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CD
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SWAX 058CD
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"Identical and deluxe reissue of this deliriously mega-rare and hardly known Itoh Kiyoko record. Normally if you want to score a copy of the original vinyl you are required to donate most of your vital organs to some yakuza-typed black marketer, but luckily enough, this one here is easier to attain without ripping out a lung or a liver to pound off. The CD is housed in an eye-popping foldout jacket. It was the final album Itoh recorded in 1971 and on this effort she got backed up by again a bunch of Tokyo underground heavy weights such as J.A. Seazer and Kuni Kawauchi of the Happenings Four. On this album, Itoh's talent is fully flowering and apart from merely eargasmatic songs, she hushes into being, atmospheric city-life field recordings and well-balanced sound snippets find their way in and between her compositions. These flashes of cosmopolitan Tokyo city life grandeur and the feeling of desperate desolation it tails along elevate her impeccable melancholic love ballads and softly erotic excursions to even higher levels of artistic expression, catapulting the whole affair towards eerie, stratospheric, heavenly, delightful realms. Sadly enough, both of her albums failed to catch on, not poppy enough, too melancholic, way too creative, artistically too advanced, hard to categorize and probably even too erotically sophisticated without degrading herself to mere carnal sonic one-hit wonders. In one word, a delicate, soft, psychedelic wonderland avenue of an album that will entrap simple airhead listeners into a deadlock without giving them the chance to fully explore the absinthial pleasures it conceals. If one only cares to listen to what lies underneath its surface layer, a new form of aural addiction will commence to besiege you. One of the greatest underrated delicate psychedelic female vocal albums to seep out of Japan. Original copies just never surface and if they do, you have to trade in -- in most cases -- a limb in order to take one home with you. So this eye-popping delicately crafted reissue might be just the thing you need. If you got entangled into Kaji Meiko's sonic universe, you should try Itoh Kiyoko. All-time highest recommendation and forget about original vinyl copies, they are even scarcer that all your Blues Creation, Too Much and Oz Days records together. Highest recommendation."
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