Music from Japan

Akashaplexia is the culmination of Merzbow and John Wiese’s decades-long partnership, offering over three hours of new music across four CDs. Recorded together in Tokyo, the album balances Merzbow’s psychedelic intensity and Wiese’s meticulous sonic architecture, presenting a vast and intricately detailed landscape of noise, improvisation, and unpredictable dynamic shifts.​

Paulownia by Merzbow is a 2025 full-length statement comprising two lengthy compositions that fuse intense electronic manipulation with Merzbow’s enduring fascination for natural phenomena. Across both pieces, the album merges organic inspiration and harsh digital process, producing a hypnotic yet confrontational experience.​

Beach of the Pliocene, a sought-after release by Ken-ichiro Isoda, epitomizes Japanese ambient’s capacity to conjure landscape and memory. The album blends flute, guitar and environmental sounds in a meditative journey that merges gently melodic lines with the resonance of the ocean, functioning equally as a balm for modern anxieties and a portal for contemplative listening.​

First released in 1998, Magic Thread finds Susumu Yokota navigating the liminal space between club rhythm and ambient reverie. Blending vaporous beats, dub inflections, and microscopic detail, the album traces the moment he stepped from late‑night dance floors into dawn-lit introspection.

Image 1983–1998 by Susumu Yokota collects fifteen years of sonic fragments tracing the evolution of his ambient vision. Recorded between early tape experiments and late‑1990s compositions, it bridges lo‑fi intimacy and polished minimalism, revealing the contours of an artist forever balancing wonder and restraint.

With Sakura, Susumu Yokota unveiled an ambient masterpiece that blends sampled fragments of jazz, minimalism, and Japanese melody into a contemplative whole. Released in 1999 on Skintone and later on The Leaf Label, the album turns repetition into poetry, infusing electronic textures with a deep human warmth.

With Grinning Cat, Susumu Yokota continues to refine his delicate ambient universe through a dreamlike balance of melody, texture, and silence. The 2001 album merges found sounds, piano fragments, and vaporous rhythms into an otherworldly narrative of domestic tranquility and imaginative reverie.

Our new album is filled with a kind of sensibility that wasn't a part of our first one: a desire to get anyone who hears it to get up and dance. We spent 2023 playing a good number of live shows, from touring and playing festivals throughout Europe and Japan. We are a band without a drummer, and we’ve been using synths and drum machines—jamming along with machines so to speak—to freely rearrange the songs from our debut album. That experience is what motivated us to make this EP. Playing live in…

A rare printed score on parchment paper, approximately A3 size. Originally folded and sent as an invitation card to an exhibition, this work embodies Suzuki's philosophy of listening, chance, and the spatial dimensions of sound. Akio Suzuki (*1941 Pyongyang) is known as a pioneer of sound art, but the breadth of his activities and the form of his works far exceeds the normal boundaries of sound art. It is perhaps more as a "quester after sound and space" that he has received the most attention f…

** Second reprint limited edition to just 110 hand-numbered copies ** The 1990s were a fascinating moment for music and new idioms of experimental music began to bubble in the underground. While often belonging to highly localized scenes and thus overlooked by a broad listenership in the moment, many of these gestures have proven to be profoundly important and influential and have left an indelible mark on the musical landscapes that have followed in their wake. Particularly notable among others…

*Limited Edition of 299 copies. Black vinyl * Masami Akita has been making noise since before most people understood noise could be made on purpose, and Animal Magnetism is what happens when forty years of sonic terrorism suddenly decides to sit you down and explain itself without raising its voice. Originally released on CD in 2003, this double LP reissue—remastered by Lasse Marhaug and pressed on black or purple vinyl in a gatefold sleeve featuring Akita's own photographs—adds a previously unr…

*2025 stock* The live recording from New York’s Knitting Factory captures noise guru Merzbow in transcendent form, serving the audience with subtle hypnotic pulses to go with rich textures of raw to low frequencies. The immersive baths of sonic clusters, sine wave swoops, rumbling low mids and glissandos jumping off of rooftops diving down to dervish dance of bit fragments offer the listener a rare glimpse of what it means to find soothing charm and calm in the chaos. Sharing the bill and the st…

Hyperentasis is a double LP celebrating the unique connection between legendary saxophonist Akira Sakata and the city of Thessaloniki. Home to Defkaz Records and the birthplace of the Damianidis brothers, Thessaloniki has welcomed Sakata countless times. This release captures two of his landmark performances as a bandleader in the city. The first LP features the group Entasis with Giovanni Di Domenico (upright piano), Giotis Damianidis (electric guitar), Petros Damianidis (double bass), and Alek…

On May 13th, 1987, at Tokyo's Rokumeikan, Les Rallizes Dénudés delivered what may stand as their definitive performance—a concert that captured the band's unique ability to transform noise into transcendence. Critical Trip: Live At Rokumeikan, Tokyo documents this extraordinary evening, preserving the raw, immersive power that made Mizutani Takashi's ensemble one of Japan's most enigmatic and influential musical forces. By 1987, Les Rallizes Dénudés had spent nearly two decades perfecting their …

Water can retain or wash away memory; flowing or freezing. It gives life and shapes earth, while frozen imprints of an ancient past are waiting to melt – back into sound or fluid motion, or simply to dissipate and disappear. For their split release, Yoichi Kamimura and Olli Aarni offer two distinct reinterpretations of a performance recorded live at the Temppeliaukio Kirkko – a church in Helsinki built directly into solid rock and bathed in natural light – meditating on glacial landscapes and wa…

First released by Extreme in the massive, infamous 'Merzbox,' "Red Magnesia Pink" is extracted and recontextualized as a standalone release for the first time. Recorded in 1995, "Red Magnesia Pink" sees Merzbow in peak form. A psychedelic whirlwind of synthetic transmissions; harsh, wet, screeching sounds that could only be produced by Masami Akita. Featuring two previously unreleased bonus tracks from the same era.

*75 copies limited edition* K2 (Kimihide Kusafuka): live recording, modular synth, electronics, effects, MTR. K2 live sounds by modular synth and delay/reverb only - no distortion/fuzz/overdrive pedals."Steuererhöhungsland" was made using live K2 recordings from Bar Isshee in Tokyo, Jan.12, 2025, Osaka Hokage on Dec.14, 2024, at some unknown venues during 2023-2024, live Kaori Komura recordings from Bar Isshee on Jan.12, 2005, and K2 studio recordings from Oncosonik Laboratory on Jan. 01 & Jan. …

For over fifty years, Blind Woman's Curse has remained one of the most sought-after soundtracks in Japanese cinema, with original vinyl pressings commanding extraordinary prices among collectors. This official CD release finally makes this essential piece of film music accessible to a new generation of listeners while preserving its legacy for future appreciation.

2024 repress! Limited edition LP including 16-page inserts with words in Japanese and English from Meitei and design by Kitchen. Label founder Ricks Ang * It began with ‘Kwaidan’, a simmering study on the lost art of Japanese ghost story-telling. Then there was ‘Komachi’, baptized in the earthly winds and static that define its comforting sonics. On ‘Kofū’, Meitei masterfully closes his trilogy of lost Japanese moods with an engaging interrogation of artforms and aesthetics as a provocation — o…

1994 release ** Cardboard sleeve.