PSF Records - Catalog PSFD161-

PSFD1-20

PSFD21-40

PSFD41-60

PSFD61-80

| PSFD8021-

PSFD1001-/MKCD/TOMOKAWA

LP/CD single/Video/DVD/Book/T-Shirt

<< back PSFD-161- next >>

PSFD-161
Munehiro Narita / Narita

Munehiro Narita - guitar
Takashi Ueno - guest guitar (#2 & #4)
First solo album by High Rise and Kyoaku no Intention six-string speed meister Munehiro Narita. Featuring a guest appearance by Takashi Ueno of Mahel Shalal Hash Baz, Tenniscoats, and a couple of dozen Majikick-related units fame.
With High Rise currently on extended vacation, Narita has been burning up stages across Tokyo in his aggressive, free-jazz inflected improv rock unit Kyoaku no Intentions, and more recently in naked solo style. The time is definitely right, after over twenty years in Tokyo's premier lysergic garage psych outfits, for Narita to unleash a solo album.
Serious students of Narita's guitar style will have noticed that for all its surface rock grime and ton-up speed thrills, it has always been a structurally complex thing drawing upon free jazz and free improv methodologies as much as greaser grunt. Even so, for those expecting a conflagration of demon-speed riffs and slash 'n' burn avant-garde dynamics, Narita will come as something of a surprise. He has deconstructed the most thrilling elements of rock guitar's pyrotechnics - wah-wahed smears, slowed down slides, sensual string bends- and retooled them into service of a far more subtle improvised psychedelia. Tonally it sounds like nothing else, rocked out and avanted up, meditative and impassioned cool all at once, Derrida with a Marshall stack.

$18

PSFD-162
Sanhedolin / Manjo icchiwa muko
Sanhedolin are a ludicrously amped-up and heavy new power trio, featuring Keiji Haino, Tatsuya Yoshida (Ruins) and Mitsuru Nasuno (Ruins). Haino brings aggressive anguish and all-consuming black fire, Yoshida and Nasuno supply a sack-full of convulsive time-shifting and complex kinetic acceleration.
Haino and Yoshida have been working together on and off for the past three or four years in a number of duo and trio contexts, including a tour of China and Taiwan. They have built up the kind of instinctual response and rapport that only comes with extended playing. A previous trio formation including Hisashi Sasaki (ex Ruins) seems to have bitten the dust, and in its place we have the newly named Sanhedolin.
Speed-deranged progressive metal of spectacular and ridiculous heights.

$18

PSFD-163
Shizuo Hasegawa / gene packs
Hirotomo Hasegawa: ichiriki, voice, loops
Shizuo Uchida: bass, ichigen, loops
Debut album by a new improvisation group consisting of Hirotomo Hasegawa and Shizuo Uchida. Both have a leather-bound folder full of underground back-story ? Hasegawa was the lead singer of seminal early eighties Japanese punk/hardcore group Aburadako (Greasy Octopus), while Uchida was a long-term member of Hainofs Nijiumu medieval dream-drone unit.
The group's instrumentation is highly unorthodox, placing Uchida's mysterious bass textures against the wet skirl of Hasegawa's hichiriki, an ancient double-reed wind instrument whose haunting upper register tones are an unmistakeable feature of gagaku court music. Hasegawa brings a bucketful of phlegm to his approach to the instrument, out-honking Zorn's duckcall work by a marshy mile. Uchida also contributes some striking ichigen (single-string) koto.
Deliriously psychedelic, fully immersive drone and oriental wind works in the grand tradition of Taj Mahal Travellers, Nijiumu, Marginal Consort and too few others.

$18

PSFD-164
Maher Shalal Hash Baz / Kunitachi Kibun LIVE 1984-1985
Maher Shalal Hash Baz stand at the pinnacle of Tori Kudo's eccentric and beguiling musical weltanschauung, a stew of soaring melodic genius, naive wisdom and the eternal amateur freshness of left-footing your own brain. Emperors of error, indeed. Their very special talent has been recognized by a slew of underground labels across the world and garnered them famous friends and fans aplenty including The Pastels. But until now, the very earliest roots of the band have remained shrouded in misty tendrils of mystery.
Kunitachi Kibun delves deep into the band's beginnings, presenting two previously unreleased gigs, including their first show from December 1984 when they played in a legendary triple header with High Rise and Kosokuya at the Kid Airaku Hall in Tokyo. The second show from six months later includes an appearance by the late alto saxophonist Masami Shinoda. Both soar with idiot-savant genius, Tori's truly distinctive guitar and vocals creating their own idiot-savant networks of logic with the rest of the group. A stupendous glimpse into a simpler world of communal transcendence and music making.

