An'archives

Onna : Onna last live 1983

Double LP ltd to 300, black vinyls, 3 color (Silver, dark blue and black) silkscreened jacket with obi (dark blue, paver red or tan), inserts with Miyanishi Keizo notes in French, English and Japanese, lyrics in Japanese and English and a postcard

Label : An’archives

Réf : [An’56]

May 1st, 2026

Printed by Alan Sherry

Onna Last Live 1983 includes the final performance by the original line-up of Onna, the psych-rock project of revered Japanese manga artist, Keizo Miyanishi. Onna’s legend has largely rested, until now, on one self-released and self-titled seven-inch from 1983. Reissued by Holy Mountain in 2009, its rediscovery, along with several archival live and studio sets that leaked out across the 2000s, signalled to a wider audience the power of Miyanishi’s strikingly hypnotic songwriting. With Onna Last Live 1983, though, we hear the group’s perfect line-up performing at its peak.

While Miyanishi was the core member and conceptualist of Onna, the other members of the group would also go on to make significant contributions to the Japanese underground. Guitarist Michio Kurihara would eventually be known for his membership of YBO2, Ghost and White Heaven, and collaborations with the likes of Boris and Damon & Naomi. Drummer Ken Matsutani formed Marble Sheep & The Run-Down Sun’s Children and The Mickey Guitar Band, while also running the Captain Trip label. Joined by the late bass player Yasui Yutaka, to whom the album is dedicated, this quartet only performed live in 1983; the live set here was recorded at Silver Elephant.

It’s a different line-up to the Onna duo that’s documented on their single. After Miyanishi and fellow manga artist Mafuyu Hiroki recorded that material, Miyanishi decided he wanted to start playing gigs; Hiroki left, and Kurihara, Matsutani and Yutaka joined soon after. This line-up allowed Miyanishi to significantly expand Onna’s powers, leading to a sound that Kurihara once described to Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine as “repetitive and heavy, yet quite orthodox.”

The songs here are simple yet deeply effective in their repetitive power, generally revolving around two or three simply strummed chords for guitar. Bass and drums repeatedly lock into mantra-like grooves as Kurihara’s guitar scales the walls, with Miyanishi’s consumptive moans and sighs sent torquing through FX. The cumulative effect of the seven songs here is very heavy indeed; if the prologue “Always…” drifts beautifully through five minutes of placid, beseeching melancholy, the epilogue, “Never Seen A Light Like This”, spirals out into sixteen minutes of glazed-over psych-rock, completely monomaniacal and thrilling in its slow-motion tumult.

Throughout, you can hear Miyanishi and co. reaching for something ineffable, something beyond and between the notes. It’s a phenomenal performance; it’s also no surprise that the group disintegrated after this show, given its intensity. Matsutani and Yutaka left after the Silver Elephant show, with Miyanishi and Kurihara continuing through the first half of 1984 firstly as a duo, and then a trio with new drummer Yoshiki Ueonyama. Kurihara left soon after. But Onna Last Live 1983 is proof plenty of the powers of the original Onna quartet, sending their Rallizes/Velvets dream-mantras off into darkened, stormy skies.

42€

Delphine Dora & Ayami Suzuki LP Kagome Kagome – An’archives

LP ltd to 300, black vinyl, 3 color silkscreened jacket with obi (black dark & blue)

Printed by Alan Sherry

[An’54] Release date : October 10th, 2025

Digital on Ayami Suzuki Bandcamp : https://ayamisuzuki.bandcamp.com/

You can stream one track here : https://soundcloud.com/user-250085008/loiseau-dans-la-cage-taken-from-kagome-kagome-album-on-anarchives

An’archives is proud to present Kagome Kagome, the first collaboration between France’s Delphine Dora and Japan’s Ayami Suzuki. Curious listeners might know Dora from the string of lovely, idiosyncratic albums she’s released over the past two decades, most recently for labels like Modern Love, Morc and Recital; she’s also worked with the likes of Michel Henritzi and Sophie Cooper. Suzuki’s performances, predominantly for voice, place her within a tradition of Japanese improvised music – see the music she’s made with artists such as Takashi Masubuchi, TOMO and Leo Okagawa – but her approach also takes in folk song, ambience and claustrophobic drone.

On Kagome Kagome, Dora and Suzuki play to their many strengths: a gentle, free-willed folksiness; long, aerated drone constructs; ghostly, time-warping explorations for voice. They met on Dora’s May 2024 tour of Japan, though they’d been in touch beforehand, with Dora proposing the collaboration to Suzuki, developed around “concepts of ‘otherworldliness’ and ‘impermanence’,” the latter says, “and explored the relationship between ‘the invisible’ and sound in Japanese culture – a common interest we share.”

