An'archives

SHIZUKA - Paradise Of Delusion

"Shizuka first came to wider attention at roughly the same time as their peers in the Japanese underground – in the nineties, really, when people started to get wise to the surprisingly wide-ranging post-psychedelic sounds emanating from the PSF label, predominantly, and a few other, similar creative cells. During that window of opportunity, Shizuka only released a few albums on P.S.F records, Persona Non Grata & Last Visible Dog. It’s not that much to go by, which is why An’archives’ Paradise Of Delusion (recorded live in 2001) is a most welcome, not to mention much-needed, posthumous collection. For the first time ever, Shizuka is now released on vinyl.

Even by the standards of their closest peers, aesthetically speaking –Fushitsusha (with whom they shared two members, Maki Miura and Jun Kosugi), Kousokuya, Ché-SHIZU – Shizuka were a mysterious, occluded bunch. Led by the late Shizuka herself, a guitarist, vocalist, song writer, and doll maker, with her husband Miura, a devastatingly powerful guitar slinger, their songs were potent, seductive things: often playing out at a snail’s pace, with the same kind of flickering, sensual ‘black-and-white psychedelia’ as the third Velvet Underground album, or a more languid Les Rallizes Denudes. Shizuka’s songs always felt far more certain of themselves, far steelier in their resolve, than their face-value fragility might suggest. Perhaps it’s the seeming ponderousness of the way they go about performing their songs – Shizuka’s slow iterations of simple chord changes, her psalmic vocal melodies over the top, suggesting a world-weariness, a kind of existential exhaustion, that’s often torn asunder by a soaring surge of roaring guitar from Maki Miura.

It’s no surprise to be reminded that, alongside her music making, Shizuka was a well-known doll maker in Japan, mentored by the legendary doll artist Katan Amano. Whatever is happening here is relentlessly private, psychologically introverted in many ways, but opened out to the possibilities of both great beauty and great despair – the two states that the music of Shizuka best captures." - An'archives

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After nearly a decade of false starts, multiple game plans veering off the rails, and a handful of shattered hopes and/or dreams, the odyssey is finally complete—the new Fusetron site is here.

This is the first phase of a multipart rollout that will span the next few months: the currently browsable stock includes miscellaneous new releases from the past 8+ months (we have a lot of catching up to do), plus approximately a third of our backstock. Note that we’ve reduced/slashed prices on many titles and will continue to do so in order to make room for new stock. We’ll also be expanding / tweaking / improving / debugging the site itself (for example, we still have work to do on the automated international postage system, not to mention the inevitable inventory discrepancies that come with transferring an ancient and massive database to a new system).

Over the next few months, as we take inventory, clean house, and delve into our storage, we will be uploading thousands of additional items, gradually, on a near-daily basis. This will include the majority of the LPs, as well as many titles, in all formats, once thought long-gone. Many currently “sold out” items are likely to resurface.

Finally, once our general backstock is up (probably in the next two or three months) we’ll begin making our extensive stockpile of rarities available online for the first time: tons of random out-of-print titles, "deadstock," warehouse finds, secondhand collectibles, etc., accumulated over the past few decades.

Frequent/returning customers will be getting early access to these items. Details to follow on how this will work (a priority mailing list? a 'frequent flyer'-like program?), but it will not be based on dollars spent. We want to reward those who consistently support us, especially in the discogs marketplace era (to those who show up trying to poach five copies of a one-off rarity, and nothing else, ever… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).

So—we suggest you take some time to dig through the site—even we’ve been surprised by what’s been turning up, and there’s much more to come.
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