$18

PSFD-165
Toshiaki Ishizuka / Drum Drama
New solo work from the Japanese underground’s drummer of choice.
Six years on from 1999`s masterful Red Night (PSFD-107), Toshiaki “ToshiEIshizuka is back with a new set of deep, shimmering nightscapes for percussion. Toshi has been a pivotal figure in the Japanese underground since the late sixties, when he founded Japan’s first radical, politically-engaged punk group Zuno Keisatsu. Since then he has been the sticksman of choice for howling folk-poets Kazuki Tomokawa, Yasuki Fukushima and Kan Mikami, as well as making up one corner of the Vajra trio with Mikami and Keiji Haino, and leading his own group Cinorama. More recently he has been active in the Sanjah trio with Mikami and altoist Masayoshi Urabe.
Drum Drama is Toshi’s third album of solo percussion. The first, Kaze no Yami, was released in a miniscule edition in 1991. Since a full reissue is for various reasons impossible, Toshi has included two mesmerizing pieces from Kaze no Yami here, alongside three new pieces. Toshi has a unique approach that blends overtly textural work (rubbing cymbals, rolling metallic balls, bowed gongs) with mountain-deep kick-drum bombs and flashes of staccato martial snares. The results are deeply evocative nocturnal landscapes of immense percussive variety, subtle, lyrical, cinematic and even soulful.
Another major statement from an unsung thinker.

$18

PSFD-166
Kousokuya/ "1979 First Live"
Jutok Kaneko Eguitar
Mick Evocals
Hiroshi Yokoyama Esynth
Toshiko Watanabe - drums
Miraculously unearthed live tape from one of the earliest incarnations of Tokyo heavy psychedelic legends Kousokuya.
For a group with a 25-year history on the Tokyo underground scene, Kousokuya have left very little imprint of their activities. Once heard, though, their sound is unmistakeable Ea grinding, soaring sonic-blackhole that charts the empty gulfs of tension-space like no one else this side of Fushitsusha.
This tape, recorded at legendary seventies Tokyo underground venue Minor, captures Kousokuya at a formative stage in their existence EMick’s blank, disembodied howl is present and correct, as is the choppy brilliance of Kaneko’s guitar playing. But the real surprise is synth player Hiroshi Yokoyama, who lasted just a few gigs with the group. He contributes great clots of synth-blurt to the mix, wailing and derailing, the soul of this group’s genetic instability.
Another piece of the jigsawE

$18

PSFD-167
Ghost Temple / D!O!D!O!D!
Li Jianhong guitar
Huang Jin drums
Fantastic album of pure guitar and drums brutality (and the first non-Japanese release for PSF in several years) from the greatest noise musician in China, Li Jianhong.
Long resident in Hangzhou, Li has released several records on his own 2pi label, including solo noise work for TV monitors and an album by his avant-rock unit Second Skin. He also curates the annual 2pi noise festival in Hangzhou. He played in at the Nuit Blanche festival in Paris in 2004, and this will be his second non-Chinese release.
It is kind of amazing to think that China has already managed to produce a musician as au fait as Li Jianhong obviously is with the whole free noise aesthetic. D!O!D!O!D! is a full-on duo with drummer Huang Jin that mines the rich seams previously explored by Munehiro Narita¹s Kyoaku no Intention and Rudolph Grey¹s Blue Humans. Endlessly thrilling free psych-noise guitar blurt that bundles up enough flailing electric energy to illuminate half of Shanghai.

$18

PSFD-168
Kondo Hideaki / Structures
Hideaki Kondo - 10 string gut guitar, gut guitar
Michio Karimata - flute
Jun Kondo - contrabass
Osamu Nomura - percussion
First solo album by Hideaki Kondo, leader of Japan leading improvisation collective, EXIAS-J.
Kondo is known for the theoretical rigour that lies behind his technical mastery of the guitar, and for the multiplicity of his methodologies, encompassing free jazz, avant-garde, rock and folk forms. As in the playing of the late Masayuki Takayanagi, there is an originality and clarity of thought, a combination of historical understanding and contemporary intentionality, in Kondo¹s approach to guitar improvisation that is simply stunning.
This first solo album presents Kondo largely on ten-string gut guitar, moving with an uncanny grace and concentration from stone melodic beauty to densely structured improv violence. Fabulous support work from Exias-J regular Kondo, and sometime Keiji Haino collaborator Michio Karimata.

$18

PSFD-169
Tokyo Flashback 6
The long awaited return of PSF's legendary, scene-defining compilation. For two years since the release of Tokyo Flashback 5 in 1995, we have been scouring the deepest dives in the darkest alleyways of the Tokyo underground in search of the newest mutated manifestations of the lysergic paradigm. The quest has not been an easy one, but now after dozens of gigs and hundreds of hours listening to demo cdrs, we have finally reached its conclusion.
Tokyo Flashback 6 presents the fruits of that search, a treasure trove of the unheard. Twelve new groups poised on the cusp of greatness, driven by a fervent belief in the transformational potential of sound and the dimension-altering power of cranked amps, delay pedals and a third-eye opened to the cosmos. The groups included span a wide-definition of the psychedelic, from the No-wave intensity of Onna (led by underground manga artist Keizo Miyanishi), to the acid-punk splatter of Ainotamenishis, the art-school insanity of Kinky Pigeon, and the loner canyon-magic of Genshi.
Featured groups: Ahobune, Hananoyoni, Onna, Yamashirube, Sarod, Retort Mandala, Ainotamenishis, Kinky Pigeon, Yakochu, Ogikubo Connection, Masami Kawaguchi, Genshi.

