Tokio Hasegawa was a founding member, here adding his voice and performing on stones, and in his liner notes he remarks that remaining original members of this group are either dead, out of the communication loop, or have subscribed to a religion that prevents them from ever playing music again. In fact, we might be lucky to have Tokio Hasegawa here at all; according to one account he also gave up on music at one point, and devoted himself instead to collecting Indian art after he had a revelation engendered by the Madhubani paintings of Ganga Devi, and even opened a museum for this purpose in 1982. He also mentions how the first 1972 LP – recorded on this exact same 15 July date – was released by CBS Sony in Japan, itself no mean achievement – I mean finding a major label prepared to release and promote experimental music, which I file alongside other one-of-a-kind anomalies such as AMM on Elektra and Tony Oxley on CBS and RCA.

If we reflect on all this, there’s an underlying message somewhere about uncertainty. For this 2022 performance for instance, only 60 people were inside this tiny venue, and not even the musicians taking part (soaking wet after a laborious trip in the rain) had any clear idea of what the music they were about to perform would be like. At a time when boring rock bands keep reforming and commanding huge fees for a “reunion performance” (causing online ticket-sale platforms to crash instantly), where it’s obvious from the start they’re simply going to play the exact same tedious songs they played 30 years ago in the exact same plodding ham-fisted manner, it’s great to see this commitment to unexpectedness and true surprises still remaining intact after 50 years.

The wispy, ghostly music on here is still empathetic and fascinating. I kind of like how minimal it is. The 1970s mode of Taj-Mahal Travellers was great of course, but also freighted with undercurrents from world culture, free jazz (by way of Don Cherry), mysticism, and even out-of-body space-travel metaphors suggesting they supped at the same bowl as the Kosmische brigade. Now all we get is unearthly chants and wails, punctuated by simple bass plucks, uncertain electronic washes, and strange percussive elements, all feeling slightly lost and adrift in the cold unfeeling world. It’s great! From 10th June 2024.

Recorded back in 2019, in Newcastle upon Tyne, “Skinwalker” is a collaboration between noisy British punk band Bruxa Maria and Norwegian jazz trio MoE. Between these two acts, fireworks might be expected to fly constantly but “Skinwalker” turns out more restrained and controlled than you’d expect. Four tracks, of which three exceed ten minutes, are on offer here, all of them brimming with caged fury and aggression which, if unleashed, could turn this recording into a tapestry of burning monstrous chaos. Fortunately these two acts, each with plenty of experience in the studio and live setting on their own and in collaboration with others, know when to let slip the dogs of jazz noise war and when to bring them back to heel, even if only temporarily.

Opening track “Shapeshift Skylight” is an exercise in building up audience anticipation for that burst of chaos, with a steady if minimalist rise in the uneasy music, starting with solo saxophone and building a dronescape background around it, until about halfway through when the vocals fade away and the stuttery saxophone goes completely bonkers. Gritty bass drones keep the music stern and harsh, and the hard-hitting percussion gives hint of subterranean power. The whole track becomes increasingly monstrous and demented, and in its derangement it exercises a hypnotic power over listeners with its continuously looping rhythms, motorcycle engine drones and grinding sheet-metal guitars.

“Weavers of Evil” presents as a suffocating performance of insistent looping guitar riffs against a backdrop of darkness in which tones, fragments of melody and effects pass in and out. The whole track has an unhealthy psychedelic edge, complete with a lead surf-guitar melody coming in the fifth minutes and dominating the music from then on. Cartoon voices and whistles lead the way into a hysteria of howling cacophonic instruments. By contrast, “The Wolf, the Owl, the Ritual” starts as a noisy space-ambient piece and more or less stays like that. Even though this a relatively short track at just over six minutes, it does seem much longer than it really is.

Last track “The Spirit is Out” is a genuinely creepy and malevolent piece of distorted doom-jazz drones and tones, more tough guitar grit, distortions of stringed instruments and some amazing moments of dronescape sounds that just seem to go forever and ever. This last piece is easily the most outstanding (if also suffocatingly crushing) work of sonic torture on the album: each crash of noise features massive reverb effects that pulse and shimmer outwards without end, piling effects upon effects until your entire brain is ringing with reverberating noise. Just when you think it couldn’t be any more intense and deranged, the music goes up several notches with rapid-fire throb, high-pressure water-hose noise drone and other layers of noise chaos.

