matsuo ono / takehisa kosugi "roots of electronic sound"


a reproduction of a 1979 victor label reissue of a 1975 lp on the legendary alm label featuring a series of short tape music experiments, recorded between 1963 and 1966 by matsuo ono, with assistance from none other than takehisa kosugi. the artwork and libretto on the lp are full of references to “atom” (better known to westerners as “astro boy”), a mid-60s japanese cartoon to which many of these tape-sounds were used as sound effects and incidental music... pretty incredibly given how zonked & explosion-oriented these short pieces are.

the whole thing comes across as an earlier, analog version of jean-claude risset’s catalogue of computerized sound synthesis (i.e. each cue is announced beforehand by a loud/distorted japanese voice solely in the right/left channel.) as the record progresses, the jabs get longer and longer, until morphing into a suite of fully realized, multi edit-per-second blasts & cosmic drift that rival only the earliest wdr & ina-grm lineage tape-music etudes. one of the key pieces historical japanese electronic music puzzle, entirely fantastic & completely necessary...

(5 tracks -tracks 1-4 contain intros in japanese before each short piece- track 5 contains no vocals pure electronic music)

(a creel pone limited release)

http://www.mediafire.com/?bzm0d4tmtom