$18

PSFD-170
V.A. / Asian Flashback
Featured groups/artists:
Lia Jianhong, Munehiro Narita, Shoji Hano; Mustangs; Kiyasu Orchestra; Mafeisan; 10; Xiao Be; D!O!D!O!D!; Yukie Sato; Yoshiteru Koga Jizo; Kim Young Jin; Li Daiguo; Amature Amplifier; Soonie.
First PSF compilation to focus on the linkages between the established underground scene in Japan and nascent ones in China and Korea. Politics and history had long prevented exchanges between the three countries, but in recent years increasing trade and cultural linkages have revealed exciting new synergies.
Covers the breadth of new East Asian underground forms Ewhite-out noise, face-peeling free improvisation, lysergic rock, limpid acid folk, electronic tone float, coruscating punk, free jazz and avant-art moves. Features relatively established names like China's king of noise guitar Li-Jianhong andmotor-psych free-rock emperor Munehiro Narita, alongside a ton of utter unknown names.

$18

PSFD-171
Gendai Sokkyo / same
Masahiro Deguchi - flute, guitar, effects, kalimba
Masaaki Motoyama - viola
Hirokuni Ueno - piano
Hiroyuki Usui - drums, percussion
Takanari Sato - drums
Another piece of ineffable mystery from the deepest bowels of the Tokyo underground. Led by flautist and guitarist Masahiro Deguchi, Gendai Sokkyo (the name means Contemporary Improvisation) are a group with no discernable history, who seem to have sprung from nothing to fully formed life.
As the name suggests, the group showcase an improvisatory fusion of methodology and sound palette, drawing upon free jazz/free improvisation, avant rock moves and the textures of contemporary classical. An explosion of weird dynamics, suggestive in its inclusiveness and entirely psychedelic in its approach.

$18

PSFD-172
Ahousen / Ahousen
Katsu: guitar
Suu: saxophone, voice
Akira: bass
Tail: drums
Lunatic avant-free-rock, honed in guerrilla street performance. Debut album from one of the most exciting discoveries from the recent Tokyo Flashback 6 compilation.
There's an entrancing sense of moon-kissed lunatic wildness about Ahousen (the group's name means Ship of Fools). Their avant-rock meets free jazz meets enka melancholic sound is entirely their own, a crazed communion with dead voices, honed to blistering perfection in guerrilla performance on the night-time streets of Shinjuku.
For those of a genealogical bent, the group has some history. Guitarist Katsu played with original Tokyo Rockers legends Lizard in the seventies. Drummer Tail has played with Suishou no Fune.

$18

PSFD-173
Onna / Katawa
Keizo Miyanishi - guitar, vocals
Kotei Penguin - electric guitar, violin
Roiki - acoustic guitar, etc
The musical alter ego of obsessive pointillist underground cartoonist and illustrator Keizo Miyanishi, Onna have been in varying liminal stages of musical existence/non-existence since the early eighties. Their bleak and nihilistic no-wave downer sound riveted the Tokyo scene of the time –an early line-up featured a pre-White Heaven Michio Kurihara. But after a couple of years and just one single, the group faded back into silence, becoming the stuff of rumour and faded memories. It was kind of shocking then to have a reformed Onna suddenly doing the rounds of Tokyo clubs a year or so back.
After a couple of CDrs and an acclaimed appearance on Tokyo Flashback 6, Kataha is their first album in well over a decade. Detuned and fractured psychedelic blues filled with a bucketful of abject fear and personal loathing Etopped off with some of the most strikingly original vocal mannerisms in the Japanese underground. A fantastic return.

$18

PSFD-174
Masayoshi Urabe / Flag of Midsummer
Alto saxophone, harmonica, chains, metal, accordion, bells, toy flute EMasayoshi Urabe
Metal junk, cello, etc - Kiyoharu Kuwayama (track 2 only)
A new solo album by Masayoshi Urabe is always a cause for rejoicing. This is his first since the frankly frightening Ware Wai Seidei No Kyojyo Zo on PSF in 2003.
Urabe rarely plays live now, but this live album catches him in action last summer in a converted sakEbrewery on the shores of Lake Biwa, near Kyoto. The damp heat of midsummer in this part of Japan seems to have worked its magic on Urabe, and this is an altogether gentler performance than normal. Over one long solo track, he bends his breath and body to the air in his saxophone, his tones blending with the sound of the insects outside the venue. A shorter second track captures him in a rare outing on accordion, toy flute and harmonica together with Kiyoharu Kuwayama.
Another radical, effortlessly convincing album from the master of contemporary rock n roll breathing.