They recorded across several days that month, with the sessions for Kagome Kagome taking place in Kanumi, in Tochigi prefecture, at a space named Center. “I was particularly looking forward to seeing Delphine encounter the vintage 104-year-old harmonium from Nippon Gakki Seizo Co. that had just been repaired at Center,” Suzuki recalls. “It was as if the harmonium had been waiting for Delphine to draw sound from it. I felt it was a beautiful relationship where they could guide each other.”

Indeed, there’s something channelled about the music that Dora and Suzuki made together in the session that constitutes Kagome Kagome. Dora’s harmonium might be the spine of the album, but Suzuki’s free-floating voice, and gaseous, muddied banks of electronics, wrap around the wheezing, ancient tonality of the harmonium beautifully – they, too, sound as though they were just waiting to be willed out of the daytime air. Their voices nestle together beautifully – “when we sang together in a tunnel,” Suzuki says, “there were times when we sang the exact same melody without planning. It happened so naturally that the boundaries between us became blurred.”

And that title? It’s drawn from a Japanese children’s song, and the song titles themselves constitute the song’s lyrics, in alternating Japanese (Romanized) and French language. Urban legend connects the song “Kagome Kagome” to the Nikko Toshogu Shrine, nearby Center, that Suzuki and Dora visited while they were in Kanumi. “The mysterious lyrics of ‘Kagome Kagome’ and its puzzle-like connection to Nikko Toshogu were a perfect fit for this mysterious album,” Suzuki reflects, “which I think has its own kind of puzzle-like elements.”

A deep album of prayer and magic, of divination and ritual, Kagome Kagome’s sense of serious play, its rich beauty, feels somehow dislocated from our time. If you’ve ever enjoyed the music of Nico, Kendra Smith, Charalambides, or other channelers of ghostly mystery, its eerie otherness will, somehow, feel oddly familiar.

26€

Jyuriaano LP Dreaming Glass

release date : June 20th, 2025

LP ltd to 300, black vinyl, 3 color (gold, purple & black) silkscreened jacket with obi (black, red or salmon), inserts and a postcard, liner notes by Jon Dale, printed by Alan Sherry

DL available on Bandcamp

Contact – wholesale : anarchives@sfr.fr – anarchiveslabel@gmail.com – clerouley@free.fr

Shop in Paris & distribution in France : Souffle Continu

Distribution in UK : World Of Echo

US : Worldgonemad

Home | WORLD GONE MAD DISTRO (bigcartel.com)

An’archives are thrilled to present the debut album by Tokyo avant-pop duo Jyuriaano, Dreaming Glass.

Consisting of Morimoto Ariomi and Cobalt, the two members of Jyuriaano have long histories in Japanese underground music. Morimoto’s history traces back to the late nineties; his nascent interests in noise collage and solo acoustic performance slowly transmuted to group endeavours, and more recently he’s performed with the likes of Akiko Toshimitsu (Usurabi), Maki Miura (Shizuka) and Doronco (Los Doroncos).

Cobalt has released a string of excellent singer-songwriter albums, many on his Poet Portraits label, which has also released material by the likes of Kazumi Nikaido, Place Called Space, Cuthberts, and moools, the latter of which he also performs with on occasion. While Morimoto and Cobalt have known each other for decades, they decided to form Jyuriaano in 2016, and since then have performed at live houses and small bars in Japan, all while slowly working together on their gentle, spirited songs.

The group’s formation story is typically playful – “It all started when we brought an acoustic guitar into the car on a rainy afternoon and started writing songs while eating Japanese sweets,” Cobalt recalls. That sense of play is important to the songs on Dreaming Glass, which vary wildly, from bright, infectious pop songs with a sixties lilt (“Dreaming Baby”, “How Close”), through slinky jazz-pop numbers (“Drawing A Nude”) to melancholy folk laments (“Erica”, “Night Window”). There’s something in Jyuriaano’s collaborative dynamic that gifts Morimoto and Cobalt a particularly open field, when it comes to their creative endeavours.

Some of this might also be down to their listening habits. When asked about their interest in Japanese folk precursors, legendary groups like Folk Crusaders and Itsutsu-no-Akai-Fusen, Cobalt agrees that they have a place in the duo’s listening pantheon, but that’s not where the story ends. “We’ve also listened to commercial folk music outside of those core genres,” he reflects, “We don’t just listen to one genre, but [also] rock and roll, noise industrial, punk, new wave, jazz, chanson, and more.”

You might also hear touches of groups like the forementioned Usurabi, or Maher Shalal Hash Baz, or songwriters like Kazumi Nikaido and Shintaro Sakamoto. But Jyuriaano’s songs, somehow, feel quite sui generis in the way they magic up alternative visions for pop’s possibilities. Dreaming Glass is, quite simply, a lovely, unpretentious joy of an album.

