Tokyo Kid Brothers - Songs Of The Story Of Eight Dogs -1971- (LP, Dutch Private Pressing), Japan

This vinyl is a private pressing of the recording of the play “The Story of Eight Dogs” by Japanese musical theatre group Tokyo Kid Brothers. In 1971 they played the "The Story of Eight Dogs" for five weeks at the Shaffy Theatre in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. This record came out in very limited quantities in Holland during their period of performing in Amsterdam.

These NWW-listers stand in a similar tradition as other counter-cultural musical theatre outfits like the American Living Theatre or Théâtre Du Chêne Noir from France. Tokyo Kid Brothers was founded by Yutaka Higashi in 1968 and made some very weird recordings during the early seventies like the albums “Throw away the books let’s go into the streets” and "Golden Bat" from 1971. Those are being regarded as two of the most important cornerstones of Japanese freak-out psychedelia from the seventies. They should reissue that stuff on vinyl. Tokyo Kid Brothers' early sound was reminiscent of other Japanese acid fuelled underground groups like J.A. Seazer and Food Brain, but also brings to mind some of the more free-form krautrock bands like Amon Düül and Faust. During that era The Tokyo Kid Brothers performed quite often outside of Japan, like New York and Amsterdam.

This recording has some great seventies underground jams combined with intense Japanese vocals. Also the difference between audience and actors at times becomes blurry when they involve the audience and try to teach them about Japanese language characters and so on in a subversive and playful manner. All with a great Japanese English accent.

My copy is not in the best shape as you can see and is quite crackly. It might have had an insert, but I don’t have it. The record doesn’t list titles of the songs, which doesn’t really matter, because it was meant as a play. Anyway this is crazily rare if you’d ask me and absolutely essential to all Japanese psych-heads and NWW-list fans.

“The history of eight dogs is the story of the Japanese young generation in reality and illusion. We came to Holland: Exodus from Japan!”

Get it HERE! Or check it out here:

Friedhelm Döhl - Odradek - Black & White -1978- (LP, Dieter Roth's Verlag), Germany/Switzerland

Friedhelm Döhl (born 7 July 1936 in Göttingen) is a German composer and professor of music. He has composed many works of avant-garde music created for piano, chamber groups, voice and electronics.

This record, which was published through the artist label of well known Swiss fluxus-artist Dieter Roth, has two sides of long pieces for piano. The A-side contains the piece "Odradek" composed for two open and prepared pianos and performed in 1976 in Basel, Switzerland. It's an improvisational piece which according to the liner notes could not get captured entirely on vinyl. Therefore the beginning and ending contain almost only silence. The B-side has the improvisational piece "Black & White" which was recorded in 1977 in Basel for Dieter Roth.

This recording contains very minimalistic piano based sounds in which the piano itself is used in a very unconventional manner. A true "artist-record". 

Get it HERE

Harry Sparnaay, Fusion Moderne - Bass Clarinet Identity -1978- (LP, Composers' Voice), Netherlands

So it's finally time for something modern composed on this blog. At first glance this looks like a quite dull classical record cover, but wait, who is peeking through the pillars of the post-apocalyptic ruins? It's Harry Sparnaay! Sparnaay is a very renowned Dutch bass clarinetist, composer and teacher. At this particular record Sparnaay plays solo pieces as well as with pianist Polo de Haas under the name Fusion Moderne.

This record shows his mastering of the instrument through five pieces composed by mainly Dutch avant-garde composers. At times the instrument itself is not recognizable any more and tends to go towards some real drone-like music. Some pieces like the 18-minute-long Mountains have electronic tape manipulations and synthesizer additions.

My favourite piece here is the haunting Chimaera from 1974 where they use weird background tape-noise in combination with the bass clarinet. On the liner note it says: "The confrontation between the two (clarinet and tape-noise) works like an exorcism in which the soloist tries to exorcise the inscrutability of the background with his background." Sounds good.

This is some nice modern composed electro-acoustic stuff which you don't see that often in combination with a bass clarinet.

Get it HERE

Donated by Kim

Unit Eight - Glass Head -1981- (LP, Rouge, RMS/LP 130), UK

So I'm a huge fan of library records, specially if it involves electronic music. My main problem is that I always have trouble knowing which ones are the pearls (any suggestions are welcome!). Usually I go for the ones that do not contain eighty songs of twenty seconds, but have got proper songs on there. Still, a lot of library records can be quite cheesy. But not this one!

