Brand new solo CD from Keiji Haino features four long nocturnal pieces spontaneously scored for tabletop electronics, F/X pedals, ‘air-FX’ and ‘digital air theremin’. This is the most electronics-heavy Haino disc to date and much of it bears comparison to his early Milky Way recording, with moments of torrential digital downpour illuminated by flares of fluttering code, wild frequency fluctuations and skies of shortwave bloop. Some absolutely mangled vocals worked deep into the maul and also some kind of wind instrument that makes the last piece sound like an exorcism in a nuclear bunker. As necessary as every other Haino side. Comes in a black hard-card Fushitsusha-style gatefold with colour pics and a 4 page booklet featuring pics and Japanese text.

Very intimate, low-level guitar/loops/vocal recordings from Keiji Haino featuring some of his most hypnotic and personally intense solo playing, all recorded live in the depths of the night at minimum volume. An absolute beauty that ranks alongside classics like Affection and Era Of Sad Wings, this is Haino at his most elegiac and haunting. Comes in large format, gatefold digipak. Highest recommendation.

Early, ultra-mysterious solo album from Keiji Haino, not to be confused with his later group project of the same name. Here he works his way through a dungeon of percussion, metal, vocal and drone to create a death-decadent psychedelic mediaeval polyglot. Beautifully blasted atmosphere, highly recommended.

First instalment of solo hurdy-gurdy from Keiji Haino features some of his most gorgeous instant compositions, all constructed from huge pools of black overtone and mud-thick drones. The actual sound of the hurdy-gurdy’s operation is just as much a part of Haino’s conceptions as the heaving tones it generates and the combination of lungs, wood and rotary action is extremely potent and very psychedelic. Also features some of Haino’s subtlest vocal interventions, like he’s simply singing softly to himself. Highest recommendation.

Simply put, the greatest rock record of the modern era. It's almost impossible to fully do justice to the breadth and scope of this epochal 1991 recording from Keiji Haino's outrageously beautiful/powerful trio, suffice to say if you buy only one album in this lifetime…

Another necessary volume in this on-going series documenting current activity on Tokyo's psychedelic underground, this one features exclusive tracks by Keiji Haino, Broom Dusters (featuring members of Miminokoto/LSD-March), Musica Transonic, Puka-Puka Brians (members of Maher Shalal Hash Baz/Aihiyo), On-Na Kodomo, Shizuka, Akiyama-Sugimoto, High Rise, Kakashi, Construction, Psychedelic Crazy Horse and Hikyo String Quintet.

Fabulously feral live recording of Keiji Haino's first band, Lost Aaraff, from 1971. This is a crazed freedom chase across drums, vocals, horns and piano, with Haino matching fucked Cecil Taylor-styled note-clusters with some infernal free-form vocals, punk-primitive heads and the ecstatic element of Albert Ayler. Mind-blowing stuff, and highly recommended.

Heavyweight improvised session from three masters of modern tongue: guitarist/vocalist Keiji Haino, bassist Barre Phillips and drummer Sabu Toyozumi.

Keiji Haino’s cover group, dedicated to wild – often completely unrecognisable - extrapolations on rock, folk and Japanese pop standards, featuring ex-Fushitsusha drummer Ikuro Takahashi and Miminokoto guitarist Masami Kawaguchi on bass. This beautiful live recording includes fantastically tranced versions of The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby”, “Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones and a tune by Japanese GS group The Spiders. Hard to believe that this actually happened. Highly recommended.

A compilation that culls tracks from a series of ‘lecture concerts' that took place between September 2003 and February 2004 at Mesar Haus, Tokyo. Kicks off with a fantastically dense hurdy-gurdy drone from Keiji Haino and also features tracks from guitarist Kazuo Imai, pianist Junichiro Okuchi, shamisen master Michihiro Sato, turntablist Otomo Yoshihide and saxophonist Masayoshi Urabe.

Another one of those chronologically-upending archival Haino finds that makes the birth of his whole aesthetic seem historically immaculate, Free Rock - recorded in 1982! - sees Haino on electric guitar playing zoned avant garage crank in the company of some of the most legendary avant-provocateurs to come out of the ranks of the Los Angeles Free Music Society: Dennis Duck (ds), Fredrik Nilsen (b), Tom Recchion (mock cello, strangaphone) and Rick Potts (g). Post-Ubu Heart Of Darkness No Wave never sounded so completely liberated.

