Woman At 23 Hour - Love In
Identical and deluxe reissue of this deliriously mega-rare and hardly known Itoh Kiyoko record. Normally if you want to score a copy of the original vinyl you are required to donate most of your vital organs to some yakuza-typed black marketer, but luckily enough, this one here is easier to attain without ripping out a lung or a liver to pound off. The CD is housed in an eye-popping foldout jacket. It was the final album Itoh recorded in 1971 and on this effort she got backed up by again a bunch…
L'Antarctique & autres séances électroniques rue de Courcelles
The late French soundtrack composer (1939-1975) was one of the first to use frequency modulators on an 8 track homestudio. He was known for his melodic works mixing electronic & acoustic. His oeuvre has been sampled by many. This release devotes a posthumous work composed for a Cousteau documentary which was refused, probably beacuse it was too avant-garde. On the second disc you'll find different tasty style-exercises that show to what extend Roubaix manipulated the modulators with ingenuity.
Soundtracks
"Malcolm Mooney passes the baton to Damo Suzuki for Soundtracks, a collection of film music featuring contributions from both vocalists. The dichotomy between the two singers is readily apparent: Suzuki's odd, strangulated vocals fit far more comfortably into the group's increasingly intricate and subtle sound, allowing for greater variation than that allowed by Mooney's stream-of-consciousness discourse." -- Jason Ankeny
Soothing Sounds for Baby Volume 1, 2 & 3
A beautiful re-release on vinyl of these three great albums. Designed for babies one to six months old, the first volume of Raymond Scott's dreamy, engaging Soothing Sounds for Baby series emphasizes soft synth tones, repetitive melodies, and relatively simple arrangements. Keeping in mind a young baby's attention span, Vol. 1 also contains shorter, more numerous pieces than the following albums. Vol. 1 begins on a minimal, hypnotic note with "Lullaby," an appropriately trance-inducing, 14-minut…
Recorded Music For Film, Radio & Television: Electronic SBH 3073
Recent claims made re: Tod Dockstader’s absence from the public eye since releasing his owl-label lps in the late 60s are somewhat off. In 1979 this and another “companion” volume were released on the boosey & hawkes library music label; consisting of a spate of sound-queues made by mr. dockstader for production/documentary use. this sounds like no other dockstader recording you’ve heard. There are a couple of “fat brass synth-fanfares for sci-fi” kind of queues, but for every one of those there…
BaraMon
The Tenjo Sajiki Company was an avant garde theater troupe formed by Terayama Shuji & was an audience participation street theatre designed to shock along the lines of the Living Theatre. Popular music was always incorporated in their projects, and so lots of rocker runaway teens were quickly attracted. By the early 70s, J.A. Ceazer and Kuni Kawauchi (of the GS group Happenings Four) had joined, and the music got really fucking weird along with the performances. Instead of just staging a version…
Saraba Hakobune
Another rarity is this original soundtrack album to Terayama Shuji's last movie with music by JA Seazer (Tenjo Sajiki, JA Caesar). Released in 1984, it was Terayama's last completed movie and Seazer's last contribution to his visionary and reactionary world. Saraba Habobune's soundtrack is just stunningly beautiful, far removed from Seazer's trademark bombastic scores. Instead it ventures into more pastoral and almost meditative psychedelic realms filled with traditional string plucking, eerie f…
Den'en Ni Shisu
Deluxe first reissue of this 1974 J.A. Ceasar-performed theatrical underground classic. A nice example of the recent flood of late 1960's-early 1970's psych reissues from Japan that are in the more fluxus/theatrical vein. The period saw political upheaval and protesting amidst much of the country's students and youth; and while the underground movements weren't as widespread as say those in the USA, the pockets of artistic institutions that responded to political causes (like the decimation of n…
Hatsukoi Jigoku Hen
Top notch and bang up identical reissue job; gatefold mini-LP style sleeve complete with inserts and obi. This was originally a private pressing on Terayama Shuji's own Tenjosajiki label. The disc is a soundtrack to his like-named movie, of which the title can be roughly translated as 'Volume of First Love Hell.' Psychedelic insanity, spoken word insertions and has included great vocal participations by sublime vocalist Carmen Maki of Blues Creation. Great disc that rarely surfaces with everythi…
Music for experimental films. Obscure Tape Music of Japan vol. 7
This is volume 7 of Omega Point's Obscure Tape Music of Japan series. Many avant-garde composers made soundtracks for experimental film-maker Toshio Matsumoto. This CD consists of Joji Yuasa's three musique concrète works for his 1960s and 1970s short films. The first track features a heavily broken and meaningless narrator for the short film Andy Warhol: Re-Reproduction (1974); "Document Of The Long White Line" is an obscure, early electronic sound collage with chamber orchestra, and "Auto…
Les Yeux Fermés & Lifespan
After changing the world in the late '60s with In C and A Rainbow in Curved Air, legendary American composer and father of minimalism Terry Riley abandoned tape manipulation and written composition to concentrate on longform keyboard cycles and improvisations. In the early '70s, while in Europe, he was invited to create scores for two films. The first, in 1972, was Joel Santoni's Les Yeux Fermés, a feature-length art film that instantly became a cult classic by virtue of its never having screene…
Buzz soundtrack
One of my Iskra's favourite album " The slow motion unfolding of these pieces isolates the beautiful sounds embedded in even their most cantankerous outbursts. The luminosity of Rutherford's long tones, Guy's glissandos and Bailey's pedal-enveloped chords are undiminished despite a marginal mono recording. At times, the music is almost too inviting and too accessible, given Iskra 1903's revolutionary aura. Buzz Soundtrack will force enthusiasts who thought they knew this trio inside out to liste…