Beautifully ragged set of death-blues and downer ballads from vocalist/guitar monster Jutok Kaneko, formerly of Tokyo underground legends/PSF recordings artists Kousokuya, and drummer/vocalist Takahisa Kikukawa. This is the kind of parched desert metal first posited by Neil Young sides like Zuma, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and Arc/Weld taken to whole new levels of gravity-defying psychedelic doom. Comes in a striking black-on-black silk-screened sleeve by Alan Sherry. Long out of print. Highly recommended for fans of stylised personal crunch; you know that means you.

Alongside Keiji Haino’s Fushitsusha, Jutok Kaneko’s death-decadent Kousokuya ruled the Tokyo underground of the 80s and 90s with a lead fist. Kaneko can mangle six strings better than anyone this side of Neil Young and Tony Iommi. 1st is a long-overdue reissue of Kousokuya’s ultra-rare debut LP, originally self-released in 1991 in an edition of only 200 copies. It features the classic original line-up of guitarist Kaneko, female bassist/vocalist ‘Mick’ and drummer Ikuro Takahashi (of Fushitsusha et al). Hands down one of the most formally flattening records to come out of whole Japanese scene. Highest recommendation.

Kousokuya, led by renowned guitar monster Jutok Kaneko, were a massive presence on the Tokyo underground throughout the 80s and 90s. Their debut LP, originally self-released in a tiny run in 1991and since reissued on CD by PSF, plotted galaxies of heavy gravity like nothing this side of Neil Young’s Weld and Black Sabbath’s Masters Of Reality. Kaneko’s guitar playing is brutally blunt, working staggered rhythms into huge, tottering constructions that crash to earth with all the ferocious inevitability of dead stars. Vocalist Mick’s high despairing vocals and ten-nods-behind-the-beat bass style reinforce the profoundly desperate, nihilistic air while drummer Ikuro Takahashi (Fushitsusha et al) sets single megaton blasts in the background. Live Gyakuryu Kokuu is a killer retrospective of this mammoth outfit, two long tracks recorded the same year as their debut album that work forms from ominous black gulfs like nothing else this side of Fushitsusha. Highest recommendation.

Major new work from one of the central stars in the firmament of the contemporary Japanese psychedelic underground, Sachiko, ex of legendary gods of thunder Kousokuya and Overhang Party. A radical departure from her previous walls of celestial electronics, Anro – which translates as “dark path” - almost feels like an extended meditation on The Velvet Underground’s “Black Angel’s Death Song” that reconnects The Falling Spikes with The Dream Syndicate via a web of tactile, sawing viola drone and forests of percussion, recorder and witchy vocals. John Cale’s viola work has had a massive impact on the Japanese underground, from the first Velvets album to his duo settings with Brian Eno on the Nico recordings but this just might be the fullest investigation into its potential for total sensory dislocation, with a massive single track that feels more like a magical working ala Keiji Haino’s solo work than a mere instrumental jam. Sachiko’s vocals are truly striking, with less of the epic use of reverb and a more macabre aura-less approach that is part early Meredith Monk and part hysterical Manson Family Jams. The recorder work has some of the bonged-out hippy vibe of Charlie Nothing or Masaki Batoh but it’s the endless buzzing fleets of viola that open up into the kind of occult string-drones that Bill Breeze brought to Coil’s Solstice sessions or even Lou Reed’s Street Hassle that effectively seal the deal. An uncanny side of string freak, sabbat-styled vocal evocations and freeform improvisation all mastered and produced by Rinji Fukuoka of Overhang Party/Majutsu No Niwa and with translated liners by Alan Cummings. Highly recommended!

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!