Second Edition
Tolerance was the name adopted by Osaka dental student, Junko Tange, for the two albums she released via Vanity in 1979 and 1981. Like much of the Vanity output, Anonym and Divin have accumulated mythical status in the proceeding years, in part because of their obscurity, and in part because Tange disappeared from music soon after the latter's release. And it just so happens those are the last two interesting things about Tolerance. Nothing like a little mythos to drive those Discogs graphs upwards of course, but let's be clear, what Tange produced is of remarkable import, both to the Vanity Records story and electronic music as a whole. Taken alone, Anonym is an astonishing work, a confluence of post-punk autodidactism and primitive electronics that suggests some psychic kinship with Throbbing Gristle and the New York avant garde, while retaining a distinctly Japanese febrility that evokes the experiments of Hiromi Moritani. Tange is markedly unorthodox, bringing an almost free jazz-like elan to what would have been very early forays into electronic music. It's a poise that she refines to perfection on Divin, a huge compositional leap forward that seems to presage the advent of dub techno. How else to hear a track like Pulse Static, 10+ minutes of low-end minimalism that unites Cageian values with Basic Channel frequencies and Monoton austerity. This was and remains bleeding edge music making. And to think it was in 1981, from a female student of limited means. Re-write the history books. It's not for nothing that Stephan Mathieu is involved with the re-mastering - you can hear the ghosts of Divin in the Staalplaat sound. Apparently Vanity label boss, Yuzuru Agi, considered Divin his favourite record on the label. He may well have been on to something.
