Takehisa Kosugi
Takehisa Kosugi ( b. Tokyo, Japan, 1938) is a Japanese composer and violinist associated with the Fluxus movement. Kosugi is probably best known for the extraordinary experimental music that he created between 1960-75, first in the early 1960s with the Tokyo-based seven member ensemble Group Ongaku ("music group") and thereafter as a solo artist and with itinerant octet Taj Mahal Travellers (1969-75). Since 1978, Kosugi has served as music director for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and lives in New York.
Takehisa Kosugi ( b. Tokyo, Japan, 1938) is a Japanese composer and violinist associated with the Fluxus movement. Kosugi is probably best known for the extraordinary experimental music that he created between 1960-75, first in the early 1960s with the Tokyo-based seven member ensemble Group Ongaku ("music group") and thereafter as a solo artist and with itinerant octet Taj Mahal Travellers (1969-75). Since 1978, Kosugi has served as music director for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and lives in New York.
Member of: The Taj-Mahal Travellers, Group Ongaku
The World of Sound: A New Summer 1996 (Book)
68 pages, large size. Revised 2023 Edition, Japanese/English edition. It can be considered a guidebook to Takehisa Kosugi's activities. Centered on the 2023 Memorial Exhibition of Takehisa Kosugi held from November 10 to commemorate the publication of a revised edition of the catalogue of the "Takehisa Kosugi The Sound World New Summer" exhibition held at the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History from May 18 to July 7, 1996.
The A6 variant has been changed to a B5 edition, and new English transl…
Jacques Bekaert (LP)
Edition of 500. ‘A Late Lunch’ is the soundtrack to Akiko Iimura’s eponymous movie realized in 1978. It is based on acoustic instruments and field recordings, brilliantly reconfigured and mixed by Jaques Bekaert to create a surreal, immersive soundscape. The technique used includes superposition and speed change of recordings, radical sound effects and juxtaposition of sounds. The players were prominent musicians of the 1970’s, including Maggi Payne, George Lewis, David Rosenboom and Blue Gene T…
New Sense of Hearing
Tip! CD Edition. Available from Blank Forms for the first time since its original 1980 release on ALM-Uranoia, New Sense of Hearing documents a collaboration between Takehisa Kosugi and Akio Suzuki, two luminaries of Japanese experimental music in the lineage of Fluxus. Blank Forms’s high-quality reissue of the sought-after, long out of print LP, is produced by musician-artist Aki Onda and mastered from the original tapes recorded on April 2, 1979, at Tokyo’s Aeolian Hall.
Described by Suzuki …
Improvisation Sep. 1975
**Ltd. 300 copies, perfect replica of the original packaging and newly remastered for optimal sound.** Toshi Ichiyanagi, Michael Ranta and Takehisa Kosugi originally got together in the summer of 1975 for an open-air concert in Sapporo. The concert felt like a great success but was unfortunately not recorded. As the desire arose to record together, they managed to arrange a studio session in the NHK Studio in Tokyo, with presence of sound engineers. What was supposed to be a soundcheck for this …
Sunrise From West Sea
** 500 copies ** Wewantsounds is delighted to announce the first-ever release of 'Sunrise From West Sea', a mesmerising performance by Stomu Yamash'ta accompanied by Jazz pianist Masahiko Satoh (well known for his involvement in the New Herd Orchestra and his 'Belladonna of Sadness' soundtrack) and Taj Mahal Travellers founder Takehisa Kosugi on Electric Violin. The line up, also comprising Hideakira Sakurai on Electric Shamisen, is a spaced-out improvisational soundscape over the two LP sides. …
Live Improvisations
Slowscan's latest, a stunning, remastered vinyl edition of Takehisa Kosugi's New York, August 14, 1991 - expanded to include an entire second LP of recordings made by the composer with Ted Szànto in Amsterdam during 1979 - Bristles with energy, physicality, and immediacy, representing a highwater mark from one of the most important experimental composers of the last 100 years.
July 15, 1972
Limited to 750 numbered copies. Comes with poster. For over half a century, Takehisa Kosugi was of the most unique and enduring figures in the Japanese underground. As an art student in Tokyo in the early 1960s, he joined the Fluxus-styled performance unit Hi Re Centre and then founded the improvisational ensemble Group Ongaku, but his most legendary project was The Taj Mahal Travellers – a multicellular organism that included Kosugi, Ryo Koike, Yukio Tsuchiya, Seiji Nagai, Michihiro Kimura, Tok…
1 - August 1974
**Sold out at the label. Limited edition of 1000 copies, one time pressing, don't miss this one** Aguirre Records present a reissue of Taj Mahal Travellers' 1 - August 1974, originally released in 1975. A monumental work by the Japanese experimental music ensemble. In April 1972 a group of Japanese musicians set off from Rotterdam in a Volkswagen van. As they crossed Europe and then made their way through Asia they made music in a wide range of locations. They also paid close attention to the ch…
Zeitenwechsel 2
A beautiful sound art compilation featuring works by Ellen Fullman, Horatio Vaggione, Fast Forward, Takehisa Kosugi, Mario Verandi, Olga Neuwirth, celebrating the 35 years of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm. Comes with 32-page booklet.
Ellen Fullman: Transmission Particle 1 for Long String Instrument and Oboe (2001; 9:00 min)[Ellen Fullman, long string instrument; Eliza Slavet, oboe]Horatio Vaggione: Scir for contrabass flute and tape (1988; 11:37 min)Beate-Gabriela Schmitt, contrabass fluteFast F…
Apollo And Marsyas: Het Apollohuis 1980-1997 An Anthology Of New
All tracks (with three exceptions) recorded during concerts and performances organized by Paul Panhuysen that took place at Het Apollohuis (Eindhoven, The Netherlands). Edition of 1,250 copies in a double-Digipak sleeve. This double CD-set gives an idea of the music and the sound art presented at Het Apollohuis in the period from 1980 through 1997. From a total of 500 performances, Paul Panhuysen chose thirty-eight to be excerpted here. René van Peer wrote the liner notes which are illustrated w…
Violin Improvisations
Originally released in 1989 as Violin Solo. Sept. 3-4, '89. Takehisa Kosugi's improvisations, both with violin and miscellaneous sounding objects, have a sense of emerging from the bottom of a spiritual unconscious. From this place comes a music based more on the feeling of sounds than conscious arrangement. Memory, physical action, tactile perceptions, environmental conditions, and awareness of subconscious microcosmic and macrocosmic extremes inform his work as much as the intention to assembl…