Edition of 500 copies 4xCD box from Lasse Marhaug’s Pica Disk label that works as a career retrospective for Mr Yasutoshi Yoshida’s Government Alpha project. Spanning the years 1992-1999, the box gathers previously unreleased early material alongside limited edition cassettes, lathes and CD-Rs. In the booklet that accompanies the set (which also includes full-colour reproductions of Yoshida’s amazing collages) Yoshida cites Nurse With Wound and Accept (!?) as his formative influences and the early material gathered on disc one is, to my mind, some of the most original and affecting experimental work to be inspired by Stapleton’s early recordings, with a minimal application of electronics combined with obscured melodies and surreal sound placements.



The second disc features some classic harsh noise works while the third disc sounds closest to how I always think of Government Alpha, as one of the more psychedelic of the Japanese noise groups, using keyboards and walls of F/X in the mode of fellow Hawkwind worshippers CCCC. The fourth disc brings us up to date with some of Yoshida’s most complex disarticulations of form, with the technicolour euphoria of the most amp-destroying rock totally liberated from any notion of form. This is a well-assembled set and makes for a much more rewarding and surprising survey of Japanese noise than you might well think.