5/15/26.
I often mention how I get recommendations from weekly emails from Monorail or Darla Records. I'm increasingly relying on Stranded Records (Oakland/San Francisco). That is where I learned about this gem from psych/rock/folk artist Harumi. I'm going to let the Stranded write-up do most of the heavy lifting today. But let me say, that my first impression was Ed Askew, and that is a great thing:
Somewhere between 1967 and 1968, at the very nerve of the psychedelic era, Japanese singer and composer Harumi recorded in New York an album that today sounds like a lost manifesto of cosmopolitan psychedelic pop. Harumi is a rare example of delicate, almost fragile psychedelia - where Eastern melodic sensibility meets soft American folk-rock and the studio imagination of the late 1960s. Recorded with New York musicians, the album moves between dream-pop long before the term existed, baroque pop orchestration and introspective psychedelia. There is no loud expression here - only transparent arrangements, bilingual lyrics (English / Japanese), gentle vocal delivery and a strong sense of inner journey. The album was produced by Tom Wilson - the producer behind recordings by Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, The Velvet Underground and The Mothers of Invention. This immediately places Harumi at the heart of the 1967 New York scene - at a time when psychedelia was still exploration rather than formula.
This is reissued by Austrian label Ebalunga!!!. The label has been around since 2019.