Browse by Artist: MIKAMI/ISHIZUKA, TOSHI

Artist:	MIKAMI/ISHIZUKA, TOSHI
Title:	Shinshi-no-Yuuutsu
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	PSF 8007CD

"Another March, another spring, another studio record by Japan's folk philosopher-king Kan Mikami. If you were wondering how he was planning to top last year's monolithic 13 CD boxset, here's the simplest of answers. A duo record with long-time comrade in arms (and the Tokyoscene's most self-effacing drummer), Toshi Ishizuka. Ishizuka is best known as the ball of percussive energy that powered Vajra, but he has an underground history as long as your arm, stretching right back to Japan's original seventies rock-punkers Zuno Keisatsu. As well as being Kazuki Tomokawa's drummer of choice for the past 30 years, Ishizuka has led Cinorama, released a couple of solo drum disks (including last year's wonderful PSF release In The Night [PSFD-107]), and held down a career as a session drummer. For as many years as anyone cares to remember he's also played in a regular monthly duo with Mikami (first Sunday of each month, Aketa's Place in Tokyo's Nishi-Ogikubo). That duo has seen some previous low-key documentation on a couple of compilations, including the Opprobrium benefit Waiting To Be Old, but this is their first full album release. On the six new tracks on Shinshi No Yuuutsu (which can be translated as A Gentleman's Depression), Mikami is in as fine a fettle as ever. Gruff, hoarse and strangled, choking out a multi-voiced pearled stream of wisdom, his guitar rippling and jerking through those convulsive A-minor patterns akin to little else on god's earth. Ishizuka is the perfect partner to Mikami's unique phrasing, all in the eternal now as straight forward momentum is fractured into a schizophrenic tumble in twenty dimensional directions at once. His playing has a rock heaviness, but broken through with delicate improv shadings and an occasional and unexpected processed whoosh. It's a naked and innocent record, as yielding as granite and as hard as new-born baby..." -- Alan Cummings

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