Browse by Artist: TOMOKAWA, KAZUKI

Artist:	TOMOKAWA, KAZUKI
Title:	Shibuya Appia Document
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	PSF 065CD

Tomokawa's seventh release for PSF consists of live performances recorded in 1993-95 at Shibuya Apia. He plays acoustic guitar and sings throughout, with only minor backing on piano or accordion. The power of musical performance demonstrated here is typically staggering; Tomokawa's guitar playing is purely invigorating and intense (as physical as acoustic playing can get), and his voice is a towering outlet; an emotional songform beyond all international limits.

Artist:	TOMOKAWA, KAZUKI
Title:	Zeiniku Na Asa (Fat in The Morning Light)
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	PSF 082CD

"Eighth CD on PSF from the true master of unalloyed humanity and possessed song-spirit. Too many underground dilettantes are unable to deal with the idea of 'song' per se, pinning their faith in some nebulous idea of 'improvisation' as the only touchstone of musical worth. Thus the complete nonacceptance of Tomokawa outside of Japan. But, for real unlimited minds with open ears there's beauty that Tomokawa manages to wring from every possessed note and syllable. Life-on-the-line-every-time, emotionally transcendent playing doesn't get any better than this!"

Artist:	TOMOKAWA, KAZUKI
Title:	Yume Wa Hibi Genki Ni Shinde Yuku
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	PSF 096CD

Title translates as Dreams Die Blithefully Day By Day. "Commemorating 25 years of unheralded existence for this unknown lyric poet/artist/betting tipster/folk-singer maniac. Tomokawa first emerged, with Kan Mikami, during Japan's underground folk boom of the early 70s, and has remained as a uniquely uncompromising obscure figure ever since. This is his ninth record for PSF, and features him in alternately introspective and insane screaming modes, with the accompaniment of longtime collaborator Masato Nagahata and legendary free bassist Motoharu Yoshizawa (whose previous collaborations with Tomokawa on the Hitori Bonodori and Maboroshi to asobu albums were some of the most exciting psychedelic acidfolk-avant collisions since Brigitte Fontaine met the Art Ensemble of Chicago). There remains little left to say about Tomokawa -- he possesses one of the most distinctively human voices and approaches anywhere. Maybe the fact that he sings equally convincingly in English on a couple of tracks on this record will finally gain him some long-deserved attention outside of Japan."

Artist:	TOMOKAWA, KAZUKI
Title:	Best Of
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	3CD
Price:	$54.00
Catalog #:	PSF 101/3CD

"PSF's first triple CD, celebrating 25 years (his recorded debut was in 1974 on Toshiba-EMI) of musical activity by legendary 'sensitive' folk-singer Kazuki Tomokawa. In spite of his criminal lack of name-value in the West, in a strange way it's entirely appropriate that PSF's first triple CD should be by Tomokawa. Painter, poet, singer, manual labourer, gambler, actor, legendary drinker (and more recently, invaluable bicycle-race tipster) -- Tomokawa is cut from a truly human, outsider cloth they don't make anymore. The first CD is a compilation mostly focussing on the eight previous Tomokawa releases on PSF, but also including some tracks from earlier in his career. The second disk features unreleased excerpts from three live performances in 1976, `85, and '89. Quality on these is fairly rough in places, but as historical documents of blasted outsider-folk you are not going to see their like again. The final disk is 13 new tracks of heavily-accented symbolism, all recorded solo in Tomokawa's patented raw murmur/scream with guitar thrash-abuse. The only true inheritor of the Buckley mantle..." --Alan Cummings

Artist:	TOMOKAWA, KAZUKI
Title:	Sora No Sakana (Sky Fish)
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	PSF 8003CD

"1999 album from Tomokawa -- Japan's other greatest underground folk singer, not to mention accomplished poet and painter, inveterate on-stage drunk, and now successful bicycle-race tipster. Eight new tracks of deeply zoned, uniquely identifiable, pure folk-soul communication, that range from melodies of limpid beauty, to sudden plunges into viciously hammered guitar, that voice rising, now screaming, and cracking into violent fragments as the other instruments following into a flailing and cathartic rhythmic purge. On Sora No Sakana, Tomokawa returns to some familiar obsessions -- the possibilities of the nursery rhyme form, musical settings for the poems of Japan's tragic symbolist poet Chuya Nakahara (in the '70s Tomokawa recorded an entire album of Nakahara's poems), and deceptively opaque natural imagery. At the centre of each song is Tomokawa's acoustic guitar and unmistakable voice, augmented with an unusually resourceful and sympathetic group of longterm collaborators (including Toshi Ishitsuka from Vajra). A unique individualist talent worthy of more support." -- Alan Cummings