This certainly is most uneasy-listening music and one of those recordings that should come with warnings that, after hearing this album all the way through, the stuffing between your ears will be permanently rearranged.

Fans of legendary electronic synthpop band Yellow Magic Orchestra will have been sucker-punched to hear that Yukihiro Takahashi and Ryuichi Sakamoto both died within three months of each other in early 2023. Takahashi died in January at the age of 70 years after suffering ill health since 2020 when he had a brain tumour removed. At this time of writing Sakamoto had just passed away in late March at the age of 71 years following his own battles with cancer. Although both musicians along with sole surviving member Harry Hosono all had varied careers in the music industry, and Takahashi and Sakamoto dabbled briefly in acting as well, all three are probably still best known for the work they did together in YMO, paving the way for other artists in the use of sampling, drum machines, computers and digital recording technologies in composing and performing original compositions. Forming in 1978 after working together on one another’s solo projects and those of other musicians, YMO originally was meant to be a one-off project but after the success of the trio’s self-titled debut album and the singles from that record, the three members decided to continue as a band. After seven studio albums and two live albums over five or six years, during which the members gradually grew apart due to solo projects and emerging musical differences, YMO effectively ended as a group though Hosono, Sakamoto and Takahashi would continue to assist on one another’s projects. They briefly reunited in the early 1990s as a studio band, and in subsequent decades played concerts either together as YMO or as collaborators.

Of the seven studio albums YMO made from 1978 to 1983, the one I know best – it’s actually the only YMO album I had in my music collection in the 1980s – is “Technodelic” which, as far as I can tell, was never as commercially successful as earlier recordings like “Solid State Survivor” but is rated by many fans (if informally perhaps) as the band’s best work. I know some of the earlier YMO music from the late 1970s but much of it tends to be either too disco or too kitsch for my taste. In YMO’s early days, the musicians satirised European stereotypes about Asian and Japanese culture in songs that turned the stereotypes back onto Western audiences. By the 1980s, YMO had moved away from Eastern / Western blends of popular music and into a more avantgarde and experimental style using computer technology and sampling. At the same time the musicians continued to criticise aspects of contemporary culture, both Western and Japanese, within the format of apparently ingenuous pop songs with often absurdist lyrics. This is a very prominent feature of “Technodelic” where an unusual incident – the protagonist mistaking a pot of stale jam for bread – leads into a very strange techno-psychedelic drug trip through the politics and culture issues prominent in Japan and the West at the time.

Heavily dependent on the use of samples and loops, courtesy of a custom-built LMD-649 digital sampler which also had sampling drum machine capabilities, the music is not as lush or busy as YMO’s earlier 1970s work but has a sparse, even wintry minimalist style. Even the quietest, most delicate sounds and samples can be heard very clearly, and Harry Hosono’s bass guitar playing is very prominent in parts. Takahashi’s singing tends towards the solemn and rather unsettling in tone and style, and the lyrics range from the dystopian (in tracks like “Stairs” and “Taiso”) to surreal (“Pure Jam” and “Key”) and the political (“Seoul Music” and “Taiso” again); the album also features much use of spoken word lyrics through two-way radio which in itself adds an urban industrial edge to the music. All tracks on the album are good but, unexpectedly perhaps, those tracks that feature vocals are actually better than the purely instrumental tracks. “Pure Jam” may be the most fun, “Neue Tanz” the most intriguing in its sampling and experimentation, and “Gradated Gray” the most blissfully beautiful in its sinuous noise lines and the most hypnotic in its rhythms and beats. “Taiso” (“gymnastics” or “callisthenics” in Japanese) takes on perhaps sinister overtones in satirising the fitness craze that swept Japan and the West in the early 1980s, when one considers the role of mass gymnastics in former fascist societies of the mid-20th century.

Even after the passing of 40+ years, “Technodelic” still sounds sharp and fresh, and much of the sampling done on the album still sounds like nothing else on the planet. The songs are tight and though they are not particularly long, they pack a punch with their rhythms and the dynamics between the tones within their layers of sound and melody. The variety of strange, often futuristic soundscapes in individual songs lasting four to five minutes (on average), and their power to make a such a deep impression – I can remember a lot of the tunes even though it’s been decades since I heard the album until recently – can be astonishing.

