Browse by Label: SHOWBOAT/SKY STATION (JAPAN)

Artist:	CAESAR, J.A.
Title:	Den-en Ni Shisu OST
Label:	SHOWBOAT/SKY STATION (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$28.00
Catalog #:	SWAX 057CD

First reissue of this 1974 J.A. Ceasar-performed theatrical underground classic. "The early '70s in Japan are often painted as an era of political and artistic disillusionment. On the one hand, the state rode roughshod over widespread opposition by renewing a mutual security treaty with the US, forcibly purchasing farming land near Tokyo for the construction of a new airport and stamping down hard on student occupations of universities. In the face of the implacability of state power, the protest movements' fluffy dreams of peaceful revolution were viciously scalpel-sculpted into new and violent forms by Red Army hijackings, lynchings and hostage taking. The sense of confusion and lost innocence was further emphasized by teenage thrill killers, coin locker babies and the bizarre coup d'etat-cum-public suicide of novelist Yukio Mishima. Against this background Japanese youth music began to discard the perky Western imitations of the Group Sounds boom and the college folkies, and slide into more appropriately brutal forms of self expression. Folk turned angry and personal, while rock groups like Las Rallizes Denudes, Flower Travellin' Band and Keiji Haino's Lost Aaraaff discovered bad acid, dissonance and heavy electric blues.

       Some of the most exciting and evocative music of the time, however, was born out of the avant garde theatre groups that had played such a central role in the '60s ferment. One of the most important was the Tenjo Sajiki Company (its name taken from Marcel Carne's wartime occupation fantasy Les Enfants Du Paradis), formed by poet, film maker, boxing fan and all-around agent provocateur, Shuji Terayama. Renowned for Living Theatre-inspired audience participation happenings and extreme street theatre designed to shock the bourgeois, by 1970 the group had already become a haven for runaway teens, and a focus for police investigation. Terayama was canny enough to realize that co-opting their music was an ideal way to hijack adolescent energies, and he consistently used heavy amplified rock to jump-start his chaotic, socially critical acid operas.

       Heard today, even independent of their lyrical message, they're astonishingly powerful as pieces of music, deploying huge Magma choruses alongside juggernaut organ, guitar, bass, drums and fully out-there vocalizing. The pick of this bunch is the soundtrack to Terayawa's 1974 film Den-en Ni Shisu (Death In The Country). Described as a fictional autobiography, it tells of a sensitive adolescent poet who later becomes a film director, stuck with his neurotic mother in a rural northern backwater, who dreams of running off first with a neighbour's wife and then with a traveling freakshow. The film's fractured narrative of awakening sexuality and severing of parental bonds is captured in hallucinatory imagery and an equally ambitious soundtrack by J.A. Caesar, which binds the whole film together with a subtle, subconscious logic.

       The deployment of disparate elements in an all-consuming flow, which works even independently of the images, is masterly. The familiar psych guitar, organ and choral chanting are heavy enough in places -- as on the disc's definitive reading of Caesar's massive and haunting 'Wasan' -- to approach Sabbath levels of dense pounding, and there's also a frighteningly visceral vocal turn from folk singer Kan Mikami. But the score also sees Caesar expanding his instrumental palette, scoring some tracks for sideshow brass band or gently plucked guitar, weeping violin and chant. The weird intervals of his sparse, medieval-influenced melodies linger in the memory with the force of nostalgia for a past not directly experienced. It's an amazing performance: from street hippy who'd never picked up an instrument to film soundtrack composer in five years. Caesar's soundtrack for Den-en Ni Shisu lost out by a single vote to Toru Takemitsu for the best film soundtrack of 1974." -- Alan Cummings, The Wire.

Artist:	TENJO SAJIKI
Title:	Throw Away The Books, Let's Go Out on the Street
Label:	SHOWBOAT/SKY STATION (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$28.00
Catalog #:	SWAX 062CD

"Typical of the company's early, crazed style is the recently reissued Throw Away The Books, originally released on their own label in 1970. Confusingly, there is a film soundtrack of the same title, but this is the extremely rare original theatrical version and contains entirely different material. Subtitled 'A High-Teen Symphony,' the performance centers around untrained adolescents reading out their own tortured, angry (and in one case, stuttering) texts and poems. Their stories of family disintegration and mother-hate, dreams and hopes for the future, and love songs to teen murderer Norio Nagayama and Mick Jagger are set to an attractively rough and ready pounding psych-rock soundtrack largely composed by organist Kuni Kawachi. Kawachi had been a member of pioneering Prog group Happenings Four and his brooding organ riffs feature throughout. As well as heavy rockers like the great opening 'Lets Go Ornette', with its ripping fuzz lead, Orff-style choral chants and motorbike effects, Kawachi was also capable of delicate, folkish pieces ideally suited for some of the company's outstanding female vocalists, several of whom developed successful singing careers outside of Tenjo Sajiki. Also of note is a track composed by a young design school dropout, Shinjuku street hippy and winner of a nationwide longhair competition, by the unlikely name of JA Caesar (Tenjo Sajiki also had its own Sinatra and Salvador Dali). Set to a simple handclap rhythm, Caesar's tale of the panhandling life possessed a subtle melodic strength and depth that hinted at the minor keys of traditional folk song. Caesar soon came into his own, composing all the music for Terayama's performances and films for the next decade, and finally inheriting the remnants of the troupe after Terayama's death in 1983." -- Alan Cummings, The Wire.