$18

PSFD-175
Kim Doo Soo / Ten Days Butterfly
Kim Doo Soo - guitar, vocals
Kim Doo Soo is the deepest and most introspective of Korea's acid folk singers. Many are the legends that cling to his songs Epolitical oppression, alcoholism, suicide, a ten-year period of mountain seclusionEDespite having been active since the mid eighties and having released four acclaimed albums in Korea, most Western listeners only became aware of him through his tracks on the recent Damon & Naomi compilation, International Sad Hits.
On Ten Days Butterfly, his fifth album, he mines productive veins of profound melancholy, animistic nature, and unfathomable, hermetic affection. The whole is couched in a veil of the most gorgeous still melodicism, Kim's vocals and guitar shaded with subtle accordion, violin, piano, organ and harmonica. A reflective and unearthly beautiful masterpiece.
Also available on 180g double-vinyl.

$18

PSFD-176
Vajra / Live 2007
Guitar, Vocals: Keiji Haino
Guitar, Vocals: Kan Mikami
Percussion: Toshiaki Ishizuka
First live album by the Japanese rock power trio to end all power trios EKan Mikami, Keiji Haino and Toshiaki Ishizuka!!
This presents the group at a thrilling peak of their rock deconstruction-reconstruction praxis, one of those all too rare manifestations of the musical sublime. Mikami is in top blues testifying form, his voice a thing of cracked beauty and weathered power. Haino and Ishizuka infuse the songs with telepathic engagement Econstant layered motion, percussive blast-bombs and eruptions of black lava. Simply a ferocious record. Limited edition of 1000 in mini-LP style paper-sleeve.

$18

PSFD-177
Tamio Shiraishi / Live Duo & MICO
Alto saxophone-Tamio Shiraishi
Alto saxophone, piano molanica, etc-MICO
A rare live album from one of the major names in the Japanese free noise underground - Tamio Shiraishi.
Shiraishi was one of the major movers in the free noise/underground rock/DIY improv Minor scene of the late 70s and early 80s that gave birth to so many of the major names in the Japanese underground. He was a pivotal member of a large number of groups associated with the scene, including Keiji Haino's Fushitsusha. But Shiraishi has rarely recorded and thus enjoys far less name recognition outside of Japan. He has lived in New York City for the past decade or so, collaborating with the likes of Sean Meehan and the No-Neck Blues Band.
This compilation of live recordings captures Shiraishi live in Europe, the US and Japan between 2001 and 2007, together with NNCK member MICO. Forceful, intense, chaotic improvisations for saxophone, vocals, percussion, piano etc. Shiraishi's trademark ultra high-pitched dog-whistle sax and guttural vocals are showcased to full and outstanding effect.

$18

PSFD-178
Shizuka / Live/Traditional Aesthetics
Vocals, Guitar - Shizuka
Guitar - Miura Maki
Bass - Seven
Drums - Kosugi Jun
Shizuka were THE great lost-in-action group of the Tokyo underground psych scene during the early to mid nineties. Led by doll-maker Shizuka, and with ex-Fushitsusha alumni Maki Miura and Jun Kosugi on hand, they created some of the most fragile and intense acid-rock of their time, but remained largely undocumented and under appreciated.
This gig documented on this CD, recorded at Bears in Osaka in 1995, was long whispered of amongst the cognoscenti. It catches them at a near-divinely inspired peak of fucked-up narcotic bliss. Shizuka's uncanny vocals and tremulous sense of timing washing like brown sugar over fluid nebulae of guitar and drum nirvana, peaking and churning in perfect, weightless filigrees of light, cosmic cold and invisible motion. Miura's guitar playing is just jaw-dropping.
Booklet includes lyrics in Japanese and English.

$18

PSFD-179
Aural Fit / II
Guitar, vocals- Mondo Bohachi
Bass- Kenichi Endo Tanabe
Drums - Teruhisa Nanbu
The reincarnation of the in-the-red psych aesthetics of early High Rise.
One of the biggest underground psych/noise rock discoveries of the last five years were Tokyo-based Aural Fit. A heavy, bludgeoning cudgel of a band, all distorted grime and redlined aggression, their 2004 self-released first album burst over the scene like a big bag of heavy spanners. They followed up with a track on Tokyo Flashback 5, but then line-up changes seemed to sideline their juddering, thundering rock juggernaut.
Leader Mondo Bohachi has then went about reassembling the group from the ground up, and these are the first recorded results. If anything, it's even scarier, noisier and more rock than last time. 'Loud' and 'psychedelic' are still the watchwords, needles in the red all the way, and all the Stooges, Blue Cheer, TG etc references you might require are present and correct. Loud, vicious and dumb - it doesn't really get much murkier or animal-mind-melding than this. Turn it up.

