Repress!

* A legendary yet long lost crown jewel from the early 80s Japanese Electronic and Jazz Rock scene
* new powerful master, much appreciated by the artist
* 2LP in UV-glossy laminated gatefold sleeve with OBI
* includes A1 Poster 60x60cm and lyric sheet
* vinyl comes in Japanese Katta innersleeves

Mariah was a Japanese outfit in the field of art pop, way back in the very late 70s and early 80s with 5 albums up their score from 1980 to 1983. The album from 1979 entitled as “Mariah” was actually made before the band Mariah was formed, and was released as a solo album by Yasuaki Shimizu. The album at hand is the fifth and for the time being last album in this row, released as a double vinyl back in 1983. Original copies, that are at least in very good condition, are hard to find. The brand new reissue on Everland, unlike the original and the first vinyl reissue from 2015, comes housed in a thick and artfully designed gatefold sleeve with OBI, which finally does justice to the progressive spirit of the music you will find here.

The musical basement of Utakata No Hibi is a fusion of dreamy synthesizer pop and haunting new wave music, that could be found all around the globe back in 1983. In the vein of TEARS FOR FEARS or more adventurous DAVID BOWIE stuff, with a touch of KRAFTWERK or even BRIAN ENO here and there, but all this gets spiced up with an atmosphere of Japanese traditionalism, with a few bits and pieces from the old music from this Far East island, which sounds so magic to us Westeners. The progressive, wacky art pop of this project was led by the popular Japanese composer and musician Yasuaki Shimizu, a relentlessly exploratory saxophonist who even dared to rework Johann Sebastian Bach’s cello suites for saxophone.

As brilliant as this man is, the music on „Utakata No Hibi“ turns out to be. And the master himself approved and much appreciated the brandnew remastering of this album by assisting a highly professional team of sound engineers who dusted off the ancient tape reels. For certain the record sounds and feels 80s through and through, electronic to the very rhythmical bone of each song sugar coated with catchy melodies that resemble Japanese classic and Enka music, which is a kind of folksy pop music. The listener gets directly drawn into a feverish dream of steaming Far Eastern cities and their darkest and most depraved corners where you find everything cheap in sleazy bars and unlighted backyards and alleys. The next moment he strolls through a beautiful Japanese park surrounded by a sea of blossoms. This change in mood and style you will experience in the sparsely instrumented tune „Shisen“, which indeed comes closest to classic Japanese folk tunes without any too catchy and pop oriented melodies. But we certainly find these harmonies allover the album. Some tunes even feel like ancient BEACH BOYS compositions and Brian Wilson creations played by a then contemporary electronic pop act and sung in Japanese.

An amazingly colorful album with songs that are based on solid substance rather than cheap pop structures. This is music for the bold listeners and music lovers and this awesome reissue should quickly find it’s way into the record collections of 80s synth and art pop aficionadoes.

Yasuaki Shimizu did what he wanted with MARIAH, pushed the borders of popular music further than anybody would have thought. Listen to a track like „Shonen“ with a repetitive rhythm pattern that hypnotizes you and somehow silky melodylines by saxophone and synth piano upon which a female voice sings in a very spiritual way. Praising pop or whatever this can be called, it is sheer magic put in music. I wonder if this would have made it into the charts back then, but you never know. It is a piece of musical art that shall be listened to. More

Precious, timely, moody reflections on migrating from Côte d’Ivoire to Moss, in Norway, over ruff breakbeat funk supplied by the nimble bass-playing of Maimouna’s old man (from Kambo Super Sound), and the expert conga and kit-drumming of Stliletti-Ana (from Jesse, in Helsinki). Even in their delirium, b-boys and girls will savour traces of the Incredible Bongo Band, in the chorus. Over the eight minutes, and going deeper on the flip, the mix lifts off into a cosmic steppers dub, featuring Gilb-r alongside Sotofett on keyboards, with no let up for the dancefloor in energy and vibes.
In beautifully letter-pressed, poly-lined sleeves.
“It was in 2001 / I got the letter / A letter that said / I would travel to a cold world / Not knowing what would happen / I was full of loneliness / No country / Everyone was different / Not only skin colour / The way people spoke / The way people behaved / That’s the adventure / Obey / This is the story we’re told / The key to success / So we can do everything for our parents / Who need us / Desperate for a better life / That’s the adventure.” More

