Experimental / Japan

** 2021 Stock. Glass-mastered CD in hand-stamped, recycled chipboard cover ** 845 label leader and sonic explorer Tim Olive uses magnetic pickups and electronics in this meeting with radical living room concert sound artist, poet and improviser Yan Jun in Kobe, Japan, Jun using a variety of electronics, radio and field recordings as the two improvise in a wonderfully mischievous set of errant dialog and restrained deconstruction. First up is a twenty-eight-minute work, which was recorded in Octo…

** 2021 Stock ** Fellow Canadians, Montreal's Ambiances Magnetiques collective member, turntablist and electronics artist Martin Tetrault meets Japan-based electronic explorer Tim Olive performing on magnetic pickups, in their first album despite having performed sporadically across three decades: 4 rich improvisations minimally edited, shaping sound in compelling ways. "[... Tim] Olive did a recording on "a lovely afternoon in Montreal, minimally edited", with the well-known turntablist Martin …

** 2021 Stock ** Recording in Saskatoon in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan the day before their performance at the Sounds Like Festival, audio explorer Tim Olive brings his magnetic pickups in a first meeting with Doreen Girard performing on a prepared tsymbaly, a Ukranian hammer dulcimer, for a single, unusually evolving, and wonderfully rich improvisation. Boro, a 2018 first-time meeting with Winnipeg-based sound artist Doreen Girard, develops a more abstracted quality, with recordings o…

** 2021 Stock. Glass-master CD with recycled chipboard cover, hand-stamped ** After a performance in 2019, Kobe-based Canadian sound artist Tim Olive and Calgary percussionist, experimenter & Bug Incision label leader Chris Dadge recorded these two studio pieces using Dadge's amplified percussion, small instruments & electronics, as well as Olive's magnetic pickup/electronics system, running through a number of guitar & bass amplifiers.abel leader Chris Dadge recorded these two studio pieces usi…

Recording in Kobe, Japan in 2014, the duo of Jin Sangtae, organizer of Seoul's long-running dotolim concert series and who gainfully employs cast-off computer hard drives as sound sources, and Tim Olive, who uses electro-magnetic pickups to give voice to consumer/post-consumer objects, for three tracks of recycled and unorthodox sound. "Here we have three lengthy pieces, fifty-four minutes in total, of some great music. They cover the entire dynamic spectrum, with lengthy passages being all loud…

** 2021 Stock. Glass-mastered CD with letterpress cover by Ben Owen/Middle Press ** Recording in Brooklyn in 2014, this collaboration between Tim Olive and Ben Owen presents four tracks of electronic improvisation using shortwave radio, oscillators, paper, contact microphones and magnetic pickups, creating a mysterious and well-paced album of sound experimentation. "The inconspicuous titles of Tim Olive and Ben Owen's first collaboration make it look like an album of discrete parts, just four im…

** 2021 Stock. Edition of 100. Glass-mastered CD in hand-stamped, recycled chipboard cover ** Like mad scientists of sound, sonic explorers Tim Olive and Cal Lyall met in a Tokyo studio in 2012 armed with hydrophones, magnetic pickups and electronics to record this richly detailed and slowly unfolding work, blending organic and mechanical elements of indeterminate origin, finding absorbing dialog without clamor or tumult; intriguing and engrossing.I think I'd only heard Lyall a tiny bit on one o…

A compilation of unreleased material from the Light Sleep and Voice Hardcore sessions alongside specially recorded new material, including a cover of “The Void” by The Raincoats. Both formats include a 20 page zine designed by Studio Tape Echo featuring photography from Masayuki Shioda and writing from both Disciples and Phew. It follows on from a limited edition cassette and digital release of Phew’s music on Disicples called Vertical Jamming, which compiled some of the cult Japanese artist’s l…

* Hand numbered Edition of 250. Printed on 350 gm paper, transparent inner. Matt laminated outer sleeve + selective UV varnish * "Sasanami" is the result of a dialog between the Japanese photographer Yamamoto Masao and the Japanese musician Uchida Akira (with 
Miu Sakamoto at the voice) initiated by IIKKI, between October 2019 and August 2020. After to have worked as a saxophonist for several years, Akira Uchida, in 2007 learned piano tuning under Mr. Satoshi Yoshida. Planning and holding "Sound…

Collaboration between Richard Pinhas and Tatsuya Yoshida. Richard Pinhas, founder of '70s legends Heldon, is one of France's best known experimental musicians. He is a key figure in development of rock music processing with electronic music. Yoshida Tatsuya is one of the most important musicians of the Japanese experimental music scene, spearheading at least a half dozen of that country's most important groups, including Ruins, Sax Ruins, Koenji Hyakkei, and Korekyojinn. Recorded live at several…

* Edition of 500 * French psych-experimental-rock genius Richard Pinhas in collaboration with Sax Ruins drummer, Tatsuya Yoshida, and saxophonist, Ryoko Ono. Recorded live at Tusk Festival, at Gateshead Old Town Hall, on October 10, 2015. Richard Pinhas, the founder of '70s legends Heldon, is one of France's best known experimental musicians and is a key figure in development of rock music fusing with electronic music. Yoshida Tatsuya is one of the most innovative musicians of the Japanese exper…

Mountains Are Mountains is a solo album that presents the sound of many moments scattered all over a period of Berke Can Özcan's (Ex-Konstrukt, Big Beats Big Times) personal time on this planet. He is a drummer, composer, writer, producer who keeps experimenting with all that is available to his one ear. Gongs, aquadrums, a vibraphone, a steel drum, a prepared piano, a vintage harmonium which smells exactly like a vintage harmonium, log drums, kalimbas, as well as his self-made instruments made …