$18

PSFD-180
Iro / Tamafuri

$18

<< back PSFD-161- next >>

PSFD1-20 | PSFD21-40 | PSFD41-60 | PSFD61-80 | PSFD81-100

PSFD101-120 | PSFD121-140 | PSFD141-160 | PSFD161-

PSFD8001-8020 | PSFD8021- | PSFD1001-/MKCD/TOMOKAWA | LP/CD single/Video/DVD/Book/T-Shirt


	PSFD-161 Munehiro Narita / Narita Munehiro Narita - guitar Takashi Ueno - guest guitar (#2 & #4) First solo album by High Rise and Kyoaku no Intention six-string speed meister Munehiro Narita. Featuring a guest appearance by Takashi Ueno of Mahel Shalal Hash Baz, Tenniscoats, and a couple of dozen Majikick-related units fame. With High Rise currently on extended vacation, Narita has been burning up stages across Tokyo in his aggressive, free-jazz inflected improv rock unit Kyoaku no Intentions, and more recently in naked solo style. The time is definitely right, after over twenty years in Tokyo's premier lysergic garage psych outfits, for Narita to unleash a solo album. Serious students of Narita's guitar style will have noticed that for all its surface rock grime and ton-up speed thrills, it has always been a structurally complex thing drawing upon free jazz and free improv methodologies as much as greaser grunt. Even so, for those expecting a conflagration of demon-speed riffs and slash 'n' burn avant-garde dynamics, Narita will come as something of a surprise. He has deconstructed the most thrilling elements of rock guitar's pyrotechnics - wah-wahed smears, slowed down slides, sensual string bends- and retooled them into service of a far more subtle improvised psychedelia. Tonally it sounds like nothing else, rocked out and avanted up, meditative and impassioned cool all at once, Derrida with a Marshall stack.	$18

	PSFD-162 Sanhedolin / Manjo icchiwa muko Sanhedolin are a ludicrously amped-up and heavy new power trio, featuring Keiji Haino, Tatsuya Yoshida (Ruins) and Mitsuru Nasuno (Ruins). Haino brings aggressive anguish and all-consuming black fire, Yoshida and Nasuno supply a sack-full of convulsive time-shifting and complex kinetic acceleration. Haino and Yoshida have been working together on and off for the past three or four years in a number of duo and trio contexts, including a tour of China and Taiwan. They have built up the kind of instinctual response and rapport that only comes with extended playing. A previous trio formation including Hisashi Sasaki (ex Ruins) seems to have bitten the dust, and in its place we have the newly named Sanhedolin. Speed-deranged progressive metal of spectacular and ridiculous heights.	$18

	PSFD-163 Shizuo Hasegawa / gene packs Hirotomo Hasegawa: ichiriki, voice, loops Shizuo Uchida: bass, ichigen, loops Debut album by a new improvisation group consisting of Hirotomo Hasegawa and Shizuo Uchida. Both have a leather-bound folder full of underground back-story ? Hasegawa was the lead singer of seminal early eighties Japanese punk/hardcore group Aburadako (Greasy Octopus), while Uchida was a long-term member of Hainofs Nijiumu medieval dream-drone unit. The group's instrumentation is highly unorthodox, placing Uchida's mysterious bass textures against the wet skirl of Hasegawa's hichiriki, an ancient double-reed wind instrument whose haunting upper register tones are an unmistakeable feature of gagaku court music. Hasegawa brings a bucketful of phlegm to his approach to the instrument, out-honking Zorn's duckcall work by a marshy mile. Uchida also contributes some striking ichigen (single-string) koto. Deliriously psychedelic, fully immersive drone and oriental wind works in the grand tradition of Taj Mahal Travellers, Nijiumu, Marginal Consort and too few others.	$18

	PSFD-164 Maher Shalal Hash Baz / Kunitachi Kibun LIVE 1984-1985 Maher Shalal Hash Baz stand at the pinnacle of Tori Kudo's eccentric and beguiling musical weltanschauung, a stew of soaring melodic genius, naive wisdom and the eternal amateur freshness of left-footing your own brain. Emperors of error, indeed. Their very special talent has been recognized by a slew of underground labels across the world and garnered them famous friends and fans aplenty including The Pastels. But until now, the very earliest roots of the band have remained shrouded in misty tendrils of mystery. Kunitachi Kibun delves deep into the band's beginnings, presenting two previously unreleased gigs, including their first show from December 1984 when they played in a legendary triple header with High Rise and Kosokuya at the Kid Airaku Hall in Tokyo. The second show from six months later includes an appearance by the late alto saxophonist Masami Shinoda. Both soar with idiot-savant genius, Tori's truly distinctive guitar and vocals creating their own idiot-savant networks of logic with the rest of the group. A stupendous glimpse into a simpler world of communal transcendence and music making.	$18

