Private Release

Monday, February 24, 2025

Tenniscoats - (2015) Music Exists Disc 1

Majikick Records ‎– 038

Tenniscoats (テニスコーツ) is a group from from Tokyo, Japan featuring Saya and Takashi Ueno, often helped by other musicians and non-musicians. They, in turn, have performed in, or collaborated with a large number of underground bands and musicians like Maher Shalal Hash Baz (with Tori and Reiko Kudo), Cacoy (with DJ Klock of Clockwise Records), Puka Puka Brians and other artists on Tenniscoats very own Majikick label.
Both Saya and Ueno also perform and release solo works. Their record label's name 'Majikick' is a combination of the Japanese word for 'serious' and the English word 'kick'. The name 'Tenniscoats' comes from the way 'Tennis courts' sounds when rendered in Japanese.
In Tenniscoats, Saya sings beautiful original melodies in a delicate falsetto and mainly plays keyboards, piano, and synths. Ueno accompanies mostly with guitar, saxophone, and occasional vocals. A lot of other instruments are also used to create their fragile pop and experimental songs.

Marvin Pontiac - 2017 - The Asylum Tapes

Strange & Beautiful Music ‎– none

Maher Shalal Hash Baz - 1996 - Return Visit To Rock Mass 3xCD

Org Records ‎– 008

In contrast to Kind Of Blue, this is this incredibly short, focussed Maher Shalal Hash Baz record [it’s an 86-track compilation box set]. The band is the work of Tori Kudo who somehow managed to persuade his friend Shinji Shibayama to release on his label, Org, on the condition that Tori would only agree to the record if Shibayama would release every single song that Tori had at the time. Tori comes up with a song a day – or more – so the project could have almost never finished. I think Shibayama must have called it off at some point or various musicians stopped coming to sessions.

It starts out with a really beautiful song called ‘Unknown Happiness’ that is probably one of their most recognisable songs. It has a really beautiful melody, weird instrumentation with a euphonium and a surf guitar style. There is a mixture of really fantastic musicians and absolute beginners and that’s what Tori likes – he wants a rough edge to what he does.

Tori is a really incredible pianist – a child prodigy who could play really complicated classical pieces from the age of five – and absolutely knows music inside out. He has no interest in playing with people who are as good as he is. He is looking for an amateur spirit and is a self-declared ‘king of error’. He started out in Japan making quite punky records and then did some no wave-type stuff, with his wife Reiko who would wail over the music, and then eventually formed Maher Shalal Hash Baz, which was this strange instrumental mix of euphonium as the main instrument – sometimes with a really good drummer of at other times with a beginner on drums. Tori was almost always on guitar and doing vocals.

When I heard their music, it was my friend David Keenan who discovered them for The Wire. Katrina and I were visiting David in London together and David said that he had found this group that he thought we would absolutely love. When Katrina and I heard it we were floored from the first notes of ‘Unknown Happiness’. It had all these elements that I love in music – great melody, a certain roughness, joy and sadness, intensity and a quiet power. It had vision.

Tori and Reiko were living in London at the time and after David did his piece and it was published in The Wire, they left a note in the Rough Trade shop for David as they had heard he also lived in London. They wanted to meet him and thank him for the review. David was moving back to Glasgow around that time so we decided to do a Maher Shalal Hash Baz concert. We put them on and it was about then that Domino had been saying that if we ever wanted to do our own label that they would support us and give us money to do it. So, we went in and said to [Domino founder] Laurence [Bell] that Maher Shalal Hash Baz was what we wanted to do and that our label would be based around them. He thought it was a bit wild, but his favourite group is something like Royal Trux, so even though he has released all these big records he loves wilder stuff and was up for doing it. So, the first release on Geographic was a Maher retrospective and we subsequently made a new Maher record in Scotland called Blues De Jour. They embody everything I love in music and I will absolutely love this group until the day I die.

Maher Shalal Hash Baz - 2000 - From A Summer To Another Summer (An Egypt To Another Egypt)

Geographic ‎– 001

Maher Shalal Hash Baz are incredible; the self proclaimed 'kings of error', their music is unselfconciously skewed and triumphantly melodic. This lovingly compiled retrospective traces their roots from the early 80s Japanese underground through to their historic Glasgow show in 1999. MSHB make you feel like you're hearing music for the first time.