Of course, after the YMO men went their separate ways in the mid-1980s, they continued to carve out solid careers in music – Sakamoto in particular found a niche in scoring music for films – but “Technodelic” stands as a landmark album in electronic music experimentation within the framework of pop songs.

RIP Yukihiro Takahashi and Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Originally released back in 1982, the only album from Japanese new wave / punk band NON baNd has been through two or three reissues since then and German label TAL has seen fit to reissue the album again in time for its 40th anniversary. (At the time of review, the reissue date was set for 18 November 2022.) Founded by bassist / vocalist Non, NON baNd had a very brief life as a trio and then a quintet in the early 1980s but broke up in 1982, six months after the album’s release, and Non retired from the music scene. She began singing and performing again in 1999, doing live dates in her home prefecture Aomori (in Japan’s far north), some with Keiji Haino and Tatsuya Yoshida, and in Tokyo. Non reformed NON baNd (or Non Band as it’s usually written now) in the early 2000s and the band continues to perform, releasing three live albums and a studio album over the past two decades.

The album showcases a distinct skronky post-punk / new wave style with a touch of ska or jazz influence, topped by the icing on the cake that is Non’s apparently whimsical vocals, child-like and playful yet insistent and intense. Starting with the minimal funky “Duncan Dancin’ “, the album skips through Non’s eccentric, often bratty rants on tracks like “Ghetto” and “Wild Child (Can’t Stand It)” with only percussion, sax and quivering violin for company. Even a comparatively normal and serene song like “Solar” veers close to madness as Non’s voice wanders up hill and down dale over the trilling music which sometimes has an odd Middle Eastern or East Asian slant in its acoustic string tremors. “Dance Song” is as close as Non comes to rapping or toasting over a soundtrack owing as much to jazz improv and ska in parts. The album goes out on a jaunty folksy note with “Bap Pang” where at last the violin finds its natural home in extended solo melodies – at first, anyway, as the song takes a surprising turn halfway through and turns into a quirky stomp.

The music seems raw and improvised at first but the more you hear it, the more you realise it was very cunningly thought out and crafted in such a way as to seem wide-eyed and innocent. The unusual instrument selection and the music’s minimal presentation contribute to its unique style. Non’s own breathy singing certainly puts the Björk Gudmundsdottir school of singing in the shade as she skips through chanting, gabbling and near-rapping. This album is certainly overdue for a reissue and its time to shine in the limelight.

The front cover artwork of Ebola’s “Red Heaven” album featuring two black butterflies hovering over two blood-red flowers, and the entire background in a similar red shade, suggesting the fragility and beauty of life at its most moving and emotional before sudden death, got my attention and I decided to stay for the music. It turns out to be good, sometimes even thrilling post-BM / depressive BM with some slight background touches from synthpop and techno. Ebola is a solo DSBM project of Youta, a musician based in Oita prefecture in southern Japan, and “Red Heaven” is the project’s fifth album. Youta had previously played guitar for another Oita-based BM act, the four-piece Zxui Moskhva, until 2021 to concentrate on the Ebola project. Other members of that band play for Ebola live so the two acts obviously support each other.

Ebola’s style is a good, often powerful mix of raw BM that bristles continuously with pent-up anger and aggression, and the calmer, clearer melodic tones of post-BM with its pensive, wistful nature. The album begins solidly with “Lycoris Radiata”, a reference to the red spider lilies featured on the album cover and which traditionally grows around cemeteries in parts of Japan at the time of the autumn equinox, and the drama and power of that song continue into the next track “Cluster Amaryllis” which now includes raggedly shrieking vocals behind the noisily spitting tremolo guitars and the deep sinister bass. Keyboard melodies tiptoe around the guitars when they pause, adding some moody atmosphere and depth to the song.