Artist:	SEAZER, JA
Title:	Saraba Hakobune OST
Label:	SHOWBOAT/SKY STATION (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$28.00
Catalog #:	SWAX 063CD

"Another rarity is this original soundtrack album to Terayama Shuji's last movie with music by JA Seazer (Tenjo Sajiki, JA Caesar). Released in 1984, it was Terayama's last completed movie and Seazer's last contribution to his visionary and reactionary world. Saraba Habobune's soundtrack is just stunningly beautiful, far removed from Seazer's trademark bombastic scores. Instead it ventures into more pastoral and almost meditative psychedelic realms filled with traditional string plucking, eerie flute, shahuhachi flirtations, esoterically floating beneath-the-surface female Orff-like choruses and ethereal shamanistic sense of poetry that create memory flashes towards a forceful nostalgia of a past not directly experienced. The whole is endowed with beauty and an austere intimacy spiced up with occasional echoes of circus side show callers that seem to recall aspirational surges out of a concealed depth of former delinquent activities. A deceptively intense, casual in feel, yet meticulous in its musical detail and lyrical transmigrative eclectic beauty. A true astonishingly beautiful and ear-filling piece of consummate art that is so hard to come to terms with. Housed in eye-popping hard cover mini-LP styled gatefold sleeve art, complete with reproduction of the original inserts."

Artist:	YANAGIDA, HIRO
Title:	Hirocosmos
Label:	SHOWBOAT/SKY STATION (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$28.00
Catalog #:	SWAX 068CD

"Top quality eye-popping reissue housed in hard cover mini-LP style gatefold sleeve complete with obi and liners of this rare 3rd album by psychedelic maverick Hiro Yanagida. Another totally vanished and ear bleedingly rare gem out of Japan's psychedelic history, this was Hiro Yanagida's (ex Apryl Fool, Food Brain, Sato Masahiko & Soundbreakers, Floral, etc) second solo album released in 1973. Original copies hardly ever surface anymore so this reissue is more than a welcome feast. The music is also just stellar and can be best described and as a mixture between Miles Davis electric mid-'70s electric period (minus the horns) cross-breeding with fusion and psychedelic elements, some snippets of unbridled improvisational jams and extended spun out instrumental tracks. Swirling key changes, synth driven organic whirlpools of exotic bliss, rigid time changes, swift communicative interplay that touches on freak-out jams as well as on sweet oozing interludes. A real sonic gem, and probably the best disc ever made to accompany your autumnal feelings of fleeting summer lust and last upsurge of vitality before winter settles in. One of the key recordings out of Japan 's psychedelic and progressive rock history and much in demand."

Artist:	TENJO SAJIKI
Title:	Hatsukoi Jigoku Hen
Label:	SHOWBOAT/SKY STATION (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$28.00
Catalog #:	SWAX 069CD

"Top notch and bang up identical reissue job by the high quality label Sky Station; gatefold mini-LP style sleeve complete with inserts and obi. This was originally a private pressing on Terayama Shuji's own Tenjosajiki label. The disc is a soundtrack to his like-named movie, of which the title can be roughly translated as 'Volume of First Love Hell.' Psychedelic insanity, spoken word insertions and has included great vocal participations by sublime vocalist Carmen Maki of Blues Creation. Great disc that rarely surfaces with everything intact. Meaning obi, gimmick jacket that folds open in triple parts once you open the album. Comes with pictures of Terayama, Carmen Maki and nude photographs of the main actors."

Artist:	MIKAMI, KAN
Title:	Yuyake No Kioku Kara - Aomori Live
Label:	SHOWBOAT/SKY STATION (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$28.00
Catalog #:	SWAX 075CD

"Originally released in 1976 on the legendary Victor SF series documenting outsider folk activities in Japan, this is one of the hardest Mikami LPs to track down, apart from his first two albums. This record sees Mikami returning to his home base, the northern prefecture of the bone-chillingly cold and weather beaten Aomori, delivering an intimate performance where he accompanies himself just on guitar with no back-up. A stunning and blood curdling live performance that proves once again that he is the ultimate acid folk/rural beatnik guttural hero. He wails out elegiac songs with enough conviction to strip the paint of the walls. But at the same time it is possibly -- partly due to his return to the motherland after having spent so much time in the concrete jungle of the capital -- his most private statement to date, loaded with cries of sorrow and grief, introspective mind trips and venomous laments that suggests he cries his heart out for dead souls and lost memories. In other words, his performance squeezes the last whiff of air out of your longs, leaving you exhausted and emotionally distressed. Great, only superlatives do him justice, all time possible highest recommendation. By the way, the audience response in the small theater is great and provides at times the ideal backup for his songs. You have to hear it in order to believe it... again quality reissue job, complete with mini-LP style gatefold jacket, obi, etc, all the works... it makes you drool just to hold it in yer hands."

