Sold Date: September 29, 2022
Start Date: May 11, 2022
Final Price: €46.99 (EUR)
Seller Feedback: 287793
Buyer Feedback: 0

First time on vinyl / Remastered from original tapes in cooperation with the artist / Interview with Makoto Inoue and Yasushi Yamashita and liner notes by Spencer Doran / Maxwell August Croy / Includes mycological photos courtesy of the Tokyo National Museum of Nature and Science / Lacquers cut by John Golden and vinyl plated & pressed at RTI

Makoto Inoue and Yasushi Yamashita’s Inoyama Land project spans nearly four decades, still active to this day. A portmanteau of their family names, the “Land” of Inoyama hovers between imagined mythical space and concrete reality, extending beyond physical releases into installations, site-specific sound design and theatre scores. After their famed Haruomi Hosono-produced 1983 release Danzindan-Pojidon, the duo became involved in the budding environmental music business that was taking shape in Tokyo during the development boom of the asset bubble – working directly with figures like Hiroshi Yoshimura (with whom they developed sound design for the International Stadium in Yokohama) and Takashi Sekiguchi (Bamboo from Asia). This collection expands upon their sound heard on Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990 (LITA 167) to illuminate material that is even lesser known outside of Japan – some of it presented publicly for the first time.
Working initially with Munetaka Tanaka’s Sound Process Design (an acoustic consulting company formed by Tanaka with Satoshi Ashikawa, before Ashikawa’s tragic death in 1983), their commissioned work mirrors the sound world first fleshed out on Danzindan: chiming synthesizers, pastoral hues, childhood memory – all pulsing with a distant, emotional resonance. This material – culled from limited CD issues of the material on Tanaka’s Crescent label, Kazunao Nagata’s Transonic Records and self-released CDRs – presents a window into this process, illustrating how Inoue and Yamashita’s idiosyncratic musical identity gelled perfectly with all of the disparate environments of their commissions. Included is music written for the Kankaku (Sense) Museum in Miyagi, an exhibit on slime molds at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Ueno park, the 1977 stage performance Collecting Net (which also included music that would later become Danzindan-Pojidon) and their score for a Tokyo re-staging of New York avant-theatre pioneer Richard Foreman’s post-modern stage piece Egyptology.

Trackliste

A1 Hair Air
A2 Cycle
A3 Soushiyou To Shiteiru
A4 Garasudama
B1 Aa Egypto
B2 Skyfish
B3 Bananatron
B4 Fairy Tale
C1 Morn
C2 Kodama
C3 Ougon No Sara
C4 Candy Floss
D1 Watashikara Ubawanaide
D2 Anatano Yushoku No Tameni
D3 Candy (alt.)
D4 Sekai No Owari