Artist:	TOMOKAWA, KAZUKI
Title:	Akai Polyan (Red Polyanthus)
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	PSF 8005CD

"Eleventh PSF album from the Japanese underground's most handsome folk-truthteller and all-round renaissance man. Nine new songs, including two more musical settings for the symbolist poems of Japan's Rimbaud: Chuya Nakahara. Tomokawa has inhabited an utterly unique world very much of his own making for over twenty-five years now. A world where the most limpid of minor melodies and symbolism-inspired natural imagery can happily rub shoulders with EXTREMELY peaked torrents of pained screams over the densest of acoustic noise-scapes. What welds it all together is Tomokawa's self-evident to desire to take himself and his audience through the wall with every performance. Forget any image of the sensitive folkie, Tomokawa's music is as violent and cathartic as anything in the underground rock or free jazz canon. For anyone at all still concerned with the possibilities of words, voice, and acoustic communication, Tomokawa is an unparalleled contemporary touchstone. There is more truth and beauty in any one of his songs than in most singer-songwriter's entire repertoires. Believe it." -- Alan Cummings

Artist:	TOMOKAWA, KAZUKI
Title:	Erise no Me
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	PSF 8008CD

"Tomokawa's twelfth leader album on PSF (the title translates as The Eyes of Elise), and hence his nineteenth in a career that dates back to the mid-seventies. Tomokawa stands, together with Kan Mikami, as one of the most unique singer-poets thrown up by Japan's folk boom of the late sixties and early seventies. Each new album from him represents not simpleminded 'progression' but a privileged glimpse into a sound continuum as forcefully individual and special as any other name you might want to drop in this field (duh -- Buckley, Drake, Hurley, Jandek even). In Tomokawa's universe, melodies of limpid and mellifluous grace rub shoulders with rhythmically violently and convulsive purges of soul bile. Tomokawa's voice is one of the most special in the Japanese underground: ragged, strained and deeply accented, far removed from conventional standards of singerly intonation, but undoubtedly a sound of deeply human beauty. The group provide the ideal un-square settings for Tomokawa's complex symbolist songs, at all times attaining a perfect marriage of acoustic density and forward lope. As an added bonus, long time admirer Keiji Haino adds some trademark abyssal guitar on two tracks." -- Alan Cummings.

Artist:	TOMOKAWA, KAZUKI
Title:	Kenshin e ichigeki
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	PSF 8013CD

"Screaming folk-poet Tomokawa's twentieth album in a career that stretches back to the seventies. And there's still no sign of him mellowing with age -- he still spits lyrical bile and emotional venom like no one else on this earth. His forceful long-term group provides loose and translucent settings for Tomokawa's beautiful madness, and the return of Ayumi Matsui on soaring violin is a very welcome development. This latest album was inspired by and is dedicated to the memory of Kenshin Sumitaku, a young free-meter haiku poet who died from leukaemia at the age of twenty-five. Yet another genuine, humanly touching, inspiring masterpiece from one of the unsung contemporary masters." -- Alan Cummings

Artist:	TOMOKAWA, KAZUKI
Title:	Itsuka Tooku O Miteita
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	PSF 8019CD

"Compilation of new and previously released tracks from Kazuki Tomokawa, Japan's god of emotionally transcendent song. Tomokawa's convulsive and passionate songs have recently graced films by two of Japan's most notorious directors, legendary underground director Koji Wakamatsu (whose career dates back to the early sixties) and Takashi Miike, the current enfant terrible of weird and ultra-violent genre flicks. Tomokawa's appearance playing himself in Miike's time-travelling samurai vengeance movie IZO in particular has stunned festival audiences -- the violent, cathartic and irrational beauty of his songs chimes perfectly with the film's mood. Twelve tracks in total, including 'Pistol' the amazing title-track from IZO, previously only available as part of the PSF 13 CD boxset (PSFD-134 / 146). Also includes three entirely new tracks, and three radical re-recordings." -- Alan Cummings.

