Kazuki Tomokawa - String Of Paper Cranes Clenched Between My Teeth - VINYL LP

In the 1970s, Kazuki Tomokawa catapulted into Tokyo's avant-garde scene with his cathartic and utterly electrifying performances. Straight from the Throat, Tomokawa's second album, released in July 1976 by Harvest Records, finds the musician in his truest form as the Inchscreaming philosopherInch he would come to be called-cynical but fair, cheeky and melancholic, and looking at the world with truth-seeking eyes. In Straight from the Throat, Tomokawa shrieks and shouts and wallows with ritualistic abandon-his avant-folk stylings are cosmic and, at times, well to ground-shaking rock. He speaks of adolescence, passing hearses, and wedding chapel cars in a poem to his younger brother, Tomoharu, and watches ice melt on the Mitane River with spring's turn. Tomokawa's sound is, as Kiichi Takahara would later dub it, InchI-musicInch revelatory and deeply intimate songs that turn to the everyday and the interior. They are portraits of a man in search of meaning, who is taking stubborn control of his life by doing so. As he croons in InchThe Spring Is Here Again Song,Inch InchI'll drink till I've had my fill / And fall in love until I die.Inch Album Tracks 1. Grampa 2. Goddam Winter 3. Ameran Kuyuran 4. Dagadzugu 5. A Fitting Adolescence 6. Footbridge 7. The Spring Is Here Again Song 8. Fridge 9. Don't Kill the Sea Lions 10. Smithereens 11. Harmonica 12. A Little Ditty 13. Stone

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

Limited edition of 1000 numbered copies on translucent silver coloured 180-gram audiophile vinyl. Cranes is a dream pop/shoegaze band formed by siblings Alison and Jim Shaw who rose to stardom following a world tour with the Cure in 1992. After the influential Dedicated tag folded in 1998 they went on a two-year hiatus after which they set up their own tag Dadaphonic. Here, they released three studio albums between 2001 and 2008, of which this self-titled record is their last. Like their other Dadaphonic records, Cranes is a continuation of the band's subtler side powered by their penchant for electronic music. Shimmery synth arps and ambient strings are interspersed with the trusted drum kit and guitars, while keeping Alison Shaw's child-like vocals so integral to the band's overall sound intact. The result is a vintage Cranes album that has the ability to both soothe long-time fans as well as reel in new ones. Album Tracks 1. Diorama 2. Worlds 3. Feathers 4. Wires 5. Panorama 6. Wonderful Things 7. Collecting Stones 8. Invisible 9. Move Along 10. Sleepwalking 11. High and Low