25€

Tête de Chou LP Tête de Chou (Mark Anderson – Kurumi kido – Arlo Wynks)

LP ltd to 300, black vinyl, 3 colors (greys, silver) silkscreened jacket (chipboard/brown) with obi (Tan or dark brow), insert and a postcard

Réf : [An’50]

Printed by Alan Sherry

Release date : April 4th, 2025

Contact – wholesale : anarchives@sfr.fr – anarchiveslabel@gmail.com – clerouley@free.fr

Shop in Paris & distribution in France : Souffle Continu

US : Worldgonemad

Home | WORLD GONE MAD DISTRO (bigcartel.com)

An’archives are proud to announce the release of the debut album by Tête de Chou, the trio of Mark Anderson, Kurumi Kido, and Arlo Wynks. Some may know Anderson for his membership of Greymouth, 番長Taste, Mysteries Of Love, and Suishou No Fune; Kido and Wynks have more personal musical histories, which informs the intimacy and gently exploratory nature of the eight pieces contained here.

The trio’s movements seem spontaneous and open-ended, which makes sense when you consider the organic way they came together, from drinking at their local yakitori joint, to Anderson and Wynks “mucking around as a duo in the studio on a semi-regular basis,” the former recalls. Kido then joined to form Tête de Chou. She was learning ichigenkin and shō, and when Anderson and Kido organised some small-scale shows in their tatami room, "extending that to us [three] making a bit of a freeform racket wasn’t a stretch,” says Anderson.The album itself was predominantly built from material drawn from two recording sessions, one each in Japan and New Zealand. These tracks were further augmented by several long-distance collaborations. Anderson reflects that, as Wynks was on the road, the album “almost ended up a bit of a travel diary for him.”Wynks recalls the exchange flowed both ways: “Mark and Kurumi sent me recordings that I added things to and/or added to pre-existing things to create a few more tracks.”That might explain the mobile terrain covered by the album. It’s an album of snapshots, at once vivid in their performance, and obscure in their methodology.Organ drones tussle with field recordings; thin streams of noise rub up against clanking metallics; whispering, wistful reeds drift alongside warping strings and a tickling glockenspiel. There’s a fair breadth to the instrumentation here: in addition to what’s already mentioned, you can add microphone, mini-amp, dulcimer, guitar,shehnai, violin, and ‘two-stringed goatophone’.Placed together, the eight pieces here form an elliptical narrative that’s far from easy to pin down, but infinitely pleasurable to listen to, a kind of home-built, humble electro-acoustic pastorale, and an impressive, unexpected first shot across the bow.

25€

Release date : Oct 4th, 2024

Usurabi LP Chita

LP ltd to 415, black vinyl, 2 color (blue and black) silkscreened jacket with obi (black or light grey), 2 inserts and a postcard
Réf : [An’48]
Printed by Alan Sherry 
Photos by Akiyama Noriko 
Chita, the third album proper by Japanese guitar pop trio Usurabi, is their most elegant, stylish confection yet. Over the past four years, Toshimitsu Akiko (vocals, guitar), Kawaguchi Masami (bass) and Morohashi Shigeki (drums) have been recording, playing live, and releasing songs of rare melodic warmth, centring Toshimitsu’s unique musical vision, where melancholy and joy can co-exist, a split-second flick of her wrist switchblading the guitar from languorous sweetness to overloaded rock action.

Chita expands on the smartly sculpted pop and rock songs found on their previous albums, Remains Of The Light (2021) and Outside Of The World (2023), while infusing the music with more of the rough-housing energy that also coursed through the live CD, Once In A Red Room, they self-released in January 2024. There’s still a through-line, of course, that connects the music here to Toshimitsu’s earlier groups, Doodles and Animone, ,but Chita feels more deeply like a sussed, sharp take on the crumbling edges of sixties psychedelic folk and rock: the harmonica that blasts through the opener, “Bansho”, is pure Dylan in effect.

One of the many smart things about Usurabi, though, is that they never feel beholden to the historical moment. Soon after “Bansho”, we encounter “TurnOff”, a lush pop song that turns on a dime, with Toshimitsu tearing fuzztone notes from six strings that are like a more folk-reverent Kaneko Jutok. And there’s something about the guitar and bass riff that doubles through the thrilling two-and-a-half minutes of “Hakanonaka” that’s a dead ringer for the Only Ones. Flip the record, and things get more expansive, the spindly jangling of the title song spiralling ever inwards, before the sweet, sugary rush of “Kanata” resolves to the martial rhythms that pulse through “Aseranai”, winding the album down to its poetic, becalmed resolution.

Distribution in UK : This Ain’t Distribution / Japan Blues

Shop in Paris & distribution in France : Souffle Continu 

US : Worldgonemad

25€