ni-hao! – No Respect – 28th March 2016

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Cat #: 182TZM

RED ARIKO (drumR, sampler)
BLUE YUKARI (drumL)
SILVER JAZMIN (guitar)
GOLD JENNIFER (bass)

Omochi Records OMC-012

All songs made by ni-hao! except tracks 1 & 12 by Soakubeats (guest vocal Onnen on track 12)
track 8 by wanna “NERVS” (guest vocal, too!)
Produced by Jun Taniguchi and ni-hao!
Recorded and Mixed by Kenichi Matsumoto
Mastering by Kenji Abe (AIM MASTERING)
Art designed by Takahisa Sano
Spuervised by Shinnosuke Mochizuki and Hakuto Asami

Special Thanks:
Ohara, Shinji Ouchi, Anthony, Yasunori Monden, Nagatomo family, Soori, Hirofumi Horikawa, Aoi Swimming, Ito, Wac, Miko and Tomonari

USSSY – usssy – 3rd March 2016

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Cat #: 181TZM

Compilation celebrating the amazing work of uSSSy!

1. c.a.m.s.
2. holyshit
taken from ‘usssy’
usssy.bandcamp.com/album/usssy

3. cock-fight
4. polarity reversal
taken from ‘oko’
usssy.bandcamp.com/album/oko

5. tamers of hucksters
6. yagibiha
taken from ‘ud’
usssy.bandcamp.com/album/ud

7. kiitos theme
taken from ‘live at substancia’
usssy.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-substancia

8. tab – al-liga’
9. sanare ali
taken from ‘karpet birch’
usssy.bandcamp.com/album/karpet-birch

10. krestyane
11. booty dance
taken from ‘afghan music house party’
usssy.bandcamp.com/album/afghan-music-house-party

12. perkele
13. rave
taken from ‘unsharp mask’
usssy.bandcamp.com/album/unsharp-mask

Yes, you can get the full albums at the links provided – just remember, you discovered them first at tenzenmen! 

Gravitsapa – Radio Free Vulgata – 10th January 2016

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Cat #: 179TZM

Gravitsapa are the pioneers of the Ukrainian math-rock stage, performing among the most brightful experimental sounds.

The band has taken its name from the Soviet cult film Kin-Dza-Dza! – depicting a post-apocalyptic anti-Utopia. The major theme of the band’s work can be described in three words: mysticism, sci-fi and absurdness.

Loyalty to a one style is not an attitude to music for Gravitsapa. One successful experiment performed in a track is not to be repeated in the other seems to be the band’s motto. Only eternal escape from the cliche, emission of otherworldly atmosphere and attempts to create music as a tool to enter a trance.

At this stage the band is moving towards Shostakovich-rock and neo-neoshamanism.

This album collects their ‘Radio Free Taxipod’ and ‘Vulgata’ EPs.

– Sasha Jabovsky (Jabo) – guitar (also play in Drunk Diver sludge/grind band drunkdiver.bandcamp.com)
– Goatooth – guitar (also play in Nonsun drone/doom project nonsun.bandcamp.com)
– Vitalik – drums (ex Na Zlami Dnia)
– Adams – bass

– influences:
Jim Black, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky, Georgy Sviridov, Robert Fripp, Tetragrammaton, Cybertron, Nietzsche, Blavatsky, John Cage, Bela Tarr

Astolfo Sulla Luna – Ψ² – 1st January 2016

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Cat #: 178TZM

Astolfo Sulla Luna is an Italian trio with a natural inclination to researching combinations between literature and mathematics. The approach to composition is similar to classical music, but taking sounds and attitude from the underground scene, from noise to post hardcore, from math rock to jazz core.

After two EPs, Moti Browniani (2011) and Cancroregina (2012), they released their first LP on November 2015, Ψ², a work filled with noises, sounds of the sea and clock’s tickings, chess games and battles against one’s self.

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes – A Million Farewells – 13th November 2015

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Cat #: 177TZM

When Xiao Zhong and Sharon Cee-Q found themselves in a room together for the very first time, they agreed on a guiding philosophy: “Let’s not make anything that’s going to last. If we’re together for just two shows, then that’s what it is.” Thus was born Tom Cruise And Katie Holmes. Since then, they’ve most certainly deviated some, but not much, really.

Over the course of a year and a half, the Shanghai-based musos who’d been involved (non collectively) in such lauded mainland acts as Pairs and Hua Jia Hu Wei, released their debut 7” here on Genjing, added journeyman bassist Sam Walsh and drummer Daniel Nagles to their lineup and have proceeded to lay down one of contemporary indie rock’s most exhilarating jam sessions gone right – a concise full-length chock-full of woolly, dreamy, delicate, white-knuckled shoegaze imbued modern hymns.