	PSFD-165 Toshiaki Ishizuka / Drum Drama New solo work from the Japanese underground’s drummer of choice. Six years on from 1999`s masterful Red Night (PSFD-107), Toshiaki “ToshiEIshizuka is back with a new set of deep, shimmering nightscapes for percussion. Toshi has been a pivotal figure in the Japanese underground since the late sixties, when he founded Japan’s first radical, politically-engaged punk group Zuno Keisatsu. Since then he has been the sticksman of choice for howling folk-poets Kazuki Tomokawa, Yasuki Fukushima and Kan Mikami, as well as making up one corner of the Vajra trio with Mikami and Keiji Haino, and leading his own group Cinorama. More recently he has been active in the Sanjah trio with Mikami and altoist Masayoshi Urabe. Drum Drama is Toshi’s third album of solo percussion. The first, Kaze no Yami, was released in a miniscule edition in 1991. Since a full reissue is for various reasons impossible, Toshi has included two mesmerizing pieces from Kaze no Yami here, alongside three new pieces. Toshi has a unique approach that blends overtly textural work (rubbing cymbals, rolling metallic balls, bowed gongs) with mountain-deep kick-drum bombs and flashes of staccato martial snares. The results are deeply evocative nocturnal landscapes of immense percussive variety, subtle, lyrical, cinematic and even soulful. Another major statement from an unsung thinker.	$18

	PSFD-166 Kousokuya/ "1979 First Live" Jutok Kaneko Eguitar Mick Evocals Hiroshi Yokoyama Esynth Toshiko Watanabe - drums Miraculously unearthed live tape from one of the earliest incarnations of Tokyo heavy psychedelic legends Kousokuya. For a group with a 25-year history on the Tokyo underground scene, Kousokuya have left very little imprint of their activities. Once heard, though, their sound is unmistakeable Ea grinding, soaring sonic-blackhole that charts the empty gulfs of tension-space like no one else this side of Fushitsusha. This tape, recorded at legendary seventies Tokyo underground venue Minor, captures Kousokuya at a formative stage in their existence EMick’s blank, disembodied howl is present and correct, as is the choppy brilliance of Kaneko’s guitar playing. But the real surprise is synth player Hiroshi Yokoyama, who lasted just a few gigs with the group. He contributes great clots of synth-blurt to the mix, wailing and derailing, the soul of this group’s genetic instability. Another piece of the jigsawE	$18

	PSFD-167 Ghost Temple / D!O!D!O!D! Li Jianhong guitar Huang Jin drums Fantastic album of pure guitar and drums brutality (and the first non-Japanese release for PSF in several years) from the greatest noise musician in China, Li Jianhong. Long resident in Hangzhou, Li has released several records on his own 2pi label, including solo noise work for TV monitors and an album by his avant-rock unit Second Skin. He also curates the annual 2pi noise festival in Hangzhou. He played in at the Nuit Blanche festival in Paris in 2004, and this will be his second non-Chinese release. It is kind of amazing to think that China has already managed to produce a musician as au fait as Li Jianhong obviously is with the whole free noise aesthetic. D!O!D!O!D! is a full-on duo with drummer Huang Jin that mines the rich seams previously explored by Munehiro Narita¹s Kyoaku no Intention and Rudolph Grey¹s Blue Humans. Endlessly thrilling free psych-noise guitar blurt that bundles up enough flailing electric energy to illuminate half of Shanghai.	$18

	PSFD-168 Kondo Hideaki / Structures Hideaki Kondo - 10 string gut guitar, gut guitar Michio Karimata - flute Jun Kondo - contrabass Osamu Nomura - percussion First solo album by Hideaki Kondo, leader of Japan leading improvisation collective, EXIAS-J. Kondo is known for the theoretical rigour that lies behind his technical mastery of the guitar, and for the multiplicity of his methodologies, encompassing free jazz, avant-garde, rock and folk forms. As in the playing of the late Masayuki Takayanagi, there is an originality and clarity of thought, a combination of historical understanding and contemporary intentionality, in Kondo¹s approach to guitar improvisation that is simply stunning. This first solo album presents Kondo largely on ten-string gut guitar, moving with an uncanny grace and concentration from stone melodic beauty to densely structured improv violence. Fabulous support work from Exias-J regular Kondo, and sometime Keiji Haino collaborator Michio Karimata.	$18

	PSFD-169 Tokyo Flashback 6 The long awaited return of PSF's legendary, scene-defining compilation. For two years since the release of Tokyo Flashback 5 in 1995, we have been scouring the deepest dives in the darkest alleyways of the Tokyo underground in search of the newest mutated manifestations of the lysergic paradigm. The quest has not been an easy one, but now after dozens of gigs and hundreds of hours listening to demo cdrs, we have finally reached its conclusion. Tokyo Flashback 6 presents the fruits of that search, a treasure trove of the unheard. Twelve new groups poised on the cusp of greatness, driven by a fervent belief in the transformational potential of sound and the dimension-altering power of cranked amps, delay pedals and a third-eye opened to the cosmos. The groups included span a wide-definition of the psychedelic, from the No-wave intensity of Onna (led by underground manga artist Keizo Miyanishi), to the acid-punk splatter of Ainotamenishis, the art-school insanity of Kinky Pigeon, and the loner canyon-magic of Genshi. Featured groups: Ahobune, Hananoyoni, Onna, Yamashirube, Sarod, Retort Mandala, Ainotamenishis, Kinky Pigeon, Yakochu, Ogikubo Connection, Masami Kawaguchi, Genshi.	$18