Lola V. Stain - 1992 - Mansarda / Ikona CD

Blind Dog Records ‎– 002

Lola V. Stain was the band from Skopje, Macedonia, YUGOSLAVIA, formed in 1987 by musician Zlatko Oridjanski . The name of this band has been taken after one of the Margaret Dirass’s novel. The music of Lola V. Stain could be described as electroacoustic ambient music with mixture of traditional macedonian ethno music played by various guest musicians. They’ve released two antology albums Ikona (1990) and Mansarda (1992) on Croatian label Blind Dog Records. Zlatko Oridjanski shortly joined group Anastasia and reached worldwide success with their soundtrack for the Oscar nominated movie „Before the Rain“

Laurence Vanay - 1974 - Galaxies LP

SFP ‎– 024

Laurence Vanay is the pseudonym for Jacqueline Thibault, wife of music producer and musician Laurent Thibault (ex-MAGMA). Here is her debut album entitled "Galaxies", a very rare item indeed and a Holy Grail for most collectors of 70ies underground French progressive
*Galaxies* opens in a progressive instrumental mood, a style elegantly dominating the entire record. The powerful swirling organ, with a sound that owes to early CATHARSIS, sets an atmosphere of acid hallucinatory mellowness which prevails throughout the whole recording. The sublime folk twists add an aura of quiet and restrained melancholy, soft and seductive yet in perfect emulation with the dreamy flute play. Refined sonorities are interwoven with troubled twists of anguish, to faint in an aetherial vaporous climate reminding delicate second Cressida or early Gracious. An album of inconspicuous, sincere beauty and a masterwork of the french progressive folk scene.

Kurt Vile - 2013 - Wakin On A Pretty Daze CD

Matador ‎– 998

Kurt Vile is slowly, quietly becoming one of the great American guitarists and songwriters, of our time. This 69-minute double album is comprised of sweeping, expansive songs that are both very intimate and conversational. Wakin On A Pretty Daze is a timeless record that would have sounded great 30 years ago, sounds great today, and will still sound great in another 30 years’ from now.
Beautifully produced by John Agnello, the record is filled with hazy, swooning guitar lines and dreamy, beatific, and occasionally sardonic vocals. It is summed up by the staggeringly gorgeous 9-minute opener, Wakin On A Pretty Day. The song is also the first video, directed by Jonathan Demme in the spirit of his landmark Springsteen video “Streets OfPhiladelphia.”
The record has other connections to Kurt’s home town. Steve Powers (ESPO), the renowned Philly street artist, painted the cover mural on an abandoned building near the Northern Liberties. The album is being announced via a mini-doc of Powers creating the mural with Kurt’s commentary, and the two of them talking about Philadelphian music and visual arts. The mural will be re-created in London, Los Angeles and New York.

Kelompok Kampungan - 1980 - Mencari Tuhan

Strawberry Rain ‎– 007

One of the true gems of the Indonesian scene, this album stands to be one of the best, and also one of the most unique albums to come from the region. Banned by the Shuko government soon after release, it remains somewhat obscure to most collectors up until now. An album created by Bram Makahekum (who had no musical experience or training at all) Kelompok Kumpangan had multiple members by trying to recreate the sounds of nature, even using original handmade instruments invented by the band themselves. The end result is nothing short of brilliant, one of our personal favourites from the region. There isn’t much to compare this to, maybe the Indonesian equivalent of a Paebiru or Genesis from Columbia at times, but it’s very unique and stands on its own. Wonderful progressive folk of the highest caliber interweaving flutes, violins, acoustic guitars, Indonesian percussion and other instrumentation. We can’t stand behind this one enough, it’s truly brilliant. 700 copies housed in paste on covers, includes insert with photos and history written by Indonesian music journalist Denny Sakrie. One time limited edition, CD limited to 1000 copies and has 4 songs not on the LP version that were never released on vinyl before

John Fahey - 2011 - Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You (The Fonotone Years 1958-1965) 5xCD

