| PEDAL RECORDS | |
| Updated April. 29th, 2005 | |
 |
ASO Ai: “Lavender Edition” - Pedal Records (PDL-0401) The resonance of the name “Aso Ai” will not immediately cause tidal waves of excitement to leap up and hit foreign shores with a vehement power of overall upheaval and long awaited anticipation. No instinctive prevision whatsoever could gear up music aficionados for what was to come, since Aso’s debut recordings on the tiny and illustrious Oz Disc label had slipped by unnoticed through the mazes of the net. Aso Ai first appeared on the so-called music circuit around the year 2000 with the release of her debut single “Amaihibiki”, closely followed the following year by her full length CD “Umerumono”. Both releases slowly fell into slumber, disappearing into the gasping wounds of total obscurity until the freshly ignited Pedal Records label, led by former White Heaven guitarist Nakamura Souichirou, decided not to let Aso Ai’s exceptional talent go to waste and set out to conflagrate her sonic isolationism. Upon listening and witnessing Aso’s music, I could not but be struck by the bare stark nakedness and an almost “less is more” aesthetic that resonated out of every slow motion-like action she sings into being through her desolate tunes. Desolate as in stripped down of all artificial distractions, intellectual constructivism and violent sonic pollution, Aso’s musical universe is one of limited notation and well balanced fragile “bossa-novelistic psychedelics”. She quietly sets out, throughout the entire album, to show a graceful, yet sharp moving floating stride. From the first, almost minimalist approach, the atmospheric angelical quality and utterly erotic naïveté that breaths through her delicate vocals, one can feel a premonition towards an unprecedented relationship she beholds for a lyrical and soft poetic shape that feels like an introverted and at times almost religious affair her music embraces. Like the fragrance of a freshly picked cherry blossom, Aso Ai’s sonic universe is as fleeting and as fragile but in the mean time strong enough to face the seasonal climate changes the buds gets confronted with. Her whispering trade mark vocalizations are throughout the album backed up with some sparse but accurate and straight-to-the-point instrumentation provided by some of Tokyo’s finest scenesters around such as ex-White Heaven and Stars front man Ishihara You (who was also responsible for producing this sonic gem), Nakamura Souichirou (engineer of Nagisa Nite, Yura Yura Teikoku, Guitar Wolf, The Stars, etc), and Yura Yura Teikoku and Stars bass player Kamekawa Chiyo. When performing live, Aso gets backed by Ishihara, Nakamura and Kurihara Michio. The overall effect the individual musicians together with Aso evoke is that of a transcendental and arresting listening experience that will make you question the validity of all music you have been exposed to until this present day, rendering most your record collection oblique and utterly useless. That is the power stripped down simplicity and utter beauty evokes. You are warned…Price: 17 Dollars |
 |
KURIHARA MICHIO“Sunset Notes”(Pedal - PDL-0502) Stellar first solo adventure of former White Heaven and Stars lysergic guitar wonder Michio Kurihara. Comprised out of 9 tracks, Kurihara proves that he has more up his sleeve than merely being an extremely gifted guitar wonder. Here, he puts on display his song craftmanship and it surely stunned me. Kurihara sounds utterly mature, well structured and exciting compositions spared from guitar frivolics and instead focusing on the image of the composition. He gets assited by the rhythm section of Yura Yura Teikoku (Shibata Ichiro), Peace Music and Pedal Records spearhead Nakamura Souichiro and Ishihara You and Aso Ai who both breath some songs into being. This album grows on you the more you lend your ear to it and is, according to these humble ears, already one of the top 5 albums for 2005. Ultimate highest recommendation. (decent review is coming up within a few days, had to rush in order to get thislist out in time, but rest assured, this recording is stuff of legends and a rare occurence of beauty that will not happen every forthnight). Price: 17 Dollars |
 |
THE STARS: “Will” - Pedal Records (PDL-0402) With a preliminary summer offensive engulfing Tokyo in an all incinerating heat, The Stars new and long awaited follow-up album to their highly acclaimed debut “Today” (PSF) certainly stirs the temperature levels up towards even more core melting heights. With “Will”, which is actually their first full length album, Ishihara and crew hit right from the first notes on the smoldering down-town pavement with a vengeance, setting the general pace the rest of the album will steer into. Stripped down from all excessive rock’n’roll glamorous trademark gimmickries that is seemingly prerequisite for most of the current mediocre hyped-up rock bands that contaminate the airwaves on a daily basis, The Stars veer out to set the record straight. Rooted in a tradition that leaps back unto the late-seventies no-wave punk movement and delicately balanced psychedelic song craftsmanship, the band’s take on acid-cool down-town psyched-out ephedrine rock sees them picking up the thread where Television and the Neon Boys left off some two decades ago. Right from the album’s opening track “Everlasting Daylight” on, the mood is set. A bare guitar riff and single drum pulse open up for Kurihara to unleash some sneering cool-aid licks against which Ishihara wails some nasal lyrics…. “black out, black out”…yes the tone is set and nihilism begins to seep in through, combined with feelings of desolation, isolation and utter disconnection. Psychedelic isolationism gets bolstered up in lysergic colored mind drops, carried into stratospheric heights by Kurihara’s unique and vicious guitar sound, liberated from West Coast acid-cool prevailing influences he gets associated with, venturing instead into a more late seventies New York drug-frenzied cutting-edge coolness and a transcendent urbanite punky elegance enriched with a rough-cut garage feel. This gets especially clear on the following fuzz-buried grooves of “Small White Wonder” and “Twinkle Outside” that tend to leap at times into the energy levels of a sheer volcanic melt down, laced into the omnipresent New York sound infested, mind-chattering backbone. But apart from bringing forth a weird and apocalyptic energy that sputters out of the first half of the album, The Stars are also unleashing some languid and beautiful slow burning tracks of which “Last Door” and “Orange Hour Circle” are prime examples. In a way, this makes that “Will” has a more adulterated fragrance than its predecessor due to the stronger intention of its songs of which the outlines and contours surface more clearly and distinctively. On the lyrical front, Ishihara keeps on dwelling into those haunted places, exploring once again the themes of alienation, solitude, dislocated love and emotional darkness, making the overall impression of this album one of amputated psychedelic scalpel-sculpted songs that balances on the fringes of sheer brilliance and dislocated melancholy. SOLD OUT & OUT OF PRINT |