★An'Archives
Sweet Inspirations at Muon (LP+CD)
* Ltd. to 385 copies incl. cdep, silkscreened jacket with obi (orange or yellow), inserts and postcard * With the release of Sweet Inspirations At Muon, the first appearance on vinyl of Tori Kudo’s mythical early ‘80s primitive rock gang Sweet Inspirations, another piece of the seemingly endless puzzle of the Japanese underground has fallen into place. Recorded some time in 1982 at Yokohama venue Muon – precise details are sketchy – we’re now given another chance to discover what was going on in…
The Night (LP)
*Ltd to 400, silkscreened jacket with obi (light blue, tan) inserts and postcard* LSD March is a band from Himeji, Hyogo Prefecture, whose members revolved around Shinsuke Michishita, guitarist/singer, the band’s black star, before being reborn nowadays, after several years of hiatus, as a duet with Ikuro Takahashi, legendary drummer who was the heart muscle of Fushitsusha, and of most of the underground Tokyo bands. Shinsuke Michishita has a taste for immersion, for plunging into the electric …
Eihwaz (LP)
*LP ltd to 285, silkscreened jacket with obi (red or black) inserts and postcard* Albedo Gravitas is an extension of Albedo Fantastica (released on An’archives in 2018), the duo of Keiko Higuchi and Sachiko (Kousokuya, Overhang Party, Vava Kitora). Both of them are well known names to those who are evolving in the Japanese underground waters since each has been involved in many projects and each has a consisting discography on labels as Musik Atlach, Improvising Beings, Utech. Their respective…
Himitsu No Kaikoroku
** Edition of 285, comes in a silk-3 panel foldout jacket with obi (green, tan, yellow) inserts and a postcard. Liner notes by Patrick O’Brien ** Shūko No Omit is a trio of Yonju Miyaoka on guitars and vocals, Yuya Oishi on drums, and Taiju Sugimori on bass: a classic framework for a rock band, and yet... Led by Yonju Miyaoka, a young prolific musician from Osaka who lives with schizophrenia, Shūko No Omit could have found a home in the P.S.F. records catalogue curated by the late Hideo Ikeezumi…
Paradise of Delusion - 妄想の楽園
** Edition of 300. Duotone insert + offset insert + postcard set Old style / tip-on offset & partially silkscreened jacket with obi ** Shizuka first came to wider attention at roughly the same time as their peers in the Japanese underground – in the nineties, really, when people started to get wise to the surprisingly wide-ranging post-psychedelic sounds emanating from the PSF label, predominantly, and a few other, similar creative cells. During that window of opportunity, Shizuka only released …
Self Portrait
** Edition of 285,comes in asilk-screened tip-on/ “old style” jacket with obi (red or black), with inserts and a postcard. Liner notes by Jon Dale ** It’s been almost three decades since Japanese guitarist and songwriter Masami Kawaguchi first broke cover, with his group Broomdusters and their debut album, 23 hours 30 minutes (Purifiva, 1997). In the intervening years, Kawaguchi has maintained single-minded discipline, through his membership of some of the Japanese underground’s greatest groups …
Remains of the Light
** Edition of 285, comes in a silk-screened (2 colors with metallic ink) 3 panels foldout jacketwithobi(red or black), inserts and a postcard. Liner notes by Michel He nritzi ** Remains of the Light, the debut album by Japanese trio Usurabi, is a gorgeous thing –six generous, deftly melodic songs that stretch out slowly, breathing deeply, yet never outstaying their welcome. The members of Usurabi started playing together in 2017, but they’d known each other for several decades, meeting via their…
Mobilis In Mobili
**Edition of 285 silk-screened wooden slipcase with inserts and a 6 postcards set. Liner notes by Michel Henritzi. An'archives presents three documents, three vinyl records carved by the illuminations of Masayoshi Urabe, six performances engraved like epitaphs in the stone that covers the Living World. These are recordings made in small suburban venues in Japan where Urabe would play in front of a meagre audience: the Bitches Brew in Yokohama, the Groove in Okinawa and the Gari Gari in Tokyo. …
Painted Screens
**Edition of 250 copies in tipped-on sleeves with Japanese obi, insert and postcard. Entirely handmade sleeve edition of Painted Screens – designed & assembled at Impression Lointaine.**
Music box : intimate music with a large palette of instruments ; Voices and sounds, mixed feelings and mysteries…A window opened on travelling memories, half-awakened thoughts and shared moments – dreamed and nocturnal wandering atmospheres, with undulating rays sporadically lighting a subconscious painting.
In …
しりえないものとずっと
Legendary drummer, Ikuro Takahashi played in most of the important bands of the psychedelic underground Japanese scene : Keiji Haino’s Fushitsusha, Seishokki, High b, Ché-Shizu, Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Kousokuya, LSD March and Nagisa Ni Te, but also with Junzo Suzuki, Tamio Shiraishi, Akiko Hotaka and many others, making it difficult to write a comprehensive list. Ikuro does not make a distinction between the young musicians with whom he collaborates, and the big names of the underground behind w…
Billion Years of Sighs
Split LP ltd to 150, comes in a silkscreened cover with obi and insert. A – Junko & Michel Henritzi. B – Michel Henritzi & Fukuoka Rinji. Side A is another love song between La Grande Dame Junko (one of Japan’s foremost improvising vocalists and a member of long-running free-noise unit Hijokaidan) & Michel Henritzi (French guitarist and member of Dustbreeders and Howlin’Ghost Proletarians ). This is blues for the day, from noise to abstract blues, the volcanic meeting between voice and lapsteel…
The Last Song of My Life
"This album documents a recording of Tori Kudo’s Last Song of My Life. Some may know Kudo already as prime mover in pop-naïf collective Maher Shalal Hash Baz; his history stretches back over four decades, and he’s a significant figure in the Japanese underground, thanks to his membership of groups like Noise (with his wife Reiko Kudo), Guys ’N’ Dolls, Snickers, and Sweet Inspirations. Untold numbers of said underground have passed through the ranks of Maher Shalal Hash Baz, among them members of…
Enka Mood Collection
Masami Kawaguchi has been an influential figure in the Japanese underground scene for 2 decades, playing with bands such as Miminokoto, Broomdusters, Los Doroncos and more recently with his New Rock Syndicate. He's also known as a major & regular Keiji Haino collaborator in Aihiyo, and more recently in Hardy Soul. He's one of the greats of modern Japanese psychedelic rock and more recently he recorded the beautiful The Mad Guitar Sings' album on Black Petal, which is a dark solo take on Ma…
Enka Mood Collection
This is the first in a series of Enka mood 10" LPs to be released on An' archives. This record is an expression of the soul of a people, an exotic, sentimental journey. To stand aside or take the ride? The decision lies with what our feelings say. Side A of this split LP features self-proclained 'King of Noise', Jojo Hiroshige, founder member of the legendary Hijokaidan and stalwart of the Japanese noise scene. The B-side is engraved with the naked and guttural voice of sax-player Tamio Shiraish…
Enka Mood Collection
Aoki Tomoyuki is mostly known with as the guitarist & vocalist of Up-Tight (Alchemy records, 8mm) and for more than 2 decades he has been behind some albums which mix plaintive echo-drenched imprecations, love of bitter-sweet folk and blissfully nihilistic guitar noise reminiscent of Les Rallizes Denudes and Mizutani’s velvetian ballads.Harutaka Mochizuki is a multi-instrumentalist, mostly known his saxophone improvisations recalling like the same other lonely satellites and solo thinkers lik…
Le jardin bizarre
CD comes in a silkscreened gatefold cover. Le Jardin Bizarre (the odd garden) is the follow up to the album 'Outside Darkness', released in 2011 by PSF. It is a hollow album, stretching out long rests in which a sticky melancholy, an infinite sadness amplifies itself. 6 tracks dark as so many gardens - gardens seen through night, 6 shades of black, 6 colours of silence. While 'Outside Darkness' appeared like a shadow cast over Fukushima, 'Le Jardin Bizarre' is it's elegy. Disquieting calligrams …
Mutsu no Hana
Reissue of a tape edited in 2011 for the victims of Fukushima. Drony and melancolic. Gatefold cover silkscreened by Alan Sherry, mastering by Denis Blackham.
Swing Low, Sweet Silence
Here, on this record, the screamer and the whisperer sail away toward the worst, expelling from their bodies shredded songs whereon our senses shatter. Such a poetic extremity is not drawn from the cultural landscape, but from the breath of the living world. Raw poetry or a poetic racket made of copper whispers and screams of terror, erotic glossolalia and ramshackle choirs. They stand like two narrators, burnt in the hullabaloo of an infinitely melancholic melody, dislocating in great devouring…