Dust-to-Digital ‎– 021

As with all histories, context and an appreciation for the times are essential. In 1958, when the earliest of these recordings were made there were probably no more than a handful of reissues of pre-war country blues 78s available on record in the United States. The long-playing 33 1/3 record was, itself, only a recent invention. Today, with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pre-war blues and hillbilly reissues available and in print, when it’s possible to walk into any halfway decent record store (to the extent record stores, halfway decent or otherwise, still exist) and find the complete recordings of Charley Patton or Blind Willie Johnson, it may be difficult to comprehend just how obscure and how otherworldly this music once was. — Glenn Jones, from the Introduction to Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You

Inca Ore with Lemon Bear's Orchestra - 2006 - The Birds in the Bushes CD

5 Rue Christine ‎– 072

Rock critics, present company included, throw around the term "primitive" too
much. We use it to describe instrumentally underdeveloped but effective music.
In my mind, the word "primitive" alludes to pre-homosapien humanoids. When
describing an artist, the word, then, describes a caveman-like tribe
semi-rhythmically smashing rocks together in some type of ceremony around a
fire. From all the critical mythos surrounding The Godz, the first time I heard
them, I expected them to be a bunch of Cro-Magnon men communicating in grunts
with a guitar being played like it dropped out of the sky from a portal to the
future. It'd take someone pretty unpretentious and wacky to make something I
could simply grace with the "primitive" label.
Inca Ore is a wacky lady. She has an affinity for shouting Dadist,
free-association poetry and clanging pots and pans. Occasionally, she imitates
animals and blows a slide whistle. Her backing band, Lemon Bears Orchestra,
creates banging and scraping sounds and sometimes adds to Ore's animal battle
cries. Occasionally, there is a reverb-ridden flute line thrown into the mix to
remind us it is the 21st century. The whole thing is an organic chaos with a
very urban tint.
The majority of the songs on the album revolve around loose, almost calamitous
percussion and Ore's spoken-in-tongues vocal chanting. Ore's nonsensical
blathering echoes the language-approximation methods of the Sun City Girls but,
unlike the Girls, Ore never seems like she is attempting to be coherent. Even
when she is shouting in English, her sentences seem disembodied from any
meaning. Her voice evokes a child's wide vocal range — from the ethereality of
playground chants to the anger of a hissy fit.
One such hissy fit provides the album's best moment. The horrific "Glossolalia
the Gift of the Tongue" finds Ore shouting like Punky Brewster as her backing
band rips a piano's chords and provides clinking sword percussion and a bizarre
low moan. A venomous mix of insanity and disorientation occurs.
A lost-in-the-woods motif runs through a lot of Ore's compositions. The group
emits animal chants and vocal imitations of natural sounds to a backdrop of odd
percussive timing or perhaps weird piano clanging. Even when the group employs a
limited use of dissonant fuzz, as they do on the expansive mindfuck "Cape Meares,"
it seems organic. Of course, the lost-in-the-woods motif leads to an inevitable
fluting and guitar strumming on "Blue Train," but Ore and the Bears never fall
prey to the nostalgia hang ups many of their peers demonstrate. Instead, the
band floats the flute sounds in an eerie manor and uses a guitar to imitate a
slow moving train, highlighting dual vocal melody that sounds like the Manson
family reinterpreting the Velvet Underground's "Murder Mystery."
A sexual gloss adds flavor to the calamity. One of the male members of Lemon
Bears Orchestra provides a rhythmic thrusting voice for the percussion on "Lucky
One." Ore works her way into orgasmic swing, slowly building a chant along to
the point of a scream filled with ecstasy and violence. It's one of the first
times I've heard bare animalistic sexuality replicated perfectly in sound art
form.
The Birds in the Bushes is a step away from the doldrums of the whole
freak folk, new weird jive, but it is not an album that will appeal to a broad
audience. To the unwilling/untrained ear, the album sounds like a cataclysmic
mess of clanging and screaming. In his two and a half sentence review of Inca
Ore's album for Rock-A-Rolla, Bobby Bone wrote: "The result is an
unlistenable and irritating mess of clatter, hissing and chanting. Absolute
nonsense." Some people just aren't evolved enough to appreciate the primitive.