This autumn marks the official arrival of A Million Farewells, the band’s first long-player for Genjing Records. It is a miraculously dissonant, wonderfully immediate display of Tom & Kate at their mightiest; alive with the same wild chemistry and sense of possibility that made their first recordings so vital. With more time together than they’d ever had before (which wasn’t much), the band had found themselves confronted with ideal, yet quasi-foreign conditions. And they wouldn’t have had it any other way. Two-minute freakouts like “My Life is Over” share airspace with the meditative squall of “Sam’s Knife” and the guitar-born majesty of the title track. One can’t but notice the band’s intentionally one-off brand of being exactly who they are in a pop context; everything presumably captured in (something like) three takes or less in a bleak, quasi-nondescript studio someplace deep within the damp, scabulous scrawl of modern Shanghai.

“It’s a simple thing,” Xiao Zhang says of their approach. “Simple takes the worry out of it. But we’ve grown up and been through some shit in China. To get to this point you have to bust through a few walls. It’s easy to be new, and I think, in the end, this is what it is.”

When you put the aforementioned foursome in a room, it’s Tom Cruise And Katie Holmes.

And A Million Farewells truly is what it is – quite something: a classic quasi-Sinophilic full length if there ever was one. 

Chui Wan – 30th August 2015

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Cat #: 176TZM

Three years after releasing their debut album, White Night, Chui Wan brings their sophomore, self-titled album into the world.

Over the last few years, Chui Wan has progressed with a new drummer, Li Zichao, while its core members — bassist Wu Qiong, guitarist Liu Xinyu, and vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Yan Yulong — have striven to perfect their musical ideas. On Chui Wan, the focus is less on the unbridled, reverb-drenched inflections of White Night, drawing more from the band’s wide palette of influences, including Sufi music, Southeast Asian folk tunes, and 20th-century avant grade composition. With confident, driving rhythm, they aim to embody a pop-influenced idiom of rock music, creating their own musical language in the process. Beyond the infectious melodic hooks on Chui Wan lies a near-constant fluctuation of beat and tempo, a deliberate maneuver calculated to create a simultaneous sense of fluidity and disjuncture.

Compared with White Night, Chui Wan’s sophomore album is structurally more complicated, yet simpler and more direct in its studio approach. It eschews White Night’s complex, repeated overdubs and adds more intricate lyrical work, which reflects the dynamic of calm and tension that stands out in Chui Wan’s live performances.

Chui Wan’s guest musicians also contribute significantly to the album’s distinct temperament. You can hear the trademark noise guitar wails of psychedelic free improv master Li Jianhong on the album’s closing track, “Beijing Is Sinking”. The album also contains a hidden gift: a remix of the second track, “Estivation”, by Dead J, one of Beijing’s most established and progressive electronic music producers. Dead J’s “Estivation” remix is a minimal, ambient, rhythmically more angular take on the original.

It is also worth mentioning that Chui Wan bassist Wu Qiong lends her vocal abilities to “On the Other Ocean” and “Silence”. Her voice adds rich choral accents to the album, a long-player already brazen in its Baroque sonic ornamentations.

Chui Wan was recorded and produced by Yang Fan. 

All songs written by Chui Wan, recorded in Beijing, in the winter of 2014.

Yan Yulong: vocals / guitar / violin / organ
Liu Xinyu: guitar / percussions
Wu Qiong: vocals / bass
Li Zichao: drums / celesta

Yang Fan / Li Qing: background vocals, “Only”
Li Jianhong: guitar, “Beijing is Sinking ”
Dead J: remix, “Estivation”

Recorded/mixed/produced by Yang Fan at Fan Fu Studios.
Mastered by Garrett Haines at Treelady Studios.
Cover art: Lv Junlin
Design: Ruan Qianrui

Chui Wan thanks everyone mentioned above, as well as: Josh Feola, Kai, CC Wang, Deng Chenglong, Liu Lu, Cao Lingfeng, Snapline, Yan Jun, Zhu Wenbo, Zhao Cong, Lu Wei, Li Ping, He Fan and Zhang Mengyao.

I’m too uncool – 12th August 2015

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Facebook post:

When I were a lad….as in my profile picture…my best friends were a mod, a new romantic, a greebo (look it up), a skinhead and various other motley crews…we loved each other and hated each other’s musical interests. The first Specials album, the first Jam albums, the first Crass albums, the first Iron Maiden albums, the first Slits, first Cardiacs etcetc – they were “punk rock to me, Mr Narrator”. I sincerely hope that every generation since feels the same whether it is Less Than Jake, Skrillex, Blink 182 or something I’m too uncool to be in the loop for.