Music from Japan

Free improvisation has rarely seen significant new movements as influential as the small group of Tokyo musicians once labeled as "onkyo", who have now been a primary driving force in contemporary improvisation for a full decade. Over that decade, these musicians have been responsible for some of the strongest and most radical work on Erstwhile, and Soba To Bara sits firmly in that lineage.Ami Yoshida strives to create a pure sound, abstracting her voice until it becomes almost completely unreco…

Chances are that most of Smegma's fans are already familiar with Merzbow's music. This collaboration, occasionally referred to as Smegma Plays Merzbow Plays Smegma or even Plays, features two 20-minute tracks. In "Electro Smegmacoustic Music," Masami Akita plays Smegma tapes, an audio generator, a teleband tranceiver, and a mixer. In "Smegma Plays Merzbow," Smegma use Merzbow tapes, tape loops, record players, and a few acoustic instruments. The result is surprisingly homogeneous -- enough to ma…

1998 release ; duo set by incapacitants’ fumio kosakai & ikuro takahashi “based on stan brakhage movie "dog star man"” ...a single, monolithic piece of itinerant synthesis, never quite getting into harsh noise realms, instead a continuous ghostly blur of steely electronics ... something of a neglected classic by now ...   

This album finds Merzbow in full-on, harsh-noise mode, at least at first listen.  The more one becomes acclimated to the sound, the more layers of activity emerge:  electric groans and roars, bird-call-like feedback, moog sirens, percussive analog static, thousands of pots and pans falling down a hill, even the occasional vocal.  It's this artful layering of sound (among other things) that separates Merzbow from some jag-off that just turns on a noise generator and walks away. 1 copy available

Volume three of Merzbow's 13 Japanese Birds series. Limited edition of 1000. Merzbow's 13 Japanese Birds is a 13 month series of releases inspired by Olivier Messiaen's Catalogue D'Oiseaux. Beginning in January 2009 one volume of 13 Japanese Birds will be released each month. The 13th and final volume will be released January 2010.

A project in celebration of the work and influence of mysterious UK (anti) artist noise outfit The New Blockaders as constructed by Houston, Texas black whips and male-on-male noise pioneer Richard Ramirez (Black Leather Jesus et al) and the sadly departed Japanese harsh noise maestro Koji Tano (MSBR). A mail collaboration where each artist would send source materials to be decomposed by each other. Fantastic walls of brutal shard skum splatter taken to points of demented anguish and resultant c…

Kiyoharu Kuwayama: contact microphone, hand made electronics. Hideaki Shimada: violin, live electronics. Kiyoshi Mizutani: feedback, drumstick. Recorded at Gambetta, Tokyo, on November 18th, 2001. Remix by Kiyoharu Kuwayama, on May 04th, 2008.

Merzbow's 13 Japanese Birds is a 13 month-13 CD set that begins January 2009 and ends February 2010. These are pressed in a limited edition of 1000 and once they are sold out they will not be repressed. This series was inspired by Olivier Messiaen's Catalogue D'Oiseaux.

Masami Akita serves up a cacophony of high tension frequencies and blasting rhythms in his newest evolution, Senmaida. Housed in a digipak featuring cover art by Val Denham and photos by Jenny Akita.

Brooding harsh malevolence packed into a 4 disc box-set with luxurious foil stamped slip cover & photos of the in-flight bomber taken by Jenny Akita. Abrasive analog and digital wings give Tumeric flight as an altogether different bird. Limited edition of 900.

Opening up Merzbow's new 13-disc series of monthly releases themed around Japanese birds, Suzume gets underway with even more of a bang than the usual Merzbow fare, combining those familiar, expertly wrought noise emissions with wild, flailing drums. The first track, 'Red Bird Of Summer Part 1' lasts some twenty minutes, dishing out aural punishment at every conceivable frequency. After a while it becomes apparent that for better or worse, the drumming somehow detracts from the intensity of the …

The first track on Merzbow's latest opus was recorded at Tin Pan Alley studios, London, on 20th April 2008 - the day after his momentous performance at ULU. Akita created an astounding and very unique 20-minute track, playing freestyle drums over his trademark noise. The final two tracks were created at Munemi House in Tokyo. Another fine example of why Merzbow is the undisputed King of Japanese Noise! 58 minutes in total.

LAST COPIES remastered from the original dat master-tapes by tommi keränen under the supervision of t.mikawa. 40 page colour booklet with extensive liner-notes by fumio kosakai, t.mikawa, otomo yoshihide and jim sauter. each disc packaged in an individual wallet cover with original cassette artwork. booklet and discs housed in a solid box. limited editon of 500 copies"i love incapacitants more than anything. my love for them is reaffirmed as i listen again to their many cassette releases. they’r…

Recorded live at Victoriaville, 5/20/02; one 68-minute piece performed by Masami Akita, Mika Vaino & Ilpo Vaisanen. The festival's closing act, Pan Sonic vs Merzbow, was worth the long wait. Their complete absence of stage presence notwithstanding, the trio orchestrated glorious cascades of white noise that sporadically collapsed into fat dirty beats -- a gut rumbling excursion into the inner depths of sound and an indication of where the true spirit of improv lives in 2002.

Performed by Roger Woodward (piano). Recorded Decca Studio No.3, West Hampstead, London, 4 May 1973. This is the first International CD release featuring this recording. Was first released on Decca's HEAD label in 1974. For Takemitsu, sound can be beautiful without being significant, can signify beauty without making 'sense'. The quality of the music is thus elusive: it is not something one must necessarily 'understand', but perhaps rather absorb and accept. His works have, all the same, qualiti…

Tōru Takemitsu was a Japanese composer and writer on aesthetics and music theory. Though largely self-taught, Takemitsu is recognised for his skill in the subtle manipulation of instrumental and orchestral timbre, drawing from a wide range of influences, including jazz, popular music, avant-garde procedures and traditional Japanese music, in a harmonic idiom largely derived from the music of Claude Debussy and Olivier Messiaen. In 1958, the international attention he drew with his Requiem for st…

Author, activist, painter and sound artist Masami Akita had been at the foreground of experimental music for over 25 years. Inspired by psycedelic rock, free jazz, early electronic composition as well the physical arts, especial Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau, Masami Akita has created a musical language all his own. Dolphin Sonar is Merzbow's full length protest album against the annual brutal slaughtering of some 2,500 dolphins in Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture Japan. This is an angry album full of beats…

1998. First collaboration of this duo with sachiko M on sine waves and Toshimaru nakamura on no-input mixing board.

An awesome double CDS Part 1_ Unknown Live1976, Part2_1976 Summer, 30, July. UNIVIVE is a new, Mitzutani approved, Rallizes-only label. ACTUAL CDs - not CDrs.

Expanded edition of one of the few official albums released by Rallizes during their existence. The original was made up of select 1973-75 material, but this includes all of the material from the original session tapes, plus a Dec 13, 1980 soundboard recording, and on the 3rd disc, some demos from 1976. Actual CDs (NOT CDRs). 1 copy available