Suigin-Lamp – Flamenco Party [CS]

"The name means "mercury lamp" - 水銀ランプ - and the industrial implications are entirely intentional. Suigin-Lamp was a trio: Kumiko Yamamoto on bass and sampler, Kazuhide Kawata on guitar, vocals, and sampler, and Kosei Yatani on violin and guitar. Flamenco Party, their only recording, was captured live at Shinjuku Ongakukan in April 1991 and released on Vanilla Records the same year - six tracks on a single-sided C62 cassette, numbered in the label's characteristic manner.

The title's deliberate misdirection - flamenco, party - is a gesture entirely typical of the Vanilla Records milieu, where titles and genre labels existed less to describe than to disorient. What Suigin-Lamp actually produced was something closer to the industrial-inflected end of the Japanese experimental underground: sampler and electronics meeting violin and guitar in a space where the conventional boundaries between improvisation, noise, and composed structure were treated as permeable, provisional, worth testing. A deeply obscure project, a single document, and a cassette that rewards the committed listener with evidence of something genuinely strange."

Vanilla Records, 1991