First-ever vinyl release of criminally unknown early ’80s Japanese punk band.

Fully remastered from the band’s original early ’80s cassette releases, and housed in a sturdy tip-on sleeve. Includes a double-sided, illustrated insert.

Singer-songwriter Syoichi Miyazawa’s tale is a confounding one.

He grew up in a small town in Yamagata Prefecture (in northern Japan), loved Dylan and The Beatles, and had very little exposure to, or interest in, underground music. And yet, shortly after 24-year-old Miyazawa arrived in Tokyo in 1978, he began performing solo shows at tiny clubs in the city, singing and playing guitar. His performances quicky devolved from brisk acoustic jaunts to lengthy, heavy dirges sung in a snot-nosed wail over a blown-out electric guitar detuned to produce a kind of sonic sludge.

At one of his earliest gigs, a mutual friend introduced him to Endo Michiro, who would soon become the legendary front man of Japanese punk icons The Stalin. It turned out Miyazawa and Endo had attended Yamagata University at the same time just a few years earlier, but hadn’t known each other at school. In Tokyo, they became fast friends, moved into the same apartment building, and for years were inseparable. Endo played guitar and drums on Miyazawa’s debut release, the “Christ Was Born in a Stable” flexi disc. But while Endo was social and outgoing, Miyazawa preferred to be alone, avoiding concerts unless he was performing.

Despite these antisocial tendencies, Miyazawa came to despise playing solo. In 1982, an eccentric high school student named Chika introduced herself at one of Miyazawa’s gigs, and Miyazawa asked if she’d play bass. She agreed and drafted two of her friends to play second guitar and drums. The Rabbits were born.

Available courtesy of Mesh-Key Records.

New vinyl pressing! The Box contains the remastered albums Hypersona, Hollow, and Lithea, in addition to Orphans, which is a curated selection of compilation tracks, most for the first time on vinyl, as well as arrangements exclusive for this boxset. Entire set spans across six vinyl records. The records are housed in a 12.5 x 12.5 white semi gloss heavyweight Tip-On box. Limited and sequentially foil numbered – grab it while it is still available!

New vinyl pressing! Welcome to the world’s first (and only) post-punk-industrial-trance-psychedelic-surf album! The fact that it took so many adjectives to describe Tragic Figures lets you know just how unique of an album it is. Sure, there are echoes of other artists, like krautrock legends Can, post-punkers Public Image Limited (Savage Republic opened for PiL on their 1982 West Coast dates), avant-garde guitar players like Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, scrap metal industrialists Einstürzende Neubauten, and Bay Area sludgecore nihilists Flipper—but really, this unlikely product of (mostly) UCLA undergrads sounds like no other record before or since.

For its 40^th anniversary edition, Real Gone Music worked with Bruce Licher to preserve and expand on the magical, talismanic quality of the initial release. The original album has been remastered from the original tapes by Mike Milchner at Sonic Vision, while both the CD and LP editions both boast an extra disc of largely unreleased rehearsal recordings taped in the bowels of UCLA parking garages, where the band used to practice to take advantage of the extended reverb afforded by all the concrete surfaces (imagine being an unwitting undergrad happening upon this unearthly din coming out of nowhere)! Richie Unterberger’s liner notes feature interviews with band members Licher, Philip Drucker, and Jeff Long, and the LP comes with the original cover graphics expanded into a gatefold jacket pressed in heavyweight “chipboard” paper stock. Clear your calendar and set aside a couple of hours to listen to Tragic Figures…you won’t end up where you started.