* 2020 stock * Almost completely unknown in the west, Masahiro Sugaya has been composing and producing music since the 1980s in an exceptionally wide range of fields and practices. From arrangements for musical acts like the acoustic guitar duo Gontiti to acousmatic diffusion at spaces like Paris’s Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), Sugaya’s reach is almost exhaustive in its breadth, but it was in the 80s bubble-era kankyō ongaku scene that he first found his musical voice. Horizon, Volume 1 …

Fischgeist is the third solo album by Tomoko Sauvage, a Paris-based Japanese experimental musician and sound artist. For more than a decade, she’s been working on her unique ‘natural synthesizer’ by combining water, hydrophones and glass or ceramic bowls. The album was recorded in a former water tank in Berlin, a building with a special architecture and acoustics. Sauvage was inspired by the building’s history that she discovered by coincidence during her recording sessions. bohemian drips, a Be…

Makoto Inoue and Yasushi Yamashita’s Inoyama Land project spans nearly four decades, still active to this day. A portmanteau of their family names, the “Land” of Inoyama hovers between imagined mythical space and concrete reality, extending beyond physical releases into installations, site-specific sound design and theatre scores. After their famed Haruomi Hosono-produced 1983 release Danzindan-Pojidon, the duo became involved in the budding environmental music business that was taking shape in …

*2020 stock. Edition of 300, last copies. Comes with custom-made foil which transforms the special cover art by acclaimed artist Takashiro Kurashima into a kaleidoscopic trail of electric vibrations.* 1 continent, 2 bands, 42 musicians! Trails to the Cosmic Vibrations is a split LP that brings together two bands from Asia with outwardly contrasting dispositions, while sharing sympathetic resonances. On Side A, hailing from Osaka, Japan, we have the ever exuberant postmodern psychrock legends, Ac…

Recorded live at the Playfreely Festival in Singapore, November 2019, Authority is Alive is a potent performance mixed from an intoxicating brew of poetry, philosophy and sonic alchemy. Bearing the theme “The Transparency of Turbulence”, the festival featured a strong line-up of East Asian and Southeast Asian artists and bore the ambition to be “an alternative to how we coalesce and navigate a region that is continuously torn apart by words, egos, greed and ideologies.” “Everything... living... …

In collaboration with Markus Acher’s Alien Transistor label, Morr Music presents a collection of hard-to-find Japanese independent music, compiled by Saya, who plays with Ueno Takashi in the iconic duo Tenniscoats. They are part of a current music scene, which is little known outside of Japan. "Minna Miteru"“ focuses on that very scene: the featured bands and musicians share a certain idea of DIY, and are also connected through frequent collaborations and mutual appreciation.

**Embossed matte laminate CD, 6 panel fold out poster, featuring a collage work from Masami Akita created in 1982** Across the middle years of the 1990s, Merzbow (Masami Akita) refined a stochastic language for harsh noise that had emerged from his studio experiments at the beginning of that decade.This technique, which involved a combination of self made instruments, synthesisers, tabletop effects and, in the case of EXD, drum machines, often recorded at incredible levels to create a uniquely v…

2025 Repress. Meitei (冥丁) is a Japanese artist from Hiroshima, who started out as a freelance composer, making various kinds of music across genres. Having done it for eight years, his goal was to eventually release his own original music as an artist. Living in Kyoto for the past two years has deeply influenced his current sound, which is a focus on musically crafting a “Japanese mood” called Meitei (冥丁 (thus, his name). Rich in history, Meitei wanted to borrow this lost “Japanese mood” and inc…

2022 limited edition of this Japanese no wave gem from 1982. With extended liner notes and interviews with band members about the recordings of the album, as well as unpublished photographs from 1981 by Jibiki Yuichi. 'The Japanese punk rock movement known as Tokyo Rockers began in the summer of 1978. It incubated an independent music culture as well as a host of fascinating, individualistic musicians. One of the more striking units was the male-female duo Maria 023. Non played bass for them, an…

** Hand stickered & stamped LP with lyric insert ** Five years after the release of ‘Pressure Loss’ the modern master of electronic minimalism Nicola Ratti returns to Where To Now? in collaboration with Japanese MC ‘MA’, for a suite of submerged, outsider Trip-Hop. ‘Shinkai’ meets at the crossroads of the gloomy sonic snapshot world of Tricky, the South London DIY avant pop bloom of Curl/Mica Levi, the outer fringes of Hip-Hop heralded by the Anticon crew, and the deep textured minimalism of Mac…

Black Editions present a reissue of Musica Transonic's self-titled release, originally released in 1995. Musica Transonic was comprised of three of the most crucial artists to emerge from the 1990s Japanese underground: Nanjo Asahito of High Rise, Makoto Kawabata of Acid Mothers Temple and Tatsuya Yoshida of Ruins. The group's music was a supercharged combination of complex rhythms, blistering guitar attacks, and enormously deep bass momentum. Pushing the rock power trio to its miasmic, overdriv…

Queried on his favourite word in the German language, Masayoshi Fujita will pick ‘getragen’ – without a sliver of hesitation. Further questioning will reveal that he loves the term’s semantic signifiers, its inherent sense of “expansive, deep, quiet and sombre.” And yet, ‘getragen’ leaves plenty of room for interpretation: depending on context, it might also indicate wearing apparel or the state of being carried – two more mundane interpretations that I would rather keep from him. Does Masayoshi…

"La Grima (Tears) was performed on August 14, 1971, at the Genyasai festival in Sanrizuka, Japan. The first six minutes or so of this performance can be heard on the omnibus LP Genya (released on CD in 2004). This CD presents the complete, unedited version of the performance.As if to slash through the audience's scornful, jeering reaction to Takayanagi's opening remarks, the group launched into a fiercely convulsive performance. Despite having a variety of objects thrown at them, Takayanagi and …