Various – 地雷を踏んだらサヨウナラ (Jirai wo Fundara Sayounara) [CS]

"Jirai Wo Fundara Sayounara - translating, with characteristic Japanoise black humor, as something close to "Goodbye if you step on a landmine" - is one of the essential compilation documents from the Vanilla Records catalog, gathering the label's core artists into a single tape and offering a compressed portrait of the underground it had quietly built since 1985.

To understand the Vanilla Records compilations is to understand how Japanoise was both made and distributed. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the internet and before any significant commercial attention, this music traveled almost entirely through cassette trades, tiny independent releases, and carefully maintained international networks - Ron Lessard's RRRecords in Boston, German noise labels, Belgian and Dutch mail order operations. A Vanilla compilation was not merely a sampler but an argument: here is a scene, here is what it sounds like, here is why it matters. The artists collected here were working without studios, without budgets, and without audiences larger than a few hundred people worldwide. What they were building, without knowing it, was the infrastructure for everything that would follow."

Vanilla Records, 1995