Artist:	TOMOKAWA, KAZUKI
Title:	Live 2005 Banana Hall Osaka
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$19.00
Catalog #:	PSF 8022CD

"Kazuki Tomokawa's gigs are now a lot less frequent than they used to be, and his August 2005 Osaka date was his first in Kansai for quite some time. But accompanied by his long-time trio of Toshi Ishizuka on percussion and Masato Nagahata on piano, this was, in Tomokawa's own estimation, the best gig that this trio has ever played. It was far too good a performance to be left to fading memories, and Tomokawa himself talked PSF into releasing it. Sixteen tracks of his patented soul-folk, emotionally charged and devastating as all hell." -- Alan Cummings.

Artist:	TOMOKAWA, KAZUKI
Title:	Blue Water, Red Water
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$19.00
Catalog #:	PSF 8028CD

"Latest album of devastating emotional transcendence from the Japanese underground's most lyrical singer-songwriter. Full of classic, richly textured songs of love, loss and stunned acquiescence to the wonders of the world. Alongside Tomokawa's regular collaborators, Toshiaki Ishizuka and Masato Nagahata, the expanded group also includes Compostela-veteran Takero Sekijima on tuba and recorder, and improv-legend Hiromichi Sakamoto on cello. Includes Tomokawa's ending theme song for director Rokuro Mochizuki's Johnen - Jo no Ai, a re-telling of the Abe Sada story. Booklet includes lyrics in Japanese and English." -- Alan Cummings.

Artist:	TOMOKAWA, KAZUKI
Title:	Muzan no bi [Beauty without mercy]
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$24.00
Catalog #:	TOMOKAW 001CD

Six previously released titles by Kazuki Tomokawa have been reissued in special art editions ("Picture Jacket Collection"), strictly limited to 500 copies each. Each will come in a gatefold card jacket, with new specially commissioned illustrations by Tomokawa on the cover and gatefold. All titles have been previously available from PSF in regular jewel box editions apart from Chuya Nakahara Poems, which was a bonus disk previously only available as part of the Tomokawa boxset." Muzan no bi was the second Tomokawa CD to be released via PSF, originally issued in 1995 as PSF 033CD. A reissue of a 1985 masterpiece. More of his aggressive and inspired Japanese folk.

Artist:	TOMOKAWA, KAZUKI
Title:	Shibuya APIA Document
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$24.00
Catalog #:	TOMOKAW 005CD

Fifth volume in the PSF Picture Jacket Collection of Tomokawa reissues. Originally released as PSF 065CD. Tomokawa's seventh release for PSF consists of live performances recorded in 1993-95 at Shibuya Apia. He plays acoustic guitar and sings throughout, with only minor backing on piano or accordion. The power of musical performance demonstrated here is typically staggering; Tomokawa's guitar playing is purely invigorating and intense (as physical as acoustic playing can get), and his voice is a towering outlet; an emotional songform beyond all international limits.

Artist:	TOMOKAWA, KAZUKI
Title:	Yatto Ichi Mai Me
Label:	SHOWBOAT/SKY STATION (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$28.00
Catalog #:	SWAX 081CD

"Faithful official reproduced reissue housed in the always top notch mini-LP styled gatefold jackets, obi and inserts. This was Tomokawa's first record, released in October 1975. He is undoubtedly the unequaled master of possessed song-spirit. Here the young Tomokawa wails and screams emotionally hard enough in order to strip the paint of the walls. Nevertheless at times he gets quite emotional and laid back in order to hush his haunting demons to sleep. Just a splendid piece of Japanese acid folk and chant exorcism. Tomokawa's music is violent, emotionally charged with insane screaming modes, piercing sensitivity, cathartic rhythmic purge, thrashing acoustic guitar aesthetic and harsh, reflecting the atmosphere of the bleak northern prefecture of Aomori. Hardly turns up these days. Stunningly great psychedelic-acid-avant-outsider folk music. For fans of Mikami Kan, Jandek, acid folk, Iuchi Kengo, J.A.Seazer, psych heads all around and adventurous music geeks. If you are interested in acid folk, well look no further cause it will not get any better than this. Highly recommended official top notch high quality reissue of this rare early (1st) Tomokawa disc."

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