As the album continues, the music alternates between the melancholy and despair of DSBM and the brooding nature of post-BM with plenty of sad, heartbreaking emotion linking the two sub-genres. “White Obelisk” and “Nostalgic Lily” open up a dark world of sadness, depression and hopelessness that may suddenly erupt into screaming, howling chaos and fury. A further dimension in Ebola’s murky sound universe is revealed in “Empty Voice”, an all-ambient piece of sadness, doomy atmosphere and quivering tension. Violent anger erupts in “The Fact”, where noisy tremolo guitars and screaming voice fight against a looming background of epic symphonic drone bass guitar. A resolution is reached in “Waiting” where the apparently happy-sounding trilling melodies (contrasting with the deranged shrieking) perhaps suggest resignation or even joy at destruction and death. The album closes with “Ending -Forever-“, a sorrowful solo piano elegy with synth ambient background.

Though Ebola doesn’t reinvent the wheel and the narrative behind the music is a path heavily trod by past generations of DSBM acts around the planet, this act does produce some very beautiful music even at its most harsh and desperate. The music is consistent in its song-writing and performance, and the energy and emotion flow well from one song to the next even though the music can jump from sheer anger to deep sadness and back again in the same track. The sound quality is nicely balanced between the raw fizzing aggression of the BM guitars and the meditative nature of clean-toned electric guitars in their post-BM / blackgaze guise. All songs are well written and express a wide range of contrasting emotions – usually anger or sorrow – that can be abrupt in their transitions. Of the eight tracks, “Empty Voice” is the most original in its brooding ambient drama.

I get the feeling though that the music seems a bit formulaic and aspects of Ebola’s style could have been shaken up a bit to produce even more raw and emotional music. The singing stays in the background fighting to be heard over the shrill and strident tremolo guitars. In later parts of the album a folk element, a little reminiscent of Ukrainian-style atmospheric BM with the epic symphonic bent, creeps in and this could have been an opportunity to bring in a more varied vocal approach as well instead of continuing with the screaming and vocal theatrics. After all is done and the album ends mournfully, my impression of “Red Heaven” is of a work that’s technically very good, even outstanding in parts, but missing that extra spark of originality that could have made it really great.

As a sound artist creating collage works of field recordings using small or contact microphones to capture sounds, Toshiya Tsunoda has produced a considerable corpus (solo and in collaboration) of releases and performances going back to the 1990s. According to the Bandcamp page for his most recent release “Landscape and Voice”, in his current work Tsunoda’s concerns include establishing a relationship with his recording environment through the sounds he collects. On the three tracks that make up “Landscape and Voice”, Tsunoda takes vowel sounds spoken by six voices (one of which belongs to Tetuzi Akiyama) and puts them over looped fragments of various field recordings taken, among other places, at a port near water and in a field. The way in which the vowel sounds are placed over different recordings is deliberate, with the field recording continuing for some time and then freezing, being zapped by fragments of human voice, and then carrying on. The interaction of the vocal glitch zaps with the field recordings and the fragments of human voice, all done in a very austere and minimalist way, brings an intriguing mystery that invites the listener to pay very close attention to all the sounds and to become fully immersed in the visions and scenes suggested by the field recordings.

The stop-start nature of the recordings, the way in which the natural background ambience can be frozen and then allowed to continue, is intended to raise the listener’s awareness that the sound environment is in constant motion. The listener is also an active participant in the sound environment: one can choose to pay attention to birds chirping in a field or to water lapping at the sides of a pier. This album becomes a sonic art gallery one can walk into and wander about leisurely.

The paradox is that the deliberate interruptions of the field recordings by periodic glitches involving human voice can bring more awareness of the dynamic nature of ambient backgrounds than listening to them, without something to anchor, filter or otherwise mediate the listening experience, might do. We come to have a relationship with the field recordings and that relationship can bring awareness and perhaps even change how we think about and engage with ambient sound.

For nearly 40 years after its first release in 1985 this album by Minoru “Hoodoo” Fushimi was much sought after and consequently hard to find by collectors for its whimsically eclectic combination of electro-disco funk, drum machines, synthesisers, hard rock guitar and shamisen playing, and early hip-hop – not to mention the fact that it was all composed, recorded, produced, designed and released by Minoru Fushimi himself. What is most remarkable about “Thanatos of Funk” (and a big part of its charm to collectors) is that at the time it was made, Fushimi was teaching high school students during the day and presumably was only able to work on the album’s songs in the late evenings. Now at last this album has been remastered and is available digitally and in vinyl LP format courtesy of French label 180g. With remastering, the album sounds fresh even though the music’s style and sounds are very much of their period and the songs are more or less restricted by the capabilities and limitations of the electronic instruments Fushimi was able to use.

