Kazuki Tomokawa - Kazuki Tomokawa 1975-1977 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Siku is Nicola Cruz's eagerly anticipated new full-length album and first since 2015's game-changing Prender El Alma. Building from where he left off, Nicola continues to develop his exploration of global sounds and cultures, and his fascination for electronics, translating this knowledge into expressive sound pieces that marry earthy textures with electronic sounds. With his new album, the in-demand Ecuadorian producer broadens his horizons beyond South America exploring a rich palette of sounds the world over.

At the tender age of twenty-five, while he was working part-time at an Italian restaurant in Tokyo's Kamata district, Kazuki Tomokawa released his debut record, fittingly titled Finally, His First Album. While he had already penned hundreds of songs, including his first single InchTry Saying You're Alive!,Inch written on a long train ride past fields and rice paddies, it was this recording that introduced Japan to one of it's most unique musicians of the postwar era. Each track, as record tag exec Kiichi Takahara writes in the LP's liner notes (here translated for the first time), is not a song but a Inchflesh-and-blood human being,Inch birthed by the singer-songwriter and the raw, guttural cries that would become a hallmark of his incomparable sound.1970s Japan was a time and place marked by a profound desire for authenticity amidst the onset of television and media saturation. Tomokawa arrived on the scene as a musician withInchthe personality of a hydrogen bomb,Inch to borrow a phrase from his frequent collaborator Toshi Ishizuka. In an unwieldy interview included here, members of the notorious leftist band Zun? Keisatsu (Brain Police) put it bluntly here was a man surrounded by the Inchdisingenuous,Inch the Inchwishy-washy,Inch and the Inchsuperficial,Inch who was delivering Inchreal life, unvarnished.Inch These songs are lullabies for the lost, staring not into the void but-as the fourth track declares-from inside it.Finally, His First Album is the first of three Tomokawa records to be reissued by Blank Forms Editions in conjunction with the US of Tomokawa's memoir, Try Saying You're Alive!, the first-ever English translation of his writing. This debut captures the self-assured trademarks that Tomokawa would hone over the course of decades. Multiple tracks are performed in his native Akita dialect, a distinct and highly regional vernacular of northern Japan se

In a generation of musicians that came of age in postwar Japan, Kazuki Tomokawa stands as a pioneer of radical individualism, with a sound marked by shocking intimacy and blistering honesty. In his third album, A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth, released by Harvest Records in 1977, Tomokawa creeps Inchever more inward, Inch as Kiichi Takahara writes in the record's original introductory text-embracing an attitude pervasive amongst musicians of the time who interrogated the prosaic and the profound alike, eschewing politics and society in favor of an Inchattitude of total self-containment.InchTomokawa recorded the album over the course of a month-from August 24 to September 25, 1977-at Tokyo's famed Onkio Haus studio in the bustling Ginza district. The arrangements, accordingly, are amped up paired with the Black Panther Orchestra, Tomokawa's Inchscreaming philosopherInch vocals find their match with the orchestra's electric guitar, bass, piano, tuba, and ground-thumping drums played by the Brain Police's Toshi Ishizuka-who appears on Tomokawa's first three records and remains his collaborator to this day.InchThis is Kazuki Tomokawa in the flesh, Inch concludes Takahara. A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth is, in Tomokawa's uncanny way, able to cut through facade and artifice in pursuit of truth. InchYou call that life?Inch he heckles, exhausted by the melodrama and nihilism of youth counterculture, Inchtry saying you're alive!Inch