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."

Artist:	TAJ MAHAL TRAVELLERS
Title:	July 15, 1972
Label:	SHOWBOAT/SKY STATION (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$28.00
Catalog #:	SWAX 501CD

Official CD reissue of the first Taj Mahal Travellers album, licensed from Sony Japan. Originally issued by CBS in Japan in 1972, this has been incredibly in-demand for quite some time (this Showboat edition was first issued in 2001 or thereabouts and is now more widely available again). The precursor to the 2nd and final Taj-Mahal Travellers album, August 1974 (reissued on P-vine in the late '90s and still available), this represents Fluxus-inspired drone and improvisation at its peak. The line up for this album is: Takehisa Kosugi (electronic violin, radio oscillators & voice), Ryo Loike (electronic contrabass, suntool, harmonia & sheet iron), Yukio Tsuchiya (vibraphon, suntool), Michihiro Kimura (electronic guitar & percussion), Seiji Nagai (electronic trumpet, harmonica & castanet), Tokio Hasegawa (vocal), Kinji Hayashi (electronic engineer), Go Hamada (producer). Recorded live at Sohgetsu Hall, Tokyo on 7/15/72.

Artist:	KOSUGI, TAKEHISA
Title:	Catch-Wave
Label:	SHOWBOAT/SKY STATION (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$28.00
Catalog #:	SWAX 502CD

Official CD reissue (more recently repro'd by World Psychedelia), licensed from Sony Japan. Originally issued by CBS in Japan-only in 1975, this album has been as difficult to find as either of the original Taj Mahal Travellers' LPs. The descriptive text on the back jacket of this exact repro gives an insight: "sounds speeding on lights, light speeding on sounds, music between riddles & solutions." A devastating, drone-intense record (unlike Kosugi's later solo recordings for Lovely Music or P-vine; Catch-Wave is the closest follow-up recording to his Taj Mahal Travellers group in the form of group improvisation), finally accessible.

Artist:	TENJO SAJIKI
Title:	Barmon
Label:	SHOWBOAT/SKY STATION (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$28.00
Catalog #:	TENJ 99003CD

"This is a limited reissue of the ultra rare privately released Tenjo Sajiki record Baramon. This identical reissue dates from 2003 and was released in a tiny edition of 500 copies, which sold out in a matter of weeks. But about the music: 'Some of the most exciting and evocative music of the early '70s in Japan was born out of the avant-garde theatre groups that had played such a central role in the '60s ferment. One of the most important was the Tenjo Sajiki Company formed by poet, film maker, boxing fan and all-around agent provocateur Terayama Shuji. Renowned for Living-Theatre inspired audience participation happenings and extreme street theatre designed to shock the bourgeois; by 1970 the group had already become a haven for runaway teens, and a focus for police investigation. Terayama was canny enough to realize that co-opting their music was an ideal way to hijack adolescent energies and he consistently used heavy amplified rock to jump-start his chaotic, socially critical acid operas. By 1972, Baramon saw J.A. Seazer and Kuni Kawauchi (of the Happenings Four and Kirikyogen) splitting the compositional scores on a bizarre musical manifesto for sexual liberation. So far so Hair, but rather than a tribute to free love, Terayama instead composed an eloquent plea for the liberation of the sexual underclass suffering discrimination, in the form of a 'gay revolution.' It wasn't Terayama's first engagement with the Tokyo queer scene -- one of the earliest plays he wrote for the Tenjo Sajiki was a vehicle for transvestite actress and chanson singer Akihiro Miwa, who was rumored to have had a dalliance with Yukio Mishima. Baramon's opening is a blast -- a densely narrated and impassioned call to arms set to a Nazi military march that links sexual second class citizenship to imperialist social control and warmongering. Featuring the actual voices of numerous smutty, cross-dressing scene queens, the record's content was deemed so subversive that it was only sold under the counter of Tokyo gay bars. Like a biker backstage at the Cage Aux Folles, fuzzed out guitar riffs and heavy swelling organ-based psych rock tracks rub shoulders with the lachrymose ballads and tawdry, mascara smudging chanson still favored in certain Shinjuku nighteries.'" - The Wire, Alan Cummings.

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