★PSF Records
Hikari yami uchitokeaishi kono hibiki
First album of solo guitar by Keiji Haino in quite some time, but very much a departure from the mountain-levelling, continent-sundering, weather-system huge electric guitar releases of years past. The title roughly translates as 'Light darkness melting into one this vibration'. Haino advises the listener to play as loud as possible - surely a first on an album of acoustic guitar.
To start with, let’s remove the colour !
Gorgeous new bag of home-recorded mystery from Haino. Apparently recorded alone, late at night and at minimal volume, these latest recordings tremble with the same deep-welled emotional sensitivity and sense of veiled threat that animated classics like Watashi Dake?, Affection and Era of Sad Wings.
The 21st century hard-y-guide-y man
Haino uses a hurdy gurdy, runs it through his battery of effects and winds up with a large whoosh of noise not unlike Tony Conrd's violin.
Nijiumu
Keiji Haino is Fushitsusha's mainman. Dark Avant-garde experimental music with various ancient instruments and metal. Complete black package.
Barking practice-White lines
Kanryu: Debut Live in Korea 2006 sees Mikami reunited with the masterful Korean komungo player and vocalist Shin Heyon, who played together him on the Fukon group release (PSFD-8001). Eight years on that epochal cross-cultural meeting, Mikami journeyed to Seoul for two nights of concerts. Shin's stringed komungo brings a thick and knotted presence to the overall sound, while Seoul-resident Japanese musician Sato Yukie tosses in swirling metallic blats of electronics and guitar. There's a gorgeou…
Jazz
Incredible screaming voice and guitar sound. New dimensions of real Japanese folk legend.
Flashback
The private home recordings presented here have been unearthed by Masayoshi Urabe which seem to date from around 1983. There's the unmistakable feel of low-level mania throughout, as Kawani moans, jabbers and obsesses wordlessly into a microphone over an patterned tapestry of feedback and amped everyday objects (rubber bands, cans, bottles, knives, steel pipes, shoes, chopsticks etc). Includes English linernotes.
Unfolding
No Obi. Awesome CD release documenting the 'magic' world of Harry Bertoia sound scuptures. This reissues two of this American genius's many self-released LPs as a great public service. His "sounding sculptures" consist of "ranks of tall slender rods, placed either upright or at special slants in rectangular formations. These metallic faces are not rigid, but 'give' when stroked -- at the same time releasing lingering musical chords of a weirdly haunting nature."
D!O!D!O!D!
Fantastic album of pure guitar and drums brutality (and the first non-Japanese release for PSF in several years) from the greatest noise musician in China, Li Jianhong. Long resident in Hangzhou, Li has released several records on his own 2pi label, including solo noise work for TV monitors and an album by his avant-rock unit Second Skin. He also curates the annual 2pi noise festival in Hangzhou. He played in at the Nuit Blanche festival in Paris in 2004, and this will be his second non-Chinese …
1st (Live)
This is where it all began. One of the first releases on the then fledgling PSF label was a DLP by FUSHITSUSHA, Keiji Haino's ultimate rock unit.
1991. 9. 26. 19:15-20:08
26th September 1991 saw a titanic showdown at the Shibuya La Mama club in Tokyo. Keiji Haino's tumultuous Fushitsusha brought their epochal de/re-construction of rock to ringside to tussle it out with John Zorn's international hardcore skronk trio Pain Killer. The night was being documented for a Pain Killer live album (released as Rituals), which meant that Fushitsusha got to benefit from an unusually high-quality recording. Previously available as a PSF video, but out of print for the last few…
Eien no houga saki ni te o dashitanosa
From 1978, the earliest group recordings by Fushitsusha yet to be released. A vital document for understanding the Japanese underground and the truest, most exciting rock group of the contemporary era. Now here's something unexpected and utterly fascinating. The earliest years of Fushitsusha have long been shrouded in mystery, palely illumined by only the dimmest of rumours and half-facts. As a live entity the group seems to have begun sometime in 1978 (also the year that Friction, Japan's first…
Origin’s hesitation
Expectations exploded, intentions fleetingly revealed, faith justified. A new album from Keiji Haino's Fushitsusha is always going to be a major event. And to make the release of Origin's Hesitation even more significant, it is the first new album from the group in almost two years, the first studio recordings by the new duo line-up, and the first Fushitsusha album on PSF since 1994's stunning Pathetique. The popular perception of Fushitsusha has usually been as a rock band, albeit one that push…
Pathetic
The fourth overall release by Keiji Haino's Fushitsusha group (following the Double Live LP (PSF 3/4), Double Live CD (PSF 15/16) and Allegorical Misunderstanding (Avant 008). This has 4 long tracks, 74 minutes of music; stylistically it's in the heavy over the top guitar trio mode a la PSF 15/16 and absolutely the dream Fushitsusha release that everybody was waiting for. Packed again in a gorgeous black fold out, with a first: English lyric translations
Live
Keiji Haino's rock trio debuted to the world of recordings with a double live LP set (PSF 3/4 -- long deleted) and then followed it up with this one -- another double live set (completely different material). Mind boggling guitar/bass/drums extensions from the heaviest rock band on planet earth. This 150 minute double-CD (wrapped in stunning all-black cover) is one of the quintessential documents of the modern era.
Live document 2003-2005
Third release on PSF by Exias-J (Experimental Improvisor's Assocation of Japan), Japan's most conceptually determined improvising collective and their first DVD. Containing three performances from Tokyo and New York, this is a challenging clash of methodologies and sonorities, hugely exciting in its electric power and formal heft.
Balance of chaos
Thrilling document of seriously wired Japanese improv collective, raising electric ghosts and phantom sonorities live in New York. Exias-J (short for Experimental Improviser's Association of Japan) have been around since 2000, and this is their second release on PSF. The group express a dedication to bringing the sounds of classic euro free improv into collision with free jazz, minimalism, electronic music, scalp-raising rock improv and a dozen other musical discourses. Balance of Chaos captures…
Avant-garde
This live recording presents Exias-J as a quintet (Hideaki Kondo and Takuo Tanikawa-guitars, Shin-Ichiro Kanda-piano and synth), Tetsuya Miyazaki-computer and electronics, Naoto Nishizawa-drums). In a huge departure from their previous releases, this is a massively loud--alternating with pin-dropping quiet--dark, cavernous work.
Solo in Japan
This is a document of one of the solo gigs by the modern sax legend and presumed bearer of the hallowed flame of Black American free jazz when he made his first trip to Japan.
Live at InRoads
One of the heaviest live documents of the original Borbetomagus big-band - Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich on saxophones, Donald Miller on guitar and Brian Doherty on live electronics - live at In-Roads, New York, 27th November 1982. This one was originally released on cassette in two different versions, copies of which somehow made it to Japan where it took on the role of some kind of free-noise Rosetta Stone, planting seeds in the helmets of a whole bunch of punks. But nothing beats the glorious p…