Browse by Label: DRONE SYNDICATE (SWEDEN)

Artist:	TAJ MAHAL TRAVELLERS
Title:	Live Stockholm July, 1971
Label:	DRONE SYNDICATE (SWEDEN)
Format:	2CD
Price:	$11.00
Catalog #:	DRONE 001/2CD

New lower pricing; 2008 repress. "Led by infamous Fluxus member Takehisa Kosugi, Tokyo's Taj Mahal Travellers were one of the prime examples of a band more heard-of than actually heard. Their vinyl legacy (the 1972 LP July 15, 1972 released on CBS/Sony Japan; the 1974 2LP August 1974 released on Columbia Japan and recently reissued by P-Vine as a 2CD; one side of the mythical Oz Days Live 2LP compilation released on Oz in 1973 and recently bootlegged as a single LP) could dig a hole in your wallet deeper than the Grand Canyon. However, the recent reissues have spread the gospel and so here is the chance to hear the young Taj Mahal Travellers live in Stockholm during their 'tour' through Europe in 1971. It's one 2-hour long improvised track. Enough free-floating higher key bliss to keep every grown-up space cadet happy for a lot longer.." From Julian Cope's Japrocksampler: "This album is a discorporated, cerebral dance whose rhythm sounds like six weather Gods emulating the cover of Deep Purple's Fireball by zooming around Silverstone circuit just inches above the track, each urging himself on by making engine noises: 'Eee-oww-urghh-ow!!!!!!!' Opening with Ryo Koike's horizontally played bowed double bass, it's my fave of Taj Mahal Travellers' three releases, better even than the obstinate medication of the first official LP JULY 15, 1972, because there's twice as much of it. Meditatively, it's extremely useful too: at the entrance portals of this live record, Ryo Koike uses his bass to invoke phlegm phantoms and cranny demons from the butt walls of Cronosian caverns; conjuring a sound as Biblical as Conrad Schnitzler's bizarre bowed cello on T. Dream's Electronic Meditation. Gradually, hesitatingly, almost imperceptibly, a violin theme installs itself, establishing over the next quarter of an hour clop-clopping hooves of hollow rhythm that conjure up the image of frustrated pastoralists driving their reluctant donkeys around the highest and most precipitous cliff edges, as their valuable cargoes sway and shudder and threaten to come untied at any moment. Recorded a full year before their first official LP, I think this in concert album is a far better and more confident shamanic statement, for this Stockholm recording melded together all six group members in such a way that no single musician rises from the primal soup long enough to establish his singular muse. The vocal effects are truly stunning, evoking everything from comb-and-paper voices playing Zeus in the sixty-metre deep Dhikhtean Antron to braying cartoon coyotes laughing to their deaths."

Artist:	LOVE LIVE LIFE + ONE
Title:	Love Will Make A Better You
Label:	DRONE SYNDICATE (SWEDEN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$9.00
Catalog #:	DRONE 006CD

New lower pricing. "Number six on the Japrocksampler Top 50, available again for the first time in over a decade!" "Commencing with singer Akira Fuse's goggle-eyed one-day-old-baby innocence, Love Live Life + 1's album opener 'The Question Mark' escorts us through an eighteen-minute free-rock R&B adventure like nothing before or since. Clanking harsher than even the title track of Funkadelic's Free Your Mind & Your Ass Will Follow, and twice as long; cosmic as the Cosmic Joker's Galactic Supermarket, and gnarly as John McLaughlin's out-there-a-minute axe excursions on Miles's 'Right Off'' or his own Devotion solo LP, do these guys fight for their right to party! The mellower second side includes the insanely brilliant eight-minute epic 'Shadows Of My Mind,' in which Akira Fuse sings like some drunken Italian baritone, while atonal swooping strings and crazy brass support/undermine him; then it's off into a juggernaut bass-heavy clatterthon with duel-axe outrage of the highest level. And how about that title track whose catchy bastard licks unashamedly rip Sly's 'I Want To Take You Higher,' but still have you singing along with Fuse? The record closes brilliantly with the demented 'Facts About It All,' which opens like Fuse laying a grunting 6/8 James Brown/Eric Burdon ballad on us. But no, this miniature R&B opera says in 2 minutes and 56 seconds what prog bands took a whole side to say. All hail visionary genius Ikuzo Orita for uniting his fave guitarist Kimio Mizutani with the errant free-jazz Gibson 335 of Takao Naoi, whose brittle spittle pops permanent wheelies around these slippery rhythm tracks. Also hail Orita for recognizing the genius of these songs of sax player Kei Ichihara, for trusting Akira Fuse's professionalism and open-mindedness, and for seeing this 33-minute-long classic to its unlikely conclusion." -- Japrocksampler

Artist:	SATOH & SOUNDBREAKERS, MASAHIKO
Title:	Amalgamation
Label:	DRONE SYNDICATE (SWEDEN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$9.00
Catalog #:	DRONE 007CD

New lower pricing."Number seven on the Japrocksampler Top 50, available again for the first time in over a decade!" "This preposterous piece of psychedelic avant-jazz sounds like the work of aliens, each with only one foot in our universe. Propelled by cacophonous brassy blasts, volleys of machine-gunning, ecstatically 'Light Fantastic' rhythms and moments of Teo Macero-style 'Mixing Concrète' (during which the whole track becomes consumed by waves of new sound); the result is the most singular mash-up of inappropriate sounds any listener is ever likely to hear. Over two side-long tracks, shaman Masahiko Satoh sends us through a sonic mind-field, baffling our senses and our sense of gravity. Located at the centre of Amalgamation's giddy sessions was the frantic Detroit drumming of hard-bop legend Louis Hayes, whose role it was to play the bubbling ever unfolding fundament on which Masahiko Satoh's whole trip proceeded, as though the rhythm section were a magic carpet magically pulled out from under the feet of the other performers. Over this rhythmic shaking, Satoh scattered Hammond organ around and ring-modulated his Fender Rhodes piano solos (Roland built three especially for the record), added lead guitar from 'super session' legend Kimio Mizutani, trumpets and sax from Mototeru Takagi, scat singing from Kayoko Itoh, and strings from the Wehnne Strings Consort." -- Japrocksampler

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