Bandcamp featured this release today. I'd never heard of Aunt Sally (Kobe, Japan) who's self-titled release came out in 1979. Full of angular post-punk, the songs I've heard (one here and several on YouTube) have more of a motorik beat.
"Subete Urimono" has keyboards that recall The Clean. But really the rest of this sounds like some of the bands Phew (leader of the band) worked with over her career - Can, Einstürzende Neubauten, and The Raincoats.
This is being reissued by MESH-KEY (New York). The label appears to specialize in reissues of Japanese bands.
Phew’s flowing and dynamic voice glides through you. She’s been making music since the 1970s, when she fronted the Osaka punk group Aunt Sally. While Aunt Sally rooted itself in the direct, face-to-face experience of angular, avant-punk music, Phew feels omnipresent and disembodied. The fleeting nature of time, as represented through the guitars, keyboards, and drums of Aunt Sally, dissipates with the presence of her gurgling analog electronics. Music becomes sculpture, rather than performance. The sounds of Light Sleep become a more tangible solid, which one can roll like a figurine through one’s hands, feel its curves and body, and understand its distinct and myriad textures. The electronics spew like crystals, while her vaporous voice billows over them.
In Light Sleep, Phew’s voice morphs itself into new manifestations and spans a variety of emotions. Phew reimagines the possibilities of the voice in music, making sound that are beautifully simple and transformative in their purity. In “New World,” “Usui Kuki,” and “Echo,” spring-like bass tones create the beat, as viscous words fall from her lips and hover on top of fluttering electronics. In “CQ Tokyo” and “Antenna,” fried electronics buzz around her voice, which sounds more urgent as it reaches out into the murky abyss. The abrasive start to “CQ Tokyo” gives way right around the two minute mark, as heart wrenching hums and prolonged coos reveal the beauty in angst. Phew achieves wonderful colors in her voice, as she consistently twirls her inflections, and the warbly distortions to her voice make it waver. In “Antenna,” her pixelated voice blurs the distinction between electronics and her voice, as she plays with the disembodied voice as an instrument or tool.
Phew’s music feels distinctly human and yet somehow alien in its hushed tones and talk-singing. In comparison, more superficially authentic music reveals itself as pure spectacle. While music making and consumption has become increasingly about the construction of identity, defining yourself as how others see you, Phew breaks down the notion of the other and instead focuses on music as an energy transfer. Phew becomes you, or you become Phew, or together you meld into one. The multi-surfaces that exist in Light Sleep can be lifted, spun around, pulled and broken apart, as the weight of it leaves a mark long after its stopped playing.
I just received my Les Rallizes Dénudés LP from Temporal Drift. Over the years my appreciation for Japanese rock has grown. From Tenniscoats to Aunt Sally to yumbo to The Caraway...there is diversity of sounds that's hard not to recognize or appreciate.
Now, here come The Rabbits. Formed in the early 1980s, The Rabbit clearly owe a debt to bands like Mission of Burma or The Fall. But, they really flew under the radar at the time. This reissue from MESH-KEY (New York; also reissued Aunt Sally) is releasing today.
This would fit nicely on a playlist with black midi. Read the Bandcamp page for a description on how The Rabbits made their unique sound.
