Label: An’archives – [An’38]
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album
Country: France
Released: 2022
Genre: Rock, Experimental
Style: Psychedelic Rock
We’re always excited when a new release on An’Archives arrives. Their commitment to the deepest recesses of the Japanese underground are unrivalled, so it seems somewhat enviable that Suishou No Fune would appear on the label sooner or label.
Active since the early 00’s Suishou No Fune (roughly ‘A Ship Of Crystal’) have developed a cult-following through a string of self-released CDrs and issues on micro labels, together with bigger subterranean institutions like P.S.F Records. Their slowwww motion psychedelic songs are cast in shades of light and dark – born out of sadness yet shimmering in light. It’s loose, unhurried and absorbing, the entire a-side here ‘Flying like a bird’ is a crawling psychedelic journey of heart-bleed, gently building over spindly guitar lines and languorous bass before plunging deep into a foggy wall of sound and splashy drums (played by Mark of Greymouth!). It’s epic, there’s little else to say. The two B-side pieces are equally engrossing – going a more sound-ritual / sonic-sermon route on ‘Rainbow Is Floating’ and trudging heart-of-darkness dirge on ‘Rainbow Is Floating [Endless Descent]’. Genuinely mind-blowing full sensory overload – the sort of music that genuinely makes me regret buying Basic Channel records in my late teens and attempting to learn to DJ instead of picking up a guitar. Total beast. (Mint / New – with inserts)
The wind is spring. There is a rainbow in the sky. Love is hiding in the waves.
Since forming in 1999, Suishou No Fune (A Ship Of Crystal), the vehicle for long-term musical collaborators Pirako Kurenai (guitar, voice) and Kageo (guitar), have been one of the most compelling groups in the Japanese underground. Their long, languorous songs are devastating in their simplicity, as though the gently sung ballads of the Velvet Underground’s third album were re-scored by the legendary Japanese free-rock gang, Les Rallizes Denudes. Their new album, 風は春、空は虹、愛は波間に隠れている (The wind is spring. There is a rainbow in the sky. Love is hiding in the waves.), documents a live performance from May 2021, at Silver Elephant, where the duo are joined by Matsuedo Hideo on bass, and Mark Anderson (Greymouth, Mysteries Of Love) on drums.
The duo of Pirako Kurenai and Kageo have come a long way since their early performances and self-released CD-Rs – in the intervening decades, they’ve released albums on P.S.F., Holy Mountain, Important, Archive, 8mm and Essence, amongst others, each album another manifestation of the duo’s ever-changing same. You can hear them patiently toiling over these beauteous songs, with their choral melodies and lush waves of tonology, Kageo’s guitar radiating bejewelled chimes and dense passages of texture, pulling the songs into a black hole of quietude and sadness. And as Kurenai once told journalist Phil Kaberry, “Suishou No Fune’s songs, sounds and words are often born from heartrending feelings like sadness and pain”.
The wind is spring. There is a rainbow in the sky. Love is hiding in the waves begins with the deep blues of “Cherry”, a drawn-out drift-song that pivots on a most elegant two-chord mantra, as Kurenai sings, siren-like, amidst the sheets of noise Kageo peels from six strings. There’s something painterly about the duo’s playing here, and indeed, Kageo was a painter and Kurenai was a doll maker and watercolour painter when they met in the late ‘90s. On the flip side, a spare, spaced-out improvisation, “A Rainbow Is Floating”, acts as a prelude to “Endless Descent”, one of Suishou No Fune’s most remarkable songs, where a mesmeric guitar line endlessly coils and twines around the flicker and toll of Kurenai’s hypnotic one-chord strum. It’s a bruised, quietly desperate ending to an album that has an acroamatic air, as though the songs were transmitting to a cabal of lost spirits.
Tracklist
A 鳥のように飛んで
Flying like a bird
B1 虹が浮かんでいる
A rainbow is floating
B2 虹が浮かんでいる
A rainbow is floating[Endless Descent]
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