Kazuki Tomokawa - Straight From The Throat LP

In the 1970s, Kazuki Tomokawa catapulted into Tokyo's avant-garde scene with his cathartic and utterly electrifying performances. "Straight from the Throat", Tomokawa's second album, released in July 1976 by Harvest Records, finds the musician in his truest form: as the "screaming philosopher" he would come to be called—cynical but fair, cheeky and melancholic, and looking at the world with truth-seeking eyes.

In "Straight from the Throat", Tomokawa shrieks and shouts and wallows with ritualistic abandon—his avant-folk stylings are cosmic and, at times, well to ground-shaking rock. He speaks of adolescence, passing hearses, and wedding chapel cars in a poem to his younger brother, Tomoharu, and watches ice melt on the Mitane River with spring's turn. Tomokawa's sound is, as Kiichi Takahara would later dub it, "I-music": revelatory and deeply intimate songs that turn to the everyday and the interior. They are portraits of a man in search of meaning, who is taking stubborn control of his life by doing so.

As he croons in "The Spring Is Here Again Song": I'll drink till I've had my fill / And fall in love until I die.

Tracklist:

1. Grampa
2. Goddam Winter
3. Ameran Kuyuran
4. Dagadzugu
5. A Fitting Adolescene
6. Footbridge
7. The Spring is Here Again Song
8. Fridge
9. Smithereens
10. Don't Kill the Sea Lions
11. Harmonica
12. A Little Ditty
13. Stone

About this product: this reissue is pressed on black vinyl.