Japanese reissue of this hard-to-find set of solo violin conceptions recorded live in New York by Fluxus operative, Taj Mahal Travellers/Group Ongaku frontman and renowned minimalist Takehisa Kosugi. This one threads a dart through your heart with all of the continuous invention of Tony Conrad’s most psychoactive conceptions. Recommended.

Heavyweight violin/piano/bass improvised trance from some of the hardest-thinking subterranean Japanese avantists. The way that Yoshizawa's unwieldy bass constructs are cocooned in scores of light by Takehisa Kosugi's (ex-Taj Mahal Travellers) violin and then exploded by Miyake's piano is fairly dazzling.

Stunning vinyl edition of what may well be the Rosetta Stone of the Japanese underground, Group Ongaku’s incredible 1960/61 (!) recording, Music Of Group Ongaku. Ongaku was a pre-Taj Mahal Travellers/East Bionic Symphonia/Marginal Consort avant garde/free improvising unit that featured Takehisa Kosugi of Taj Mahal Travellers on violin, saxophone and tape, Yasunao Tone on saxophone and tape, Chieko Shiomi on piano, Mikio Tojima on cello, Genichi Tsuge on guitar and Shukou Mizuno on cello, drums and tape. Putting these recordings in some kind of historical context is nigh on impossible – there isn’t any! This is pre-Beatles, pre-Rock, pre-Free Jazz and yet it sounds as if it could have been recorded this year. Forming in 1958, Ongaku were primarily influenced by the avant garde strategies of Cage, Stockhausen and the Fluxus movement but they quickly extrapolated those thinkers’ aleatoric approaches and concrete strategies into a form of instant, communal composition that pretty much set the seeds for much of what was to come in their wake. There are two sessions featured on the album, which was originally available in an elusive CD edition back in the day. The first side features recordings made at Mizuno’s house in May 1960 while the flip features two pieces recorded live in concert at Sogetsu Kaikan Hall in Tokyo in September of 1961. The sound combines aspects of jarring tape work with free saxophone blurt, long passages of nocturnal drone, Industrial percussion, strange vortices of strings, psych/noise guitar and a dosed/peaking atmosphere that is deeply psychedelic. In these grooves you can hear the first of echoes of what would become the whole Alchemy/PSF aesthetic while joining the dots between all of your favourite Nurse With Wound listees. Indeed it has been described as “sounding like the COMPLETE Nurse With Wound List playing at once... and when you realize that said posse includes Airway, Cromagnon, Don Bradshaw Leather & Throbbing Gristle among its formidable ranks, then one must understand that what is passing between their ears is an aural Excalibur of avant/experimental freakdom that almost no one knew existed.” A massively potent unearthing of some of the most historically confounding avant/drone/tapework ever to escape the prodigious gravity of the Japanese underground and a vital addition to any shelf. Hard to imagine any reissue topping this one all year. Edition of 300 copies. Highest possible recommendation!

Gorgeous repro reissue of this massively potent set, one of the cornerstones of any collection of celestially-sourced higher hand. Recorded live via a host of third eyes in August of 1974, this is the legendary Japanese free-form/psychedelic ensemble's masterpiece, two discs that pass in and out of corporeal form via huge doses of heavily-processed violin (played by Fluxus operative Takehisa Kosugi), starfields of percussion and wordless ritual chant. Hearing this one again this afternoon, it felt like a real slap around the head, as deep within the very fibre of its sound/process you can trace the source of so much modern tongue, from Double Leopards and Skaters through Throbbing Gristle, Vibracathedral Orchestra and onwards. As featured in Julian Cope's Japrocksampler. Highest possible recommendation!