The general presentation is amazingly clear and very polished, and all instruments, even those in the far background or delicate in tone, can be heard distinctly. With most songs featuring vaguely Japanese or other Asian melodies, and all done in a fairly spare way, the music sometimes appears a bit over-refined, even precious. How many of the ten songs are Fushimi’s own originals, I do not know: he covers Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady” so of course there is at least one cover. The inclusion of “Foxy Lady” and other songs with titles like “Gals’ Blues” speak to a rather droll sense of humour on Fushimi’s part given the nature of his day job. Several tracks feature electronically treated or distorted vocals along with the heavy thumping funk rhythms and those synth drum beats that sound like blown-up packets of potato crisps being hit together.

The album starts well with “Thanatopsis” and “In Praise of Mitochondria” which feature twangy shamisen in amongst the beats, the funk, guitar and a huge range of familiar 1980s-era synthesiser effects and tone wash. From then on, it tends to coast along on an even keel though individual songs do have their particular charms like Fushimi’s rapping (“Hensachi-sama”) and occasional lead guitar break-outs. The album can start to pall a bit around the halfway mark and the inclusion of “Foxy Lady” and smoky blues elements along on “Gals’ Blues” and “Disco Thesis” is not enough to save the music from sinking into its own electro-disco funk kitsch. By the time we reach the truly dreadful “Dompan (Private Funk)”, the twee quality is reaching alarmingly nauseous levels.

After a couple of spins to become acquainted with “Thanatos of Funk”, you’re best advised to hear the album in small bites of a couple of songs rather than playing it all at once from start to finish. Truly unique music it is but like a lot of outsider music made by DIY enthusiasts doing everything themselves, it does have a lot of hit-and-miss moments.

Today’s item likewise presents an inscrutable face, and the credit simply reads “composed and improvised by Takahiro Kawaguchi with self-made instruments”, but if we visit the Pilgrim Talk website there’s a photograph of his set-up for this occasion. It evidently involves bicycle horns, perhaps connected by many air tubes. That coiled yellow cable looks especially tasty. For those who wish to find out even more, there is a recorded interview with the composer available here. The three tracks here are called ‘Horn’, ‘No Horn’ and ‘Horns’, showing three possible permutations of how he might make sound with this equipment – a single horn, several horns, or no horns at all. Naturally the results are extremely minimal and – in spite of some moments of syncopation and mesmerising patterns caused by the small notes on two tracks – one suspects that Kawaguchi is not necessarily intending to create a musical experience, but rather focus on the properties which are afforded him by very simple objects. It’s like a very intense concentration on a single thing, to the point where the object itself somehow becomes more than an object, transcending its own form and purpose. I shan’t say that you’ll suddenly see a gigantic, cosmic, bicycle horn if you play this for long enough, but the work may pass on the mental equipment that enables you to perform a similar heroic act of contemplation.

The word in the title xenoglossy refers to the ability to speak or write in another language which you haven’t actually learned; the word is often used in a scientific context, by those who have observed this strange phenomenon. The implied parallel with this music isn’t entirely clear to me yet, but perhaps there’s a case to be made for processing these strange tiny notes as a form of alien language, and Takahiro Kawaguchi is trying to help us learn it. From 19th May 2021.

Keiko Higuchi we heard as one half of Albedo Fantastica, whose 2019 record Culvert And Starry Night continues to amaze. Shizuo Uchida had the rare distinction of playing with Keiji Haino as part of Nijiumu in the 1990s, and he’s active in some half-dozen bands right now, all of whom sound worth investigating, such as Galactic Abyss; he might be one of those omnivorous Japanese musicians who delights equally in psychedelic rock, noise, and free improv, refusing to draw lines between genres. TOMO is the name that unpacks into Transcendental Organic Magical Objective, and this fellow has made at least two records as part of the group Tetragrammaton with Nobunaga Ken and Cal Lyall. He mostly played saxophone for that sprawling long-form combo, but here it’s 100% hurdy-gurdy droning performed with much sensitivity and mystical musings.

