There are few figures in the history of experimental practice as uncompromising or divisive as Keiji Haino. Initially emerging during the early 70s, largely working within improvised rock music - Lost Aaraaf, Magical Power Mako, Fushitsusha - despite his many collaborations over the decades, it is for his solo work that he remains best known. Haino is a singular figure. Entirely ahead of his time, even in his earliest efforts, he almost singlehandedly sculpted the field of noise, as it would subsequently be understood. It all begins in a single place, with his solo debut from 1981 - Watashi Dake?, the album whose long awaited reissue rests before us now.

With nearly four decades behind it, Watashi Dake? makes sense now, but it’s hard to imagine what it sounded like to virgin uninitiated ears, when that needle first dropped. Even today, it remains a writhing, punctuated, emotional gut-punch, leaving the world struggling to catch up. While easy associations might lead the ear to believe the album to be an extreme successor to the territories opened by punk, and to a certain extent it is, Watashi Dake? is better understood as the perfect sonic realization of Haino’s early obsession with the work and ideas of the French playwright and poet Antonin Artaud. In his manifestos for the Theater of Cruelty, Artaud advocated a communion between actor and audience in a magic exorcism; gestures, sounds… combine to form a language, superior to words, that can be used to subvert thought and logic and to shock the spectator into seeing the baseness of his world. There is perhaps no better way to describe what Haino set forth in Watashi Dake?.

To describe Haino’s debut at any end of the known spectrum - genius, primitive, or anything else - falls far short. This is the tapping of the human spirit to its core - beyond logic, structure, or reason. It is noise, but so much more. Across eleven tracks, the artist unfolds in a strange series of raw and emotional vocal and guitar works - each inverting expectation, sculpting an uncharted inner world. Watashi Dake? was initially issued in a tiny LP edition by the legendary imprint Pinakotheca, and heard by almost no one inside Japan or without. Over the years, as the legend of Haino grew, so too did this work - becoming one of the rarest and most sought after artifacts of the experimental music world, and commanding astounding prices on the second hand market. The brand new label Black Editions has now partnered with Pinakotheca to bring this legendary album back on vinyl for the first time since its original release.