LP ltd to 290, black vinyl, 3 color (black, red & gold) silkscreened jacket with obi, inserts, and a postcard. La scène 裸身 have been working at the quiet edge of the Japanese underground for the best part of a decade. Futaishitsu Souzou, three songs across two sides, is the first of their records to appear on vinyl. The Tokyo duo of Saya, on voice and bass, and Eiji, on guitar, take their name from the Japanese word rashin, naked body, and the principle has held across everything they've made: the songs are stripped back to what will bear weight, and little else. Their debut, Ten No Sekido, was self-released in 2018 with Atsuo of Boris co-producing, and he returned the following year for the Corridor EP. The connection runs both ways, Eiji having played guitar on Boris recordings since the early 2000s.

Saya sings low and unhurried. The chord changes beneath her are few and slow to turn, small gem-like shifts that she gives room to sound. Reiyou, written after the death of the band's friend Gazelle, is a lament in the plainest folk sense, its melody carrying the weight so the arrangement doesn't have to. Elsewhere the guitar of guest player Hiroshi Kurosawa, of Asylum, cuts the songs open with long burning lines, and the record pushes into noise and feedback with none of the restraint that precedes it. Grief runs through all three pieces, and the album keeps finding its way out the other side.

The touchstones are audible and partial. There is the drifting psychedelia of the Paisley Underground in the guitar tone, the slowcore lineage in the tempos, and the acid folk that has run through Japanese independent music since the 1970s. Set against the more delirious reaches of the Tokyo underground, the duo's restraint reads as a discipline of its own. An'archives, whose catalogue has done as much as any European imprint to keep the more hermetic corners of Japanese music in circulation, is the right home for it.

Issued in an edition of 290 copies on black vinyl, in a three-colour silkscreened jacket printed by Alan Sherry, with obi, inserts carrying lyrics in Japanese, English and French, and a postcard.