There has been no shortage of compilations documenting the work of presumably forgotten Japanese bedroom musicians, in fact you could say that those have become their own genre by now. Lately however, it feels like all possibilities have been thoroughly exploited and that labels are desperately banging out documents of some guy in Tokyo farting in the vicinity of a recording device as long as that happened some time around 1975 and 1989. »Fossil Cocoon: The Music of K. Yoshimatsu« is different, if only because it is not presented by Phantom Limb as some kind of holy grail—even though its release is nothing short of an absolute sensation.
The work of Yoshimatsu has been anthologised before when Bitter Lake released a compilation of pieces he put out under the Juma moniker in 2019, but his vast discography from the early 1980s—we’re talking about roughly 25 albums under different aliases—has never been fully made available for the general public. In fact, if it weren’t for one or two die-hard collectors, his ultra rare releases wouldn’t even be listed on Discogs. Putting together a compilation of only six tracks cannot adequately rectify this, but hopefully »Fossil Cocoon« marks only the starting point of a re-evaluation of Yoshimatsu’s own music as well as the 222 (!) records he helped put out together Tadashi Kamada through their DD. Records label, next to Vanity and Pinakotheca one of the most prolific early indies in Japan.
The stylistic variety of these tracks, two of which were recorded together with vocalist Fumie Yasamura, is simply stunning. There’s the one which sounds like it had been the blueprint for Frankie Knuckles’ »Your Love,« the one that seems to reinterpret »Music for Airports« in uncanny ways, the one that sets thundering industrial percussion against soothing new age synthesizers and of course the tune that sounds like a Porter Ricks track circa »Biokinetics« more than a decade before the release of that album. There’s moments of heart-achy pop, sleek punk-ish wave music, collage-like experiments, surfy krautrock à la Manuel Göttsching, and then some—often within the same piece of music.
Representing only a tiny fraction of Yoshimatsu’s body of work, »Fossil Cocoon« is of course too short. That doesn’t make it more essential: It hopefully serves as a door opener for many into the world of this enigmatic musician, who besides producing the odd album for others is today focussed on his work in the film industry, before his visionary work is being made more comprehensively available for a broader public. In a sea of unnecessary reissue compilations, this one stands out as absolutely fresh and exciting.
