NYC’s amazing Blank Forms Editions give a gripping introduction to Kazuki Tomokawa’s avant-folk vitality, documenting the early years of the “screaming philosopher” via his first three albums, all collected and reissued internationally for the first time – think Nick Drake meets Keiji Haino ​

“In the 1970s, Kazuki Tomokawa catapulted into Tokyo’s avant-garde scene with his cathartic and utterly electrifying performances. Straight from the Throat finds the musician in his truest form: as the “screaming philosopher” he would come to be called—cynical but fair, cheeky and melancholic, and looking at the world with truth-seeking eyes.

In Straight from the Throat, Tomokawa shrieks and shouts and wallows with ritualistic abandon—his avant-folk stylings are cosmic and, at times, well to ground-shaking rock. He speaks of adolescence, passing hearses, and wedding chapel cars in a poem to his younger brother, Tomoharu, and watches ice melt on the Mitane River with spring’s turn. Tomokawa’s sound is, as Kiichi Takahara would later dub it, “I-music”: revelatory and deeply intimate songs that turn to the everyday and the interior. They are portraits of a man in search of meaning, who is taking stubborn control of his life by doing so.”