Three murderous steppers dubs on a propulsive, rat-tat-tat rhythm, combining mystical spaciousness with detail and ferocity. Angry-lion bass and smears of brass, fusillades and explosions, scares and shocks, oriental pentatonics, clattering percussion and synthy transcendence… the business. The second mix is nastiest; the third is the wildest and most discombobulated (and our favourite).
Letter-pressed, poly-lined sleeves. More

Noise, art, experimental music band Gray, founded by Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1979, has released their 2nd album titled, “Last of the Beats,” a reference to the lyrical poetry featured on the album, inspired by the likes of Allen Ginsburg and William S. Burroughs (Gray's first album was “Shades Of…,” released in 2010, a true collector's item today). Original Gray members Nick Taylor and Michael Holman conceived of this sonic and verbal work of conceptual and intellectual beauty, knowing they would be collaborating with a variety of celebrated musicians and lyricists, including: James Lavelle of U.N.K.L.E. (and Mo'Wax Records); writer and Downtown New York editor Glenn O’Brien of GQ and Interview magazines; Spike Lee actor and spoken word artist Roger Guenveur Smith; music producer and Digable Planets' DJ King Britt; John Cale Band and Andre 3000 drummer Deantoni Parks; legendary Hip Hop music producer Arthur Baker; “The Widow Basquiat” Suzanne Mallouk; 1970s New York scenester and poet Victoria Galves; with liner notes written by famed American art critic Carlo McCormick

Carlo McCormick Liner Notes:

These grooves are the product of stealth engineering, improvised like an assassination five years in the planning, a conspiracy of creativity meant to slip in the truth while savoring the fiction. It's impossible to fathom just how hard it is to make something so easy, to instill endless complication within eloquent simplicity, to tear the whole damn thing down so that the jagged broken parts actually fit back together, but the slack laidback beauty of Gray is that they are not in any rush, like the slo-mo suspension of time in our hyperaware perceptions before sudden and inevitable impact, this is the sound of deceleration, an unwinding that takes your breath away.

To the last of the beats, here's the last of the at last, the song of the swan to the unborn, the clinging desire of the last dance, the just deserts of a last meal, what adheres grasping and gasping at the edge of forgetting like the muscle memory of a dream. Track by track, Gray excavate the senses and sensibilities of forlorn fables, the heroic slipping off crumbling pedestals, a city of need revamped as a city of greed, the light flickering, overcome by shadows, places and times conjured like a sonic psychogeography of passing and absence.

Their music has traveled a very long way to reach our ears, rewritten, rerecorded, recollected, remastered and renegotiated over and again by two artists, in constant dialog, spaced out in deep focus, a four-legged split personality in dogged single pursuit to somehow get it right. You can hear that distance in these songs, the harmonics of process like a reverberant echo, the undertow of an undertone, the taste of ripening.

Only the truly young can hear the ghosts singing, but it takes an old kind of wisdom to make out their words. That's the post-modern contradiction of this band; where novelty sounds classic and stories unfold as allegories of metaphors, landing from far away with undiminished urgency. Two guys, Michael Holman and Nick Taylor, stubborn enough to forge their own musical tempest apart from the meddling, marketing and machinations of any music industry, yet slick enough to enlist an unimaginably brilliant cast of collaborators, Gray is the carefully curated composition of a community, the common sound of disparate voices, the mix of the melting pot, the noise of incompatible agreements. Pastiche and pluralism, it's a collage cut up and still bleeding, the angry graffiti on a wall of sound, the melodies that linger like a sweet aftertaste of lazy pleasures, the battle cry of the vanquished sounded in the survivors' silence, the dance of the reckless to the tempo of an impending disaster, the tone of resistance in a note of rebellion, the voices of visionaries talking over, and under, the din of time's cruel march, correspondences rich and textured in a lost chord yet to be fully decoded. The references are dizzying, disorienting and defiant to the reductions of genre, chaotic and unruly dissonance given rhyme and reason, blues with a beat, art with a purpose, lyrics that bruise, the sound of repercussion struck with a vengeance. This music is so stone cold cool it's hot to the touch;deep downtown and dirty like a lethal seduction, a collective memory that needs no introduction. More