First ever live album from the world-beating trio of Keiji Haino, Kan Mikami and Toshi Ishizuka in a limited edition of 1000 copies in mini paper LP-style sleeves with obi. Haino's playing is at its most straight-forwardly beautiful, with soul-searing arcs of beautiful single-note bliss cutting high swathes through the heart of Mikami's black blues. There is a suite of songs that appeared on another Mikami CD that represents the most epic and emotionally-charged playing the trio have ever laid down and the way that Ishizuka triggers single martial explosions while Haino illuminates the space above him has exactly the same electrifying spirit/force of the Albert Ayler Orchestra. There are moments here that are so outrageously epic, just increasing peaks of vertical tone-on-tone, that it's almost overwhelming and when Haino joins Mikami on vocals it feels uniquely cathartic. The tongue-in-cheek blurb on the disc best sums it up: "With a combined age of 171, the most powerful geriatric rock trio in the world." And it's no mere hubris. In the absence of Fushitsusha, they might just be the greatest rock band in the world. Best Vajra ever. Highest possible recommendation.

Wild, bombastic high energy rock ‘n’ roll from Keiji Haino’s punishing power trio. The first track on this ludicrously heavy 1994 set sounds like the end credits to your life and is one of Haino’s most epic guitar conceptions. Highest recommendation for any humans still in touch with their brain.

Massively-anticipated pair of releases from Keiji Haino’s new post-Fushitsusha avant blues rock group. Seijaku is a trio, with Haino on vocals, electric guitar, steel guitar and, on You Should Prepare..., blues harp. He is joined by Mitsuru Nasuno on bass and Yohsimitsu Ichiraku on drums for two live in the studio/no over-dubs recordings. The closest comparison for both discs in terms of atmosphere is Haino’s double acoustic/electric set Black Blues, albeit transposed to a group setting. However, both records have their own particular atmosphere. Mail From Fushitsusha obviously makes the most overt connection to Haino’s past and the interplay between the bass and drums marks a direct extension of where the Takahashi/Ozawa backline were headed, with staggered, overlapping rhythms that fall into odd repetitive/organic cycles that are massively hypnotic. Haino’s guitar is more taught than on latter-day Fushitsusha recordings, sometimes playing with a clean tone and sometimes with a just little growl of fuzz and the aggressive, auraless appeal of his interactions connects to the whole No Wave/Mars aesthetic that he has long championed. But like Black Blues there’s a real focus on the vocals, with some of Haino’s most soul-scraping singing, while “Humiliation To Be Selected To Come Down From Elsewhere” comes closest to the Fushitsusha of old with a beautiful fuzz/reverb guitar solo in elegiac Star Spangled Banner/Peter Green style. You Should Prepare... is based around four longer tracks that really punish the blues rock metaphor with some fantastically aggressive brokedown boogie cut-up with wailing blues harp that harkens back to the 1^st Fushitsusha album. Dedicated to “Albert King, The Doors and Steppenwolf”, it takes roots based rock music back to the future with a transcendent vision of the still pregnant possibilities of guitar/bass/drums that sounds like nothing else. They might have changed their name and their personnel but they’re still the greatest rock band on the planet. An easy late entry for albums of the year. Highest possible recommendation!

Although primarily known as the greatest guitar player on the planet Keiji Haino is also one of the most radically inventive vocalists in experimental music. Black Blues – his duo of radically re-tooled acoustic and electric Blues - was in reality a showcase for his stunning range, from guttural blasts of lung power through high lonesome choirs. And who could forget his stunning castrato performance on Fushitsusha’s Double Live, still one of the great contemporary devotional works? Although we’ve had full albums from Haino dedicated to single instruments – hurdy-gurdy, electronics, percussion, acoustic guitar – we’ve yet to be treated to a solo vocal album, which is where this massive new release comes in. Recorded live in the depths of a cave in the village of La Haye de Routot and a church in the same village this is an emotionally high-wire solo vocal performance with stunning sound. At points it feels as if Haino’s whole body is resonating with sound, as convulsive explosions of epiglottal fury wrack his frame and turn the air purple. There’s also plenty of his haunted choral work, with high, mournful melodies dissolving into the air. At points the arc of the song is almost classical but then he drops into a gruff Black Blues howl that would reanimate the spirit of Blind Willie Johnson and drags the whole thing down the Delta. This is a beautiful document of an artist at the absolute peak of his powers and a necessary addition to any Haino shelf: “Keiji Haino is an individual that never ceases to provoke new ideas in the minds of those that meet him. And so, although he is usually surrounded by amplifiers, a myriad of effects pedals, and cables plugged into his guitar, he nonetheless amazed his audience with the power of the simplicity of his purely vocal performance and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in 2008, as part of the InFamous Carousel Festival. The following year I had the opportunity to get to know him a bit better, acting as interpreter for his solo performance at Les Instants Chavirés in Montreuil. Being the intermediary for all his questions allowed me to fully understand the extent to which he attempts to give the absolute best of himself on stage, and how he leads a tireless quest for music. This led me to wonder if what he had done in 2008 couldn't be done without the technology, replacing the electronic amplification with the acoustic properties of a space. Solidifying this proposal did not take long; my musician friend and label associate, Eric Cordier, who has worked for 20 years with site-specific sound recording, knew of several acoustically interesting spaces in the region in which he grew up. And so we find ourselves en route to Normandy, in June 2010. We had a week consecrated to the exploration of one voice, and this is not just any voice; a voice developed outside of any school, through a unique journey, a voice simultaneously rock and spiritual, outside any taboo, a voice that shakes us to the core. This time, in addition, this voice is heard in its purest state. Of all the spaces visited, amongst them many churches and caves, a forest, a cliff, a tunnel, industrial wastelands, etc, it was in a quarry cave in the village of La Haye de Routot that he was able to release his entire being, offering up one hour of introspective song, so good that I believed at one moment I saw him disappear… in any case it was at this point that his voice and his body were able to melt into the space, or perhaps to become the atmosphere itself. This album presents this recording, preceded by those made in the church in the same village.” - Satoko Fujimoto

