Yasuaki Shimizu: Kakashi [PALTO FLATS/WRWTFWW]

Why you'll love it

This remastered reissue brings Kakashi out of Japan for the first time since it appeared on the Better Days label in 1982. Record Collector gave it four stars, and Pitchfork later called it a major standout of Shimizu's career.

This edition

• Remastered

About the album

Yasuaki Shimizu spent the early 1980s playing saxophone in the Tokyo band Mariah, and on his solo records he treated the studio like a toy box. For Kakashi he played saxophone, clarinet, flute, trumpet, piano, mallets, drums, charango, tapes, toys and what the credits call simply noises. He painted the cover too, and Seigen Ono engineered the sessions at Nippon Columbia Studios in Tokyo.

"Suiren" opens on a sampled loop that sounds like an electronic cat, and from there the record wanders happily between genres. The two parts of "Kono Yoni Yomeri" hum with synthetic cicadas and summer-night insects, "Semi Tori No Hi" is a clattering highlight, and "Yume Dewa" has horn lines with a touch of downtown New York about them. "Umi No Ue Kara," the longest track at over eight minutes, drifts like a slow tide, and "Utsukushiki Tennen" closes on an old Meiji-era melody.

For decades the album was a quiet legend among collectors of Japanese ambient and fusion, and Record Collector compared it to Mariah's own Utakata No Hibi. Kakashi means scarecrow, and on a summer afternoon this record does an excellent job of keeping the outside world at a polite distance.

Also at Kops: more Yasuaki Shimizu on vinyl · browse Electronic

Tracklist

Listen

On Palto Flats / WRWTFWW (cat# PFLP 007), a reissue of the 1982 album.