2025 reissue - Imported super deluxe double LP with booklet + obi-strip
Long-overdue reissues of the first three Nagisa Ni Te albums, separately and collectively documenting the melodic ingenuity and experimental verve of one of the great shining lights in Japan's storied interior history of psychedelic music. Formed in 1992 and led by Org Records Shinji Shibayam, the group debuted in 1995 with ...On The Love Beach, an across-the-bow opening gambit that features some very notable players (Naoki Zushi, Kenichi Takayama, Chie Mukai, Tori Kudo.) and unites psych rock classicism, prog ambition, indigenous folk and a radical sense of iconoclasm that's undeniably unique. This was the first the world was to hear of Nagisa Ni Te, but they weren't new exactly - ...On The Love Beach represented the product of Shinji's decade-long work with Org Records that seemed to both recognise a continuum as well as forging its own new understandings. If that iconoclastic zeal remains central to much of the groups subsequent activity, then their second album, the live document Taiyou No Sekai, proves an equally surprising volte face through its relative return to tradition. Recorded amidst a debilitating heatwave in Tokyo in the summer of 1997 and featuring just acoustic guitar and djembe, the performance represents a marked departure from the rich arrangements of their debut, refining the songs to their essential core and fully embracing the folk intimacy that resides at the heart of Shinji's songwriting. Like with a number of their Western contemporaries, they were releasing that quiet could be as powerful as loud. The release of their third album in 1999 pulled the group in new directions once more, favouring improvisation and the dreamzone drift of Hallelujahs and Naoki Zushi without ever losing sense of its melodic centre. Hontou No Sekai is in effect a splitting of the difference between classic conceptions of psychedelia and an emergent slowcore aesthetic propagated by US peers like Low and Red House Painters, and actually signals the way for another monumental project Shinji was to be involved with a few years later - Naoki Zushi's masterpiece, III. You'd reasonably declare them pivotal if only they had been more widely available. To that point, the criteria for assessing archival projects ordinarily flips between vanguardism, influence and hidden status. With these opening three statements, Nagisa Ni Te make a claim for them all, a claim I believe has only strengthened with time.
FFO: Naoki Zushi, Hallelujahs, Crazy Horse, Galaxie 500, Low