	PSFD-170 V.A. / Asian Flashback Featured groups/artists: Lia Jianhong, Munehiro Narita, Shoji Hano; Mustangs; Kiyasu Orchestra; Mafeisan; 10; Xiao Be; D!O!D!O!D!; Yukie Sato; Yoshiteru Koga Jizo; Kim Young Jin; Li Daiguo; Amature Amplifier; Soonie. First PSF compilation to focus on the linkages between the established underground scene in Japan and nascent ones in China and Korea. Politics and history had long prevented exchanges between the three countries, but in recent years increasing trade and cultural linkages have revealed exciting new synergies. Covers the breadth of new East Asian underground forms Ewhite-out noise, face-peeling free improvisation, lysergic rock, limpid acid folk, electronic tone float, coruscating punk, free jazz and avant-art moves. Features relatively established names like China's king of noise guitar Li-Jianhong andmotor-psych free-rock emperor Munehiro Narita, alongside a ton of utter unknown names.	$18

	PSFD-171 Gendai Sokkyo / same Masahiro Deguchi - flute, guitar, effects, kalimba Masaaki Motoyama - viola Hirokuni Ueno - piano Hiroyuki Usui - drums, percussion Takanari Sato - drums Another piece of ineffable mystery from the deepest bowels of the Tokyo underground. Led by flautist and guitarist Masahiro Deguchi, Gendai Sokkyo (the name means Contemporary Improvisation) are a group with no discernable history, who seem to have sprung from nothing to fully formed life. As the name suggests, the group showcase an improvisatory fusion of methodology and sound palette, drawing upon free jazz/free improvisation, avant rock moves and the textures of contemporary classical. An explosion of weird dynamics, suggestive in its inclusiveness and entirely psychedelic in its approach.	$18

	PSFD-172 Ahousen / Ahousen Katsu: guitar Suu: saxophone, voice Akira: bass Tail: drums Lunatic avant-free-rock, honed in guerrilla street performance. Debut album from one of the most exciting discoveries from the recent Tokyo Flashback 6 compilation. There's an entrancing sense of moon-kissed lunatic wildness about Ahousen (the group's name means Ship of Fools). Their avant-rock meets free jazz meets enka melancholic sound is entirely their own, a crazed communion with dead voices, honed to blistering perfection in guerrilla performance on the night-time streets of Shinjuku. For those of a genealogical bent, the group has some history. Guitarist Katsu played with original Tokyo Rockers legends Lizard in the seventies. Drummer Tail has played with Suishou no Fune.	$18

	PSFD-173 Onna / Katawa Keizo Miyanishi - guitar, vocals Kotei Penguin - electric guitar, violin Roiki - acoustic guitar, etc The musical alter ego of obsessive pointillist underground cartoonist and illustrator Keizo Miyanishi, Onna have been in varying liminal stages of musical existence/non-existence since the early eighties. Their bleak and nihilistic no-wave downer sound riveted the Tokyo scene of the time –an early line-up featured a pre-White Heaven Michio Kurihara. But after a couple of years and just one single, the group faded back into silence, becoming the stuff of rumour and faded memories. It was kind of shocking then to have a reformed Onna suddenly doing the rounds of Tokyo clubs a year or so back. After a couple of CDrs and an acclaimed appearance on Tokyo Flashback 6, Kataha is their first album in well over a decade. Detuned and fractured psychedelic blues filled with a bucketful of abject fear and personal loathing Etopped off with some of the most strikingly original vocal mannerisms in the Japanese underground. A fantastic return.	$18

	PSFD-174 Masayoshi Urabe / Flag of Midsummer Alto saxophone, harmonica, chains, metal, accordion, bells, toy flute EMasayoshi Urabe Metal junk, cello, etc - Kiyoharu Kuwayama (track 2 only) A new solo album by Masayoshi Urabe is always a cause for rejoicing. This is his first since the frankly frightening Ware Wai Seidei No Kyojyo Zo on PSF in 2003. Urabe rarely plays live now, but this live album catches him in action last summer in a converted sakEbrewery on the shores of Lake Biwa, near Kyoto. The damp heat of midsummer in this part of Japan seems to have worked its magic on Urabe, and this is an altogether gentler performance than normal. Over one long solo track, he bends his breath and body to the air in his saxophone, his tones blending with the sound of the insects outside the venue. A shorter second track captures him in a rare outing on accordion, toy flute and harmonica together with Kiyoharu Kuwayama. Another radical, effortlessly convincing album from the master of contemporary rock n roll breathing.	$18

