This Week's Forced Exposure Wish List

VA: Songs For Nao - 14 Bands From Japan CD (CHAPTER 046CD) 17.00
"Songs for Nao (pronounced 'now') is a compilation featuring many incredible Japanese artists... Most work in a rarefied world of wide-eyed, folky psych-pop. Songs For Nao includes new tracks by Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Nagisa Ni Te, Tenniscoats, Kazumi Nikaidoh, Yumbo, Andersens, My Pal Foot Foot, Pervenche and more. Songs For Nao is a taste of an incredible music scene. Isolated from the music industry at large, these artists create genuinely inspired music, fresh even to the ears of the most conditioned music-geek. The release is accompanied by a full colour, 16-page booklet featuring extensive liner notes on each band, and beautiful photos by Eigo Shimojo."



PRIMITIVE CALCULATORS: Primitive Calculators CD (CHAPTER 047CD) 17.00
"Melbournes Primitive Calculators met as teenagers in the early 70s, growing up in the grim outer suburb of Springvale. An older friend who lived in a bungalow behind his parents house provided an oasis of culture, and there they were introduced to music of a kind rarely heard in their neighbourhood. The Velvet Underground and The MC5 were obvious heroes, but they were also inspired by lesser known bands like The Fugs, The 13th Floor Elevators, and The Godz (they went on to dedicate their album to Godz singer Jim McCarthy) as well as the writing of obsessive rock journalist Lester Bangs. Their own debut single was also released in 1978, featuring the songs 'I Cant Stop It' and 'Do That Dance'. Pressed with plain black labels and stark monochrome sleeve, the single introduced many to the impassioned, atonal, electronic chaos that was the Primitive Calculators trademark, and it has gone on to become a highly collectable classic of Australian post-punk. The following year the band attempted to relocate to London, but seeing how difficult life was for fellow expats the Birthday Party and Whirlywirld, they decided instead to take an indefinite break. A 1979 live recording of a gig supporting The Boys Next Door turned out to be the Primitive Calculators swansong. Released by friend and supporter Alan Bamford in the early 1980s, Primitive Calculators is a crucial document of a band whose originality, power and humorously belligerent Australian mindset has never since been duplicated. Chapter Music's reissue of the Primitive Calculators album, twenty-five years after its original release, includes six bonus tracks plus a rarely seen video."



MY CAT IS AN ALIEN: When the Windmill's Whirl Dies LP (ECLIP MCIAA2) 15.00
"The new work by the space-brothers Maurizio and Roberto Opalio, alias My Cat Is An Alien. Both the words, recited and shaped by Roberto from his own homonymous poem that suggested the title of the album, and the oblique minimalism of the complex musical texture made of flowing space sounds, represent the abstract neo-expressionistic substratum of the whole corpus of the work. Moving throughout a nebula of space dust and debris, the starting spoken-word vocals alongside the percussive section sound as powerfully impressive as the violent imagery of trees beaten down by the storm, while the whispered silence of 'Perspective of Time' and 'Fallin'', on side two, discloses the emotional and existential universe of an isolated broken soul, lost in a world of inanity. This is the center of the No-thing Universe, where each single word or sound assumes the aspect of a sort of pagan prayer that speaks the language of astral folk-blues. In this context, MCIAA's outer space becomes a re-found uterus, meant to be the form of a new self-biogenesis. At the same time, space is conceived as symbol of the eternal theatre surrounding the mysterious cycle of life & death; such infinite space, despite such limited time. This cosmic-chant of the new millennium may heat our nights like a flame left to enlighten the shadows of the coldest darkness." Edition of 600 copies.