'Straight from the Throat' is available at https://blankforms.org/publication/kazuki-tomokawa-straight-from-the-throat-lp/, and as part of the Kazuki Tomokawa CD box set at
https://blankforms.org/publication/kazuki-tomokawa-kazuki-tomokawa-1975-1977/.

In the 1970s, Kazuki Tomokawa catapulted into Tokyo’s avant-garde scene with his cathartic and utterly electrifying performances. Straight from the Throat, Tomokawa’s second album, released in July 1976 by Harvest Records, finds the musician in his truest form: as the “screaming philosopher” he would come to be called—cynical but fair, cheeky and melancholic, and looking at the world with truth-seeking eyes. 

In Straight from the Throat, Tomokawa shrieks and shouts and wallows with ritualistic abandon—his avant-folk stylings are cosmic and, at times, swell to ground-shaking rock. He speaks of adolescence, passing hearses, and wedding chapel cars in a poem to his younger brother, Tomoharu, and watches ice melt on the Mitane River with spring’s turn. Tomokawa’s sound is, as Kiichi Takahara would later dub it, “I-music”: revelatory and deeply intimate songs that turn to the everyday and the interior. They are portraits of a man in search of meaning, who is taking stubborn control of his life by doing so. As he croons in “The Spring Is Here Again Song,” “I’ll drink till I’ve had my fill / And fall in love until I die.”

Kazuki Tomokawa (b. 1950) is a prolific singer-songwriter from Hachiryu Village (now the town of Mitane) in the Akita Prefecture area of northern Japan. Since his first release in 1975, he has recorded more than thirty albums. The 2010 documentary about his life, La Faute des Fleurs, won the Sound & Vision award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, and that same year saw the Japanese release of the book Dreams Die Vigorously Day by Day, a collection of his lyrics spanning forty years. His most recent albums are Vengeance Bourbon (2014) and Gleaming Crayon (2016), both on the Modest Launch label.

Kazuki Tomokawa - Footbridge

ride or die (kansas city shuffle)

The result of an afternoon in the lab experimenting and exploring a newly resurrected and slightly modified little 1964 EICO 488 variable frequency tube dual-channel multiplexing switch, a swept signal generator and a pinch of insanity :)

Several minutes of ensuing material was declicked in iZotope RX (yes, sadly the EICO's tube multiplexor, although lovely in tone and saturation, has a clicking/popping habit) cut up and then randomly triggered in Kontakt with random levels, panning, filtering and reverb depths to create a cacophony of Amazonian birdsong... well that was the general idea anyway...

Rain performance courtesy of my Blue Zone Kontakt library.

Sound Design, Composition & Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio, 2022.

1964 EICO 488: Amazon Hideaway.. (SFX With Lab Gear)

written by Orchid Ghoul (Angleton's Orchids on twitter)
arranged and produced by Compost Ghoul

Orchid Ghoul's Tale of Twin Cities

Sway In The Morning Guest Mix 11-9-22 (intro & Outro)

Meshing Gown Rot

Mefrera Seven

If I

Soon

Cézanne By Touch Part 1

Radiohead - Reckoner (Flying Lotus Remix)

My mindspace has been colonized by ancient earth spirits and neighborhood ghouls.

Orchid Ghoul's Tale of Twin Cities

Dream Ghoul

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