TOMOKAWA, KAZUKI - Akai Polyan (Red Polyanthus)

Eleventh PSF album from the Japanese undergrounds most handsome folk-truthteller and all-round renaissance man. Nine new songs, including two more musical settings for the symbolist poems of Japans Rimbaud: Chuya Nakahara. Tomokawa has inhabited an utterly unique world very