	PSFD-175 Kim Doo Soo / Ten Days Butterfly Kim Doo Soo - guitar, vocals Kim Doo Soo is the deepest and most introspective of Korea's acid folk singers. Many are the legends that cling to his songs Epolitical oppression, alcoholism, suicide, a ten-year period of mountain seclusionEDespite having been active since the mid eighties and having released four acclaimed albums in Korea, most Western listeners only became aware of him through his tracks on the recent Damon & Naomi compilation, International Sad Hits. On Ten Days Butterfly, his fifth album, he mines productive veins of profound melancholy, animistic nature, and unfathomable, hermetic affection. The whole is couched in a veil of the most gorgeous still melodicism, Kim's vocals and guitar shaded with subtle accordion, violin, piano, organ and harmonica. A reflective and unearthly beautiful masterpiece. Also available on 180g double-vinyl.	$18

	PSFD-176 Vajra / Live 2007 Guitar, Vocals: Keiji Haino Guitar, Vocals: Kan Mikami Percussion: Toshiaki Ishizuka First live album by the Japanese rock power trio to end all power trios EKan Mikami, Keiji Haino and Toshiaki Ishizuka!! This presents the group at a thrilling peak of their rock deconstruction-reconstruction praxis, one of those all too rare manifestations of the musical sublime. Mikami is in top blues testifying form, his voice a thing of cracked beauty and weathered power. Haino and Ishizuka infuse the songs with telepathic engagement Econstant layered motion, percussive blast-bombs and eruptions of black lava. Simply a ferocious record. Limited edition of 1000 in mini-LP style paper-sleeve.	$18

	PSFD-177 Tamio Shiraishi / Live Duo & MICO Alto saxophone-Tamio Shiraishi Alto saxophone, piano molanica, etc-MICO A rare live album from one of the major names in the Japanese free noise underground - Tamio Shiraishi. Shiraishi was one of the major movers in the free noise/underground rock/DIY improv Minor scene of the late 70s and early 80s that gave birth to so many of the major names in the Japanese underground. He was a pivotal member of a large number of groups associated with the scene, including Keiji Haino's Fushitsusha. But Shiraishi has rarely recorded and thus enjoys far less name recognition outside of Japan. He has lived in New York City for the past decade or so, collaborating with the likes of Sean Meehan and the No-Neck Blues Band. This compilation of live recordings captures Shiraishi live in Europe, the US and Japan between 2001 and 2007, together with NNCK member MICO. Forceful, intense, chaotic improvisations for saxophone, vocals, percussion, piano etc. Shiraishi's trademark ultra high-pitched dog-whistle sax and guttural vocals are showcased to full and outstanding effect.	$18

	PSFD-178 Shizuka / Live/Traditional Aesthetics Vocals, Guitar - Shizuka Guitar - Miura Maki Bass - Seven Drums - Kosugi Jun Shizuka were THE great lost-in-action group of the Tokyo underground psych scene during the early to mid nineties. Led by doll-maker Shizuka, and with ex-Fushitsusha alumni Maki Miura and Jun Kosugi on hand, they created some of the most fragile and intense acid-rock of their time, but remained largely undocumented and under appreciated. This gig documented on this CD, recorded at Bears in Osaka in 1995, was long whispered of amongst the cognoscenti. It catches them at a near-divinely inspired peak of fucked-up narcotic bliss. Shizuka's uncanny vocals and tremulous sense of timing washing like brown sugar over fluid nebulae of guitar and drum nirvana, peaking and churning in perfect, weightless filigrees of light, cosmic cold and invisible motion. Miura's guitar playing is just jaw-dropping. Booklet includes lyrics in Japanese and English.	$18

	PSFD-179 Aural Fit / II Guitar, vocals- Mondo Bohachi Bass- Kenichi Endo Tanabe Drums - Teruhisa Nanbu The reincarnation of the in-the-red psych aesthetics of early High Rise. One of the biggest underground psych/noise rock discoveries of the last five years were Tokyo-based Aural Fit. A heavy, bludgeoning cudgel of a band, all distorted grime and redlined aggression, their 2004 self-released first album burst over the scene like a big bag of heavy spanners. They followed up with a track on Tokyo Flashback 5, but then line-up changes seemed to sideline their juddering, thundering rock juggernaut. Leader Mondo Bohachi has then went about reassembling the group from the ground up, and these are the first recorded results. If anything, it's even scarier, noisier and more rock than last time. 'Loud' and 'psychedelic' are still the watchwords, needles in the red all the way, and all the Stooges, Blue Cheer, TG etc references you might require are present and correct. Loud, vicious and dumb - it doesn't really get much murkier or animal-mind-melding than this. Turn it up.	$18

	PSFD-180 Iro / Tamafuri	$18