Holy Grails Of Bizzarro

Yamasuki: Yama Yama, Kono Samurai, Yamasuki, Yokomo and Aieda
Taken from the album Le Monde Fabuleux des Yamasuki on Biram (1970)

This post stands as a warning to the fledgeling record head, a couple hundred LP’s into the game and feeling pretty good about himself and his collection of sample-heavy CTI dollar-bin’ers and lesser known funk-rock gems on Westbound and Cotillion… You don’t know how far the rabbit hole goes.

Hear me loud and clear on this one, friends: THE DEEPER YOU GET, THE DEEPER THE MUSIC GETS. There is more ill music out there than you and I can wrap our sorry little heads around and we’re suckers to think otherwise.

I’ll put it another way… the more stones you turn, the rockier the underbelly. Take for example

Yamasuki!

I have very little doubt that 90-some percent of the non-Japanese, non-LSD-loving populace that might lay ears on this record would be entirely perplexed by it. Even hate it. “What,” they might ask, “Could have possessed somebody to combine twangy Morricone-esque guitars with Axelrod beats and Far Eastern choral arrangements?” And they would be right to ask the question.

But the answer, simply, for now and for always, is Yamasuki. Yamasuki. Yamasuki.

I will further endorse this record by saying that the five tracks posted here could have been arbitrarily selected. The whole album is start to finish sonic mayhem that gets better with each go-round. Not for the weak of heart, to be sure, but a record of such originality and–dare I say–grace, that if the first hundred listens don’t make sense, you’d better hope that the hundred-and-first does because Yamasuki is like that patronizing dog in Duck Hunt: they always get the last laugh.

You’re either with ’em or against ’em, friends… You know where I stand.