10", silkscreened jacket with obi (dark blue & dark red), insert and a postcard
The brightest star! Perhaps An'Archives greatest moment thus far sees them pull four tracks from the wondrous archive of Shizuka, all recorded in 2001 and featuring members of Tokyo Flashback affiliates, Dip. Like Hallelujahs before her, Shizuka's songwriting seems to look west for inspiration, drawing some influence from the fogpop climes of San Francisco and sweetly transposing that base material into lilting and sometimes ecstatic dreampop reveries. Soft as lace lullabies alight on a cloud or dream. And that's just the half of it. Elsewhere, there's chemtrail traces of their acid-freak past, Maki Miura's guitar playing especially cut-loose and revelatory at times. We've one foot in the Paisley Underground, the other stomping the Tokyo psych underbelly. That's the body spoken for. But with the wor(l)dless moonage drift of closer, The Street The Fairy Goes, it's the mind that's fully ascending to heaven's high. Sweet Cartesian split! Truly blissful and otherly transcendence you'll struggle to beat. I believe this is the first Shizuka to make it to vinyl, so don't expect it to hang around.
