Victor Japan Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Soil & Pimp Sessions is a Japanese jazz band with an explosive sound. Made up of five musicians Shacho, Tabu Zombie, Josei on piano, Akita Goldman on bass and Midorin on drums, they are primarily an expressive live outfit who serve up rough and ready sounds that fire your every single synapse. They have been playing for 20 years now but their breakout album Pimp Master came in 2006 and saw them go on to play at Glastonbury the year after. This latest record is another exceptional one that goes from intense and complex highs to beautiful tender and vulnerable moments of calm.

Review: Re-rendered in a stunning full-length form, the groundbreaking soundtrack to the 1988 anime film Akira is here remixed in full by individual members of Geinoh Yamashirogumi, the elusive Japanese music collective behind the original Akira OST. Founded in 1974 by musician and agricultural scientist Tsutomu Ohashi, Geinoh Yamashirogumi still to this day adhere to a loose ecology, comprising hundreds of people with different occupations. Recreating folk music along modern dance musical and electronic lines - terraformed folktronica, if you will - the original Akira soundtrack was innovative, drawing on such Japanese folk musics as gamelan and noh while merging them into. Spawning many later remixes across electronica and dance music, this fresh remix record is fully overseen by director Katsuhiro Otomo and tracks larger-than-life remixes from Makoto Kubota, Kuniaki Haishima and Yasuharu Konishi, ragtag but chosen members of Geinoh Yamashirogumi.