Massively anticipated re-match for the world-beating trio of guitarist/vocalist Keiji Haino, bassist Jim O’Rourke and drummer Oren Ambarchi: recorded live on January 6^th 2011 at SuperDeluxe in Tokyo, this is classic post-Fushitsusha avant rock bombast at an insane high-energy peak. Ambarchi is the perfect drummer for Haino, much more so than any jobbing improv or free jazz percussionist, in that he’s not afraid to drop it into straightahead 4/4 pummel if the power chords demand it. Haino reacts with obvious glee to his pugilistic attack, piling sky-splitting solo upon solo alongside epic levels of fuzz. O’Rourke is on similarly phenomenal form, driving the whole group with these hypnotic two-note grooves that are uniquely powerful and that provide an anchor for Haino to get all the way out. O’Rourke is obviously a serious student of the late Yasushi Ozawa as he has mastered the Ozawa style of single infinitely pulsating notes dropped into deep wells of silence and when the smoke clears and it’s just O’Rourke’s bass and Haino’s voice plotting the void the effect is truly hair-raising. But most of all Imikuzushi is about the wild rockers and it pretty much puts the seal on the group as the true inheritors of the euphoric psychedelic blues of Fushitsusha, with O’Rourke and Ambarchi the only rhythm section to truly approach the classic Ozawa/Takahashi dream team. Totally phenomenal, one of the top five releases in the Haino discography, pretty much destroys any other contemporary ‘rock’ recording and already my album of the year. Comes with a beautiful gatefold sleeve and glossy photographic inners designed by Stephen O’Malley. Already completely sold out at source. Can’t possibly recommend this one enough, a mandatory VT purchase! 

Possibly the most anticipated release of 2012, the return of the greatest rock band on the planet, Keiji Haino’s Fushitsusha: Hikari to Nazukeyo sees Haino on guitar and vocals joined by original Fushitsusha/Kousokuya drummer Ikuro Takahashi and bassist Mitsuru Nasuno (who he also plays with in Seijaku).
The rhythm section of Takahashi and Nasuno is as formally boggling as you might have hoped, with the pair playing in the kind of staggered signatures and over-lapping time/space visions of the Seijaku discs, but whereas the focus of those recordings was on birthing a form of future blues that took off from Steppenwolf, Albert King and The Doors here it feels very much as if the trio are attempting to reformulate original rock & roll moves, with a feel that’s somewhere between Scotty Moore, Eddie Cochran and John Lee Hooker, albeit wrestling with the kind of rhythmic equations that are most assuredly post-improvisation and deeply Japanese. Indeed, the album has two distinct sides, there are the ultra-thrifty insistent monochord carve-ups of classic trio rock/roll moves and there are the heady F/X saturated blow-outs, with Haino’s guitar exploding the kind of post-Hendrix vectors of Double Live while he sings in an otherworldly castrato, birthing a form of violent sacred music. At this point in time I think it’s safe to say that no one else has so successfully and rigorously disinterred and interrogated the basic tenets of rock music as Fushitsusha and to think that at 60 years old Haino is still making the most radical and searching rock music of anyone’s career is a tribute to his commitment to the specifics of vision and his belief in the potential of the form. From where I’m sitting it feels like the whole history of rock music has led up to this. Highest possible recommendation!