Zyklon B. Zombies – Skull [CS]

"Floating around the sub-underground for years, rarely surfacing, rarely seen. Skull by Zyklon B. Zombies is one of those cassettes that circulated mostly as rumor - a ghost tape, a name that appeared on want lists - until Minimum Table Stacks finally pressed it to vinyl in 2023, giving a wider public its first proper encounter with what had been locked inside. This is the original 1993 Vanilla Records cassette.

Zyklon B. Zombies was the project of Hirohito Taneguchi - known as Seed Mouth, and now sadly deceased - and the equally legendary Junko Hiroshige of Hijokaidan and Genbakukaidan, with 1104 on guitar and vocals, オーマチ on guitar and bass, and タネ on violin, synthesizer, and voice. Recorded entirely at Seed Mouth Studio, with artwork by Kouji Ochiai. Twelve tracks across a single side.

The sound sits at an angle to the standard Japanoise constellation - blurred, clamorous, driven partly by organic impulse and partly by something harder to name. It can move without warning from cascading guitar chaos to an eerie, drifting strangeness; post-punk structure and noise obliteration occupying the same body, neither quite winning. Tom Lax of Siltbreeze described it as a blue-blooded artifact of disparate vision, and the description holds. A genuine rarity from the inner circle of the Vanilla catalog."

Vanilla Records, 1993