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Japan

Recorded here more than anyone else

Shizuka

Shizuka made dolls in Tokyo for a living. She formed her band with her guitarist husband in 1992, and she came by the local underground almost by blood: her guitarist and drummer had both been through Fushitsusha, and one of them through Les Rallizes Dénudés too. In 1995 that band's famously reclusive leader, Takashi Mizutani, came out to share a stage with her. It's one of the only times he's known to have played alongside anyone else. She also appears here more than any other artist, with eleven recordings taken from her one studio album, a night at a Kichijoji live house, and tape that happened to survive.

P.S.F., Tokyo, 1984

Ghost

Masaki Batoh started Ghost in Tokyo in 1984 and ran it more like a commune than a band. Members came and went so freely that he compared the group to an amoeba, and for a while they lived together among the ruins of old temples and a disused subway station. In 1988 he went to London to learn acoustic technique straight from British folk guitarist Martin Carthy. Two years later Ghost's debut came out on P.S.F., the Tokyo label at the center of this whole scene.

One session, then decades of silence

GRIM

Jun Konagaya spent his early years making harsh industrial noise. Then, recording as GRIM, he did something nobody saw coming and cut one gentle, melodic folk session in 1986, released the next year on his own tiny label. After that he more or less dropped out of music for two decades. A small Italian label finally tracked him down and reissued the record in 2022, which is the only reason most of the world has heard it.

Tokyo, 1987–1999

Fishmans

Fishmans were formed in 1987 by a handful of Tokyo college students. Over a decade they drifted from guitar-pop toward something stranger, with a lot more dub in it, and became one of Japanese rock's most quietly loved bands along the way. On December 28th, 1998, they played a marathon show meant as a send-off for their departing bassist. Three months later frontman Shinji Sato died of heart failure at thirty-three, and that show ended up, without anyone planning it, as the band's own goodbye.

Osaka → Rock in Opposition, Europe

After Dinner

Haco led After Dinner out of Osaka as a rotating chamber-pop collective that sat closer to composed art music than to rock. Their 1989 album, Paradise of Replica, found an unlikely audience in Europe through Chris Cutler's Rock in Opposition network. The official credits list one of Haco's own contributions as "volleyball performer." No instrument named.

Osaka, 1979

Aunt Sally

In 1977 seventeen-year-old Hiromi Moritani flew to London, saw the Sex Pistols, and came home to Osaka sure that punk was something you did rather than something you watched. As Phew, she formed Aunt Sally with guitarist Bikke. They cut one self-titled album in early 1979, pressed in around four hundred copies, and broke up within the year. There was no falling-out. They had simply decided punk itself was finished. Decades later, singer Jun Togawa summed it up in the reissue's liner notes, saying the record wasn't really punk at all, since "whereas punk directed opposition toward conventional rock, Aunt Sally directed opposition toward punk itself."

The Collection