Four long tracks here explore the cosmic unknown and combine musical forms and styles in incredibly bold ways – among their avowed selling points are “vocalisation of a forgotten and nameless language” and “interplays of discordant masses of sound”. But they also manage to negotiate that tricky area that lies between restrained discipline and free-form adventurousness, thereby creating music of extraordinary reach and emotional depth, without once descending into mindless drone or self-indulgent clatter. The three players breathe as a single organism, going beyond extra-sensory communication. I enjoyed the high drama and increasingly intense passion of ‘Where The Waving Nerves Go’, which builds into an exciting episode of speaking-in-tongues trance state music that verges on the terrifying; you may prefer the slightly more calming mood of ‘Basked In The Black Sunshine’, with its vaguely “epic” sweep suggestive of ancient monks or feral warriors making their way across some mythological plain. At all times, the music of Archeus transcends the musical instruments that produce it, the musicians reaching deep and aiming high to generate unusual and unfamiliar sounds; to say nothing of the bizarre vocal mutations of Keiko Higuchi, who at times seems to be transforming herself into a shamanic monster from ancient Persia the better to deliver her cryptical texts.

Speaking of which…the texts of this record have been partially derived from the writings of Koizumi Yakumo, the 19th century Japanese writer of Greek-Irish descent (he was also known as Patrick Lafcadio Hearn). Specifically the 1904 work Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, a collection of ghost stories collected from Japanese folklore. This information can’t help but inform the listener’s “reading” of this record, which is redolent with unknown mysteries from beyond the spirit world. Recommended! From 28th January 2021; a cassette version is also available from the same label.

Collected and compiled by sound artist Robert Millis (Climax Golden Twins) in various trips to Japan over the years, these early recordings include the first commercial recordings made of Asian music by Fred Gaisberg in 1903. Gaisberg (1873 – 1951) was a US musician, recording engineer and producer who travelled the world collecting and recording music for The Gramophone Company (later His Master’s Voice) in London. He and his team must have been quite diligent for in one month in 1903, Gaisberg collected over 270 titles of Japanese music. The recordings that appear on this compilation cover a nine-year period from 1903 to 1912, up to the time that a local recording industry appeared in Japan, and include bootleg recordings.

After surviving several wars, fire, earthquake and various other calamities, the recordings are surprisingly clear and actually sound very fresh and energetic in spite of the expected sizzle (much more muted than I would have thought) in the background. The energy and enthusiasm are apparent right from the start in a duet of shamisen (a guitar-like instrument) and what seems to be a wooden xylophone instrument. The instruments tend to be quite loud in contrast to the singing (sometimes barely audible) and some of the percussion instruments have a downright alien quality in playing tunes that appear at once experimental and at the same time very steeped in tradition. The music featured on the compilation range from gagaku (a formal orchestral style performed mainly in imperial court settings and associated with Japan’s upper classes) to solo instrumental music, some of it improvised and often sounding surprisingly contemporary, and folk songs. Singers themselves may be gagaku performers who had many years of training and experience to people off the street whose singing careers began and ended with Gaisberg’s recordings. The final piece on the album is a stunning work of rich shrill drone that sounds as if it could have been recorded more recently.

Perhaps because I have heard much traditional Japanese music over the years, the music on this LP does not seem at all alien or strange. The impressive thing about the music, apart from the quality of sound that still holds up after decades of misadventure, is its liveliness. Individual instruments have a sprightly quality while being played and some musicians seem to want to overplay their instruments and see how much they can stand before strings or fretboards break. One particular female singer appearing halfway on the album warbles enthusiastically, going up and down the scale, and frequently breaking into laughter at her own virtuosic efforts. Likewise one male singer near the end demonstrates a wide vocal range and enthusiasm aplenty while often breaking off to gabble or explain what he is doing before launching unexpectedly into another stupendous flight of song.

To his credit, when he made the original recordings, Gaisberg appeared not to have tried to influence the Japanese performers while they were playing their pieces and the music here sounds distinctively Japanese. Likewise Millis leaves the recordings as they are – this sometimes means there are long pauses between tracks or in the middle of tracks – and this helps the music retain a fresh and often raw quality. The result is a recording whose historical value is priceless as a snapshot of the range of contemporary Japanese music that existed at the dawn of the 20th century.