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viewing 1 To 8 of 8 items
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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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SWAX 080CD
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2nd CD reissue from Showboat of this classic Japanese underground folk-rock album, originally released by RCA Japan in 1971. Great mini-LP gatefold packaging, but very few made and not long for this world. "The Tropics was Minami Masato's first record on which he got assisted by Mizutani Takeshi of the Rallizes Denudes, his only appearance on record ever. Minami Masato was one of Japan's first beatnik hippie scum singers, who before venturing into the music world, spent some time in Mexico where he indulged himself in the narcotic goodies the country had to offer, went to America and witnessed in 1964 the rise of the beatnik movement and saw one of Bob Dylan's early performances. Minami's life would never be the same again. He crossed the Atlantic Ocean, criss-crossed through Europe and returned to Tokyo in 1966. He participated at the 1968 Kyoto Folk Jamboree Festival. However, his debut single did not appear until October 1969, followed by a second single in 1970. This album, his debut appeared in July 1971 for which he got assisted by a loose collective of fan musicians and befriended artists. Hadaka no Rallizes' Mizutani Takeshi was such a fan collaborator since he was quite in awe for what Minami stood for, being the unattached beatnik and drugged singer-songwriter he was. He let loose some ear shattering electric guitar on the album's closing track. This is the sole recorded output of Mizutani on disc. At least officially, if one ignores the dozen bootlegs and unofficially released music of his (like the Arthur Doyle-Mizutani 2LP set that was released without his consent). An unbelievably valuable document of the early Japanese underground. Hyper-rare and demented all the way. For lovers of Hadaka no Rallizes, Tomokawa Kazuki, acid folk, Jandek, and obscure and psyched-out sounds."
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SWAX 078CD
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"Tenjosajiki-related CD, reissue of a rare 1973 album, edition of only 500 copies."
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SWAX 066CD
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"Second Yanagida Hiro album, with Kimio Mizutani at the helm, swirling acid leads, heavy psych moves with at one point even an acidic Elvis joining the trip." Originally released in 1971. Deluxe gatefold sleeve packaging.
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TENJ 99003CD
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"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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SWAX 069CD
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"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."
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SWAX 063CD
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"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."
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SWAX 062CD
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"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.
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