HAINO, KEIJI
Title:	Koitsukara Usetaitameno Hakarigoto
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$19.00
Catalog #:	PSF 8029CD

The return of the "21st Century Hard-y-Guide-y Man"! "With its crank handle mechanism and drone strings out-numbering melody strings, the hurdy-gurdy is the Ur-industrial instrument par excellence, a connection Keiji Haino makes abundantly clear on the opening track of Koitsukara Usetaitameno Hakarigoto, the third album he has made under the tortuously punning banner of the 21st Century Hard-y Guide-y Man. The terrifying density and textures of his bone-shearing noise immediately bring to mind the arresting closing sequence of Halber Mensch, Japanese director Sogo Ishii's document of Berlin group Einstuerzende Neubauten's mid-1980s visit to Japan, when he filmed them in all their destructive glory at a busy intersection bringing the city to a standstill with their armoury of scraped metal and heavy machinery. The major difference is Haino achieves his pandemonium totally alone on an electrically amplified medieval instrument, and the chaos he invokes is of a wholly other kind to that of the displaced Berliners. Rather than creating chaos, he accepts it, even as he taps it for the tremendous energies needed to generate the overarching schemes that shape and contain his monumental works. Haino is not the only person using the hurdy-gurdy as something more than folksy color. There's Stevie Wishart working at the interface of contemporary composition and improvisation; and hurdy-gurdy player Cliff Stapleton featured strongly in the late output of Coil (the UK outfit of John Balance and Peter Christopherson, not to be confused with the Japanese unit of the same name with whom Haino has performed blues sets live). And though the hurdy-gurdy is but one of the hundreds of instruments he has gathered during his frequent working trips around the world, next to guitar, voice, percussion and electronics, it's the one on which Haino continues to evolve a distinctive body of work that is at once of a piece with and different from the main thrust of his music. Not that any one style holds true, mind, in a discography that is approaching 200 entries. As with his other instruments, Haino has developed methods of playing the hurdy-gurdy that both exploit and defy its particular character. Asked what compelled him to acquire one on a trip to France in the mid-1990s, he replied by mimicking the turning of a handle, saying it was the only instrument he knew of that you played that way, as opposed to striking, blowing, bowing or plucking it. His long-held interest in medieval European troubadour music might well have been another contributing factor. However, the hurdy-gurdy is more than the purely mechanical cranked instrument such as the barrel organ which it is sometimes confused with. The handle turns a rosined wooden wheel that bows a melody string, whose pitches are determined by pressing the tangents, or keys, with the other hand. The instrument usually contains two more sympathetic drone strings. How the player jerks or cranks the handle creates the fluttering beats and rhythms characteristic to its traditional use as a folk instrument at carnival or festival dances. Knowing as much is only so helpful to understanding the way Haino plays it. He hadn't had the instrument long when he released his first hurdy-gurdy album, Twenty-first Century Hard-y- Guide-y Man, on PSF in 1995. It was followed in 1998 by Even Now, Still I Think, released by the Japanese major label Tokuma as part of an extraordinary deal that saw the release of eight Haino/Fushitsusha projects in two stages (and if you think signing to a major in any way compromised the artist, you only have to check the number of CD length tracks of unrelieved intensity produced during the deal). First impressions from both is that Haino's instrument of choice is immaterial, that Haino plays Haino regardless, and on these two occasions the hurdy-gurdy just happened to be the tool selected to do so. To be sure, they both set out an extreme position from which they rarely retreat, with Haino sounding like he's pushing the instrument to the very limits of endurance. This is especially the case on the barely wavering 72-minute assault of the Tokuma disc. But as with much of Haino's music, it rewards the listener's perseverance through its most extenuated passages, which often come right at the front of his work, with moments of otherworldly, overwhelming beauty amid the swarming overtone activity generated at this volume. Before returning to his 21st Century Hard-y Guide-y Man persona on Koitsukara Usetaitameno Hakarigoto here, Haino dedicated a hurdy-gurdy disc apiece to the two double sets, Abandon all words at a stroke, so that prayer can come spilling out (released in 2001 by the Canadian label Alien8) and Reveal'd to none as yet -- an expedience to utterly vanish consciousness while still alive (recorded live at Tokyo Super Deluxe in 2005 and jointly released in December that year by the U.S. labels Archive/Important). Through them, all it's possible to discern id an increasing awareness and appreciation of the hurdy-gurdy's character. It's very much evident in this disc's opening track, alluded to earlier, in the way the turning crank handle sinks its drone deeper to the core, even as it sends up the baleful clouds of overtone dust that hover above the churning chaos. Tracks two and three make play with the bowing mechanism of the hurdy-gurdy wheel, its sorely tested violin tone transformed into an electric buzzsaw over rasping tones that simultaneously betray and exploit the hurdy-gurdy's fundamentally primitive construct. The third track, incidentally, is the album's magnificent centerpiece, evolving from a manic hoedown into a frenzied dance warding off the onset of melancholia represented by a buzzing secondary drone. Elsewhere the sounds Haino draws from the instrument range from delicate music box prettiness to something altogether darker, conjuring an image of a creaking ghost ship whose fate it was to be sealed at the point of breaking up in a storm for all eternity." --Biba Kopf

Artist:	HAINO, KEIJI
Title:	New Rap
Label:	TZADIK
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	TZ 7262

"Keiji Haino is a mysterious psychedelic minstrel who has been performing his peculiar blend of rock, medieval music and improvisation since the early 1970s. Incredibly prolific, he has headed dozens of bands and released hundreds of CDs on a variety of labels around the globe. His latest project is a wild duo with Ruins mastermind Yoshida Tatsuya, the undisputed master drummer of the Japanese Underground. Featuring Haino's unique singing and screaming style as well as his best guitar playing to date, this is a remarkably varied and creative program of radical music by two of Japan's greatest originals."

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