Abe Kaii

Featuring: Jojo Hiroshige

Originally issued on the Pinakotheca cassette label in 1982, unheard by all but a few for over thirty years, it returned on Alchemy in 2017 - one of the great lost documents of the scene's formative moment. A buried treasure. 阿部怪異 (Abe Kaii) was a short-lived meeting between Jojo Hiroshige and Toshiji Mikawa, two figures who would go on to define Japanese noise through Hijokaidan, Incapacitants and the Alchemy Records label. For decades its sole release existed only as a near-mythical cassette.

The name itself is a piece of sly reverence. 阿部怪異 puns on 阿部薫, the free jazz saxophonist Kaoru Abe, swapping the characters of his given name for ones meaning something like strange apparition. The music answers the gesture: rather than the pure noise both men would later pursue, this is a free jazz and psychedelic space-rock monolith, loose and combustible, recorded when the Osaka underground was still inventing its own rules and following them nowhere.

The first piece sprawls and mutates, the second a live recording threaded with circuit-board electronics.