Audiopile Review: Black Editions has done an incredible job of making classics from Japan’s P.S.F. label available in obscenely luxurious vinyl editions. We’re particularly grateful for those ragged and radiant White Heaven albums. Of all the P.S.F. bands, White Heaven concocted the most palatable brew of heavy rock, lo-fi murk, and free-ranging experimentalism. The latest release on Black Editions is a 1997 solo album from that band’s You Ishihara. ‘Passivité’ is something of an obscurity. It wasn’t even released on P.S.F. and apparently disappeared without trace faster than you could say “shambolic blues-rock genius”. However, it is hardly a minor work, and is a must for White Heaven and P.S.F. fans, particularly as it features scene legend Michio Kurihara. ‘Passivité’ was recorded in the wake of White Heaven’s disintegration and is essentially a continuation and, crucially, an expansion of the band’s mission, with Ishihara sounding appropriately bummed out. Many of the songs revolve around Kan Mikami-style inertia-trapped blues and abstract-expressionist experimentalism. It’s only ‘Crevice’ that rocks in a familiar way, but boy does that shit rock. Fans of P.S.F.’s rocking and avant-garde sides alike are really going to dig digging this one out of obscurity.

***

When it was first released in 1997, White Heaven founder You Ishihara’s solo debut Passivité seemed to vanish into the ether, going largely unnoticed; the scant coverage it did receive in the Japanese music press was confused or even dismissive and it hardly reached an overseas audience in that moment just before the online music era. It was released by the short-lived Japanese Creativeman Disc label, which also produced albums by other luminaries of the Japanese underground, including Phew, Otomo Yoshihide, Taku Sugimoto, C.C.C.C. and Ground-Zero. Yet, even in that eclectic company, Ishihara’s album stood apart in a world all its own, out of time in that, or any other, era.

Passivité arrived at a pivotal point in Ishihara’s career, just as White Heaven dissolved and before the formation of his next group, The Stars. To realize the album, he recruited a choice group of players, including Michio Kurihara (White Heaven) on guitar, Chiyo Kemekawa (Yura Yura Teikoku) on bass, and Koji Shimura (Acid Mothers Temple) on drums, arranging them in no less than five configurations. The result revealed an expansive creative and even conceptual vision that could only find expression outside the band context. In the twenty-odd years since, the album has found adherents who, like P.S.F. Records founder Hideo Ikeezumi, praised its tremendous depth and discovered that they experienced something new each time they listened to it. Listening back today, Passivité sounds timeless and, in a sense, encapsulates the concepts, feeling, and brilliance that have marked the near 50-year career of one of the key figures in Japanese underground music.

Passivité is an entrancingly beautiful album that draws from rock and psychedelic music, the sounds of 60’s America as well as elements of jazz, bossa nova, soul, and even electronic music. It’s an enigmatic late-night meditation that unfolds in a cool darkness pierced by scattered flashes of light and heat. The album’s opening tracks “K” and “Nachbild,” as well as the second side’s nearly 15-minute “Nightwalker,” slowly float in the night, quietly seductive, stripped down, and soulful. Even as Ishihara seems to surrender to these nocturnal atmospheres, he cuts to songs that erupt with urgent energy, overdriven fuzz guitars, and even dives into an electronic excursion recorded 18 years before. Through all of this, there is a clarity and cohesion of vision. On Passivité, Ishihara both embraces and departs from his work with White Heaven. The music is deeply personal and intimate even as it operates on a conceptual level with a masterful nuance and subtlety.

Black Editions presents Passivité for the first time on vinyl in a meticulously remastered deluxe edition, including metallic silver tip-on jacket with gloss film laminate finish, matte pigment stamping, two inserts with liner notes in Japanese and English newly written by renowned music critic and editor Masato Matsumura (Studio Voice, Tokion) and the original notes by Shinji Shibayama (Nagisa Ni Te, Hallelujahs, Org Records).