One of the most significant archival recoveries from the deep history of Japanese electronic music. Electronic Music Works gathers, for the first time anywhere, the entirety of Shuko Mizuno's tape and synthesizer output - a body of work that, until now, had remained almost entirely unknown, even to those familiar with the composer's name. Spread across three CDs, issued by the indispensable Three Shells imprint, it presents music drawn from tapes discovered at Mizuno's home and salvaged on the verge of disintegration. A missing chapter in the story of postwar Japanese sound, restored at the last possible moment.
Born in 1934 and trained in musicology at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Mizuno is best remembered today as a co-founder, alongside Takehisa Kosugi, Yasunao Tone, and Mieko Shiomi, of Group Ongaku - the collective whose 1960 improvisations at Mizuno's own house, Automatism and Objet, have come to be regarded as among the first sustained experiments in free improvisation anywhere in the world, and a foundational gesture in the history of Japanese experimentalism. Mizuno's later turn toward large-scale jazz orchestral writing in the 1970s, and to opera and symphonic composition thereafter, drew attention away from a parallel current of activity that has remained, until now, almost wholly invisible: a sustained and rigorous engagement with electronic music carried out across studios in Tokyo and California.
The three discs unfold this hidden discography with considerable clarity. Disc 1 assembles works realised between 1971 and 1974, including the three-part Ikari-no Hi (Exstasis I-III), Electronic Music '71, the paired Stretta A and Stretta B, and two Meditation studies, one for Buchla and one for Moog. The Buchla and Moog pieces were produced during Mizuno's time at Mills College in California, placing him within the same studio lineage as Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, and the wider American synthesizer underground of the period; the remaining works on the disc were produced at the NHK Electronic Music Studio, the storied Tokyo facility from which the foundational tape music of Toshiro Mayuzumi, Toru Takemitsu, and Maki Ishii had emerged a decade earlier.
The remaining two discs reach further back into Mizuno's archive. Disc 2 presents the three-movement Symphony for Concrete (1960) alongside Gyomon (Fish Patterns, 1962) and Remote Control "Irreversible" (1962) - a body of musique concrète and tape work effectively contemporaneous with Group Ongaku's earliest improvisations, and which casts the collective's well-documented activities in a new light. Disc 3 rounds out the picture with the source materials for Symphony for Concrete: isolated oscillator studies, three piano concrete études, two organ concrete pieces, and a field recording made in 1960 at Keisei Museum Station. These are working documents, the sonic primary sources from which the symphony was assembled, and they offer an unusually detailed view into a composer's electroacoustic method at the dawn of the 1960s.
Mizuno's own instruction on the music, reproduced in the accompanying booklet, is unambiguous: "My works should be playbacked loudly." Heard at volume, these recordings ask to be approached not as historical artefacts but as living electronic compositions - granular, sometimes harsh, sometimes weightless, by turns severe and luminous, and entirely unlike the Tokyo electronic music canon as it has been transmitted. Their belated appearance reframes what we thought we knew about Japanese tape music of the 1960s and 70s, and about Mizuno's own position within it.
Issued as a 3CD set, with extensive booklet notes in Japanese; track titles and contents listings in both Japanese and English. An indispensable document.