Unit Eight consisted of two people: F. McDonald and C. Rae. They had at least four releases on Rouge and this one comes from 1981. Rouge was a sub-label of the legendary British library records distribution label De Wolfe. The music on this record is described as Modern group sounds featuring electronic keyboards played by Unit Eight. You can find many library records over at this excellent blog.

This is an absolute cosmic disco, minimal synth classic. It has some cheesy library music touches to it, but nevertheless it's a record with almost only A-sides. Every melody seems like it has always existed and all the songs get stuck in the head. It's the missing link between stuff like Gary Numan/Tubeway Army, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Space (magic fly) and library minimal synth. It also reminds me of Latvian electronic space disco group Zodiac and the Philippe Laboudigue songs on this record. So it has a lot of dancefloor value because of the great combination of electronics with some more commercial melodies.

Our new favourite minimal synth record?

Get it HERE

Ápolók - Szeder Demo -198X- & Artis Studió -1989- (Cassette), Hungary

Ápolók, actually written áPolók, is one of Hungary's finest Avant-Garde groups to come out of the eighties. They started out in 1982 and were not from the capital Budapest, but came from a city in the North-East of Hungary called Miskolc. Their name means "The nurses" if translated to English. The city Miskolc is known for its heavy industry and its raw edge. Not coincidentally one of the songs on the Szeder Demo ("Blackberry Demo") side starts with a cacaphonic take on The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night.

Much like their peers A.E. Bizottsag (check them out), Ápolók uses absurdist lyrics, Casio SK-1-driven punk, post-punk sounds and other wonky guitar and piano based movements reminiscent of some R.I.O. bands. They are definitely one of the most underrated weirdo bands to come from Hungary. I'm not quite sure if they ever had proper releases of their old stuff. Even in Hungary they are somewhat of a cultband and quite unknown. In the nineties they did manage to tour around through Europe.This cassette seems a self-made creation of apparently a demo and a studio recording.

Ápolók nowadays still exists through other weird Hungarian bands in which some of the members play, like Büdösök and Csermanek Lakótelep. The cassette did not contain a tracklist, although I'm sure the songs have in fact titles. If you want to know more about Ápolók you have to read this article over here by someone who really got into the whole Ápolók myth.Check below for a song and how a concert of Ápolók  looked like.

Highly recommended and so so underrated!

Get it HERE

SHUN・4 - Shun -1987- (12 Inch, EP, CSV Shibuya), Japan

Shun was created during the eighties by Japanese chameleon composer Susumu Hirasawa. Hirasawa started out in the late seventies with Japanese devo-ish quirky minimal synth unit P-Model. Shun was already less driven by dada-esque craze and has more elaborated compositions you would expect to hear in a movie or play. It is real composed music that moves away from "pop-music", but still has quite a few new-wave influences in it. It reminds me a lot of the solo music of Holger Hiller around the same era when he started to use German classical music combined with drummachines and samplers, but then Japanese.

You should read this excellent article about Susumu Hirasawa over here, because the person that wrote it obviously knows much more than I do. Hirasawa did numerous projects and always seems to musically transform into something else. A 16-CD box set came out which covered most of Hirasawa's career. I believe the material of this EP is also included, but I still present it here in all its individual vinyl glory. Many of the songs here have had multiple remakes.

Get it HERE

Variëté Royal - Same -198X- (Tape, Kino-Tone), Netherlands

I guess it can't get any more obscure than this. I've got no clue who contributed to this or was behind this cassette. I'm not even sure about the name, but it has Variëté Royal written on the insert. The only thing I know is that it comes from the city Maastricht in the complete south of the Netherlands. Kino-Tone was a label that was affiliated to Friet Records, a small independent label which published some punk and post-punk cassettes and singles in the early and mid-eighties. You can find some of those releases over here.

This cassette might have some connection with the VEC-exchange which also hailed from Maastricht, but I'm not sure. You could only obtain those cassettes by means of exchanging your own music on tape for one of the volumes. Then they would put some of your music on the next tape so the cycle would keep going. There is an excellent article over here about that project and you can get them all over here on the official website.

The music on this Kino-Tone tape ranges from processed Casio VL-1 sounds to some proper jamsession song-stuff and electro-acoustic experiments all drenched in a nice portion of surface noise. It's a classic home-taping recording which has some really nice highlights. My personal one is this excerpt below which sounds very close to some total wacky Ptôse like jam. I did not separate the tracks as I felt it was intended as a whole.

Enjoy!