Browse by Artist: MIKAMI/HE YON/ISHITSUKA/SATOH

Artist:	MIKAMI/HE YON/ISHITSUKA/SATOH
Title:	Fu-kon
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	PSF 8001CD

"Historically, the relations between Japan and its closest neighbors have not been among the smoothest in the international arena. For a long time there was a blanket ban on Japanese culture of any sort being sold in Korea, and cultural exchanges were by necessity greatly limited. There have been notable underground exceptions, such as university performances by theatrical renegade Kara Juro (who also brought back Korean musicians and actors to play at this performances in Tokyo). Now there is another to add to that list. Female Korean percussionist and vocalist Shin He Yon met up with THE leading voice of emotionally-saturated Japanese outsider art-folk Kan Mikami at a festival in Iwaki in 1997. With similar oral shamanic cultural backgrounds the two immediately hit it off, played together, and they were easily coaxed into the studio to lay down some tracks of transcendent cultural detente. Kan gets to sing his soul out in Korean (not that you're going to be able to tell the difference), Shin croons with a beautiful cracked edge to her voice and then drums up a storm, and countercultural icons Ishitsuka (drummer of Japan's first underground rock band Zuno Keisatus, longtime Kazuki Tomokawa collaborator, Vajra stalwart), and Satoh (Shamisen maverick with Zorn-connections) get to sketchin the backgrounds. There's a hard-to-articulate perfect sense of acid-folk looseness to this record. Rarely has Kan's voice been given such a sympathetically warm setting. Shin is the ideal counterpoint, both on vocals and heavy percussion." -- Alan Cummings.

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