Between 1980 and 1985 a medical student named Tadashi Kamada who had founded a small label called DD. Records released 222 cassettes of Japanese outsider music, in what has been described as ‘the most amazing DIY effort ever undertaken to document an alternative music scene’. Containing typewritten liner notes and bearing photocopied images of found objects on their cover, these cassettes ran the gamut from experimental pop to no wave, coursing through drone and tape music, loosely rendered free jazz, psychedelic rock and early takes on house and industrial music while reflecting at some remove contemporary trends in the vein of ambient and kankyÅ ongaku.
One of the most prolific artists on DD. Records was Koshiro Yoshimatsu, who composed in the region of forty albums across the span of a few years. Initially corresponding and then trading tapes with Kamada as he completed his studies at the nearby Yamaguchi University, his first efforts for the label came under the name Juma, a band which he had founded alongside the soprano saxophonist Takafumi Isotani. Sometimes going solo and other times performing as part of a full ensemble comprising vocals, a rhythm section, flute and keys, Yoshimatsu under the alias Juma released six albums including Faust and Lost, Ammonite Legend and Aqua Cosmos before he graduated and relocated to Hiroshima, where he became doubly prolific even as he pursued a career in film.
DD. Records became a cult label and their cassettes remain collectors’ items, but this week the Brighton label Phantom Limb has for the first time reissued some of Yoshimatsu’s key eighties compositions, selecting six tracks which flow together for the compilation Fossil Cocoon. The selections – which include the title songs from albums like Poplar and Pastel Nostalgia plus two tracks from Pre-Chaos, where he accompanied and produced the voice of his former classmate Fumie Yasumura – carry the same sort of compositional structure, with top melodies of a floral or otherwise accented nature overlaying propulsive, motorik guitar licks and beats.
Still those structural similarities are the basis for an enveloping and sometimes intoxicating mixture of sounds and genres, whether Yoshimatsu is adapting the motorised revs of a bass guitar, jerky krautrock rhythms or more overtly playful trends in ambient synthesis. The opening to the winding gait of ‘Jerusalem’ sounds like water being sucked through a hose pipe, before its reverberating drum beat and sloganeering vocals serve as precursors to eighties headliners like The Sugarcubes on those tracks where Einar Ćrn hogged the microphone or a Disintegration-era Cure.
On the suggestive ‘1984’ what sound like synthesized pan pipes and arpeggiated keys are punctuated by an industrial clanging, with the reedy melody redolent of both Pachelbel’s Canon and Joe Hisaishi’s scores for Takeshi Kitano and Hayao Miyazaki’s films. ‘Escape’ is more coiled as Yasumura whispers her wish through a crackling ambiance which incorporates sloping, stuttering drum beats and a stalled guitar, with the track drawing to a halt after more squelching and bubbling through the wop wop of rotating helicopter blades. And as Fossil Cocoon floats free of its percussive casing, ‘Pastel Nostalgia’ is in the vein of Ambient 1: Music for Airports by Brian Eno, sped up and embellished by the rub and clink of glassware, while ‘Poplar’ is an astral projection, a baroque garden cultivated in blackest space.
