Hiroshi Yoshimura - Music for Nine Post Cards (1982)

Hiroshi Yoshimura

Music for Nine Post Cards

Empire of Signs

EOS01LP

Lovely vinyl repress of 1982's ambient masterpiece

Despite his status as a key figure in the history of Japanese ambient music, Hiroshi Yoshimura remains tragically under-known outside of his home country. Empire of Signs – a new imprint co-helmed by Maxwell August Croy, Spencer Doran and distributed by Light In The Attic – is proud to reissue Yoshimura’s debut Music for Nine Post Cards for the first time outside Japan in collaboration with Hiroshi’s widow Yoko Yoshimura, with more reissues of Hiroshi’s works to follow in the future.

Working initially as a conceptual artist, the musical side of Yoshimura’s artistic practice came to prominence in the post-Fluxus scene of late 1970s Tokyo alongside Akio Suzuki and Takehisa Kosugi, taking many subsequent turns within Japan’s bubble economy afterward. His sound works took on many forms – commissioned fashion runway scores, soundtracking perfume, soundscapes for pre-fab houses, train station sound design – all existing not as side work but as logical extensions of his philosophy of sound. His work strived for serenity as an ideal, and this approach can be felt strongly on Music for Nine Post Cards.

Home recorded on a minimal setup of keyboard and Fender Rhodes, Music for Nine Post Cards was Yoshimura’s first concrete collection of music, initially a demo recording given to the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art to be played within the building’s architecture. This was not background music in the prior Japanese “BGM” sense of the word, but “environmental music”, the literal translation of the Japanese term kankyō ongaku [環境音楽] given to Brian Eno’s “ambient” music when it arrived in late 70’s Japan. Yoshimura, along with his musical co-traveler Satoshi Ashikawa, searched for a new dialog between sound and space: music not as an external absolute, but as something that interlocks with a physical environment and shifts the listener’s experience within it. Erik Satie’s furniture music, R. Murray Schafer’s concept of the soundscape and Eno’s ambience all greatly informed their work, but the specific form of tranquil stasis presented on releases like Nine Post Cards is still difficult to place within a specific tradition, remaining elusive and idiosyncratic despite the economy of its construction. This record offers the perfect introduction to Hiroshi’s unique and beautiful worldview: it’s one that can be listened to – and lived in – endlessly.

Buy here: https://lightintheattic.net/releases/3538-music-for-nine-post-cards

La Monte Young & Mariam Zazeela - The Black Album

It's like Christmas, but early.
This record has been at the top of my wish-list forever, but the £100+ price tag for old battered copies of the impossible grail always prevented me from buying it. La Monte Young is incredibly prolific, and records everything he ever does, but, somewhat against the grain of internet culture, never actually releases anything. Having a grand total of two commercially released albums (plus a few shoddy bootlegs), it is possible to pick up the 100 hours or so of the rest of his output on torrent sites, but you rarely find anything in the flesh... until now. A limited re-release that seems to be already bordering on going out of print, this album consists of two long-form 'drone' tracks - the first for two singers (Young and his wife Zazeela) and sine tone, with the second for two gongs. Like all Young's music, it's not for the faint-hearted, and you'd be forgiven for assuming a lack of progression throughout the 20 or so minutes of each piece. However, the careful use of specific frequencies creates all kind of odd psycho-neurological affects in the brain, creating a space that is beyond conscious attention - the mind tunes in to a new way of being, freed from the constraints of taste or opinion.
I can't sell this record enough - it is one of the greatest things to every grace wax - designed to be played loudly and in a single, uninterrupted sitting, I defy anyone to not get caught up in its trance-like effect under the right conditions. If you're in New York, Young and Zazeela have an ongoing installation where you can go and sit in on these continuous drones and chants - their house is an open performance space that has been running a perpetual version of this work for nigh on 30 years.

You can pick this up at Piccadilly records for at least another ten minutes - Buy it

Self Defense Family - Heaven is Earth

A bit like normal rock music, but slower and without any hooks, and a singer who just angry talks over it all. Self Defence Family manage to be particularly weird by sounding so close to normality, coming off as simply too lazy to actually bother finishing writing songs - and yet, their songs have an underlying cleverness. Hints of unexpected keys, extreme repetition that seems to border on classical minimalism, and that relentless, grating voice that doesn't seem to be saying anything. The last album came with a whole extra slab of vinyl consisting entirely of one long interview with a 70's porn star. This time round, themes seem to veer between reports of explosions at science laboratories, buying the wrong flavour of teas by accident,  to existentialist discussions at King Arthurs table.

And to top things off, its produced by that chap from Converge and comes on see-through vinyl.

Get it at Deathwishinc. - http://store.deathwishinc.com/product/DW170v.html