Since launching in 2017, the Superior Viaduct sub-imprint, États-Unis - dedicated to limited edition reissues of ambitious realisations of experimentalism - has brought us an astounding and often revelatory array of historic LPs. Spanning genre and era, efforts by Annea Lockwood, Remko Scha, Jean Dubuffet, Joe Jones, The Taj-Mahal Travellers, and numerous others, have taken strides in rewriting the standard narratives of where the avant-garde sound is often understood to exist. Now they’re back with one of their most anticipated and important records to date, Yoshi Wada’s seminal Lament For The Rise And Fall Of The Elephantine Crocodile, originally issued on India Navigation in 1982, and nearly impossible to obtain on vinyl over the decades since.

Of all the many members of Fluxus, remarkably, one of its youngest, Yoshi Wada, has had among the most enduring and influential legacies. Following his move from Japan to New York City in 1967, quickly falling in with the collective and embarking on studies with La Monte Young and Pandit Pran Nath, Wada began the development of an astounding and singular body of efforts for voice, bagpipes, and his own hand-made, invented instruments. These works, representing some of the most important documents of American Minimalist music, pushing the territories explored by Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros into unforeseen realms, through their wild, liberated and yet deeply meditative qualities, have carved a deep path over the decades - offering inspiration and departure for those who followed in their wake. Recorded during an epic three-day session in an empty swimming pool in upstate New York, Wada's debut LP, Lament For The Rise And Fall Of The Elephantine Crocodile, is like nothing that came before. With crucial masterworks like Arnold Dreyblatt’s Nodal Excitation and Phill Niblock's Nothin To Look At Just A Record, it belongs to India Navigation’s final push of albums before dissolving - ultimately leading to the respective rarity of each. Drawing the unnameable elements at the fundamental root of music toward an unknown future, Lament For The Rise And Fall Of The Elephantine Crocodile joins two of the oldest drone instruments - the human voice and bagpipes - into a single force. Sparse and otherworldly, harnessing the natural, hallucinatory, resonance of the swimming pool, Wada’s modal experiments with reeds and improvisational singing swell into the rise and fall of a sorrowful chant, bending the boundaries between an expansive ambience and the intimate harmonic of an inner self.

Imbuing the world of avant-garde sound with a remarkable, and deeply personal sense of humanity, Lament For The Rise And Fall Of The Elephantine Crocodile has been so influential over the years that you can hear its traces everywhere you look. This is where it all began. Overwhelmingly beautiful and creatively compelling, this is one of the unquestionable holy grails of experimental music. États-Unis’ reissue is the first ever vinyl reissue.