Binding together ambient, abstract punk, music concréte and purist songwriting into a single unified artform, Fossil Cocoon: The Music of K. Yoshimatsu will be released on 16th August via Phantom Limb.
This is the first time this material has been unearthed. In a new career retrospective the album pays particular attention to the cult Japanese outsider musician’s 80s material.
Pre-order here.
K. (Koshiro) Yoshimatsu was born in 1960 in Yamaguchi City in the Chugoku region of southern Japan. In 1978, then a student and already deeply engaged in the local arts scene, in the classified ads of communications magazine PUMP he chanced upon the creative work and curatorial interests of T. (Tadashi) Kamada, at the time a medical student in a nearby town. It was there the cult industrial and avant-garde label DD. Records was born.
Over a furiously prolific period from 1980 to 1985, K. Yoshimatsu composed, recorded and released some forty albums in the span of a few years. These records primarily appeared under his own name, some required aliases, and others saw him compose, arrange, and produce for friends and peers in his creative circle. All of them, however, surfaced on DD. Records, an astonishingly exhaustive catalogue once described as ”the most amazing DIY effort ever undertaken to document an alternative music scene”.
Led by close Yoshimatsu associate T. Kamada, DD. Records released exactly 222 cassettes of addictively weird Japanese outsider music over five years, each with typewritten liner notes and enigmatically constructed Xerox artwork of found materials. The cassettes remain the stuff of collectors’ dreams, fetching high prices on the rare occasions they surface in record stores or private sales. However, a keen archivist, Koshiro Yoshimatsu’s master recordings remained in his possession (a not unreasonable outcome given that his work was all self-recorded in his home) and meticulously filed, ready for rediscovery.
Over the breadth of Yoshimatsu’s work – solo, ensemble, and in composition for labelmates – we see a remarkable generosity of musical talent. Some records, such as those produced for Fumie Yasamura, represented here in Violet and Escape, are formed of hazy, gliding 4-track pop songs coursing with hallucinogenic electricity. Others, such as 1982’s Poplar (and its namesake track on this collection), combine bucolic nylon-string guitar rambles, vibrantly coloured with sequenced MIDI arpeggiation and the dulcet bloops of early computer programming.
Deeper still, Pastel Nostalgia, from the 1983 album of the same name, marries childlike piano with a wailing siren tone and dripping tap percussion. It is significantly creepier, more acerbic and disembodying than the ambient or New Age music of the era, despite a similarity in raw materials.
Koshiro himself was an invaluable lighthouse throughout the curation process, a guide through the depths and annals of his recording career, now forty years hence, shining light onto forgotten music rescued from home-recorded tapes. The result may be an expressly varied album, but it is held magically together by Yoshimatsu’s profoundly singular creative alchemy.
K. Yoshimatsu’s substantial catalogue now happily sits in a neat collection as Fossil Cocoon, compressing his enormous abilities into single moments.
Taken from the album, listen to Violet below:
Fossil Cocoon: The Music of K. Yoshimatsu tracklisting:
1. Violet
2. Jerusalem
3. 1841
4. Escape
5. Pastel Nostalgia
6. Poplar
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