Kazuki Tomokawa: Try Saying You’re Alive!: Kazuki Tomokawa in His Own Words vinyl record

Kazuki Tomokawa: Try Saying You’re Alive!: Kazuki Tomokawa in His Own Words vinyl recordRelease Date: November 16, 2021 Kazuki Tomokawa has lived many lives: poet, self taught guitarist, actor, day laborer, basketball coach, painter, bicycle race tipster, and incomparable drinker among them. Above all, he is a legend of Japans avant folk music scene and his searing lyrics and raw, unvarnished vocals have influenced generations of musicians since his mid 1970s debut, when his unique sound brought him to prominence in the turbulent worlds

forcing the guitarist

April is the cruellest month was originally slated for release on ESP-Disk before the pioneering free jazz label’s untimely demise that year

Sound Art: Beyond Music

and the Shadow Ring—joined here by Maria Lambkin and Howard “Bloodmouse” Lester on subtle percussion and John “Klaus Canterbury” Wright on xylophone—capturing them at a pivotal and frenzied moment in their artistic trajectory

” “I’ll drink till I’ve had my fill / And fall in love until I die

while capturing radical artistic and political developments across Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s

recordings

he was already firmly immersed in the world of New Music as an interpreter of Kenneth Gaburo

natural voices

save for the occasional overlay of an AKG-plate reverb unit

The album’s seven tracks bleed into and out of one another

a man jailed for protesting the Vietnam War