3LP wooden box set, edition of 275. no digital
An'archives presents three documents, three vinyl records carved by the illuminations of Masayoshi Urabe, six performances engraved like epitaphs in the stone that covers the Living World.
These are recordings made in small suburban venues in Japan where Urabe would play in front of a meagre audience: the Bitches Brew in Yokohama, the Groove in Okinawa and the Gari Gari in Tokyo.
In the corridors of cult label P.S.F. Records, Urabe came across the likes of Kan Mikami, Chie Mukai, Rinji Fukuoka, Hiroshi Hasegawa, with whom he played, and sometimes recorded albums of unfathomable beauty. But he is most disturbing, luminous and dark, violent and poignant, during his solo sets. Hideo Ikeezumi (the cultural ambassador behind P.S.F.) supported him more than others and tried to offer him all the space he could hope for.
His only kindred spirits are Kaoru Abe and Albert Ayler, with whom he shares a sense of tragedy, the same jealous string to swing into the sound, to turn the heavens over to our feet. Urabe mates with his alto sax, assaults it, snuff jazz calling fallen angels to come and haunt us.
Death, like Eros, haunts Masayoshi Urabe’s body of work, and unravels through copper sounds. He follows the sound, inhales it, spits it like an air bag turned inside out until exhaustion, violent, playing and dancing, willing the front rows to give in to his murky eroticism.
Urabe is a magnificent musician, even though he ends up trashing everything, leaving only a mutilated musical body behind. Strangled notes, no melody, just breath, spat air, un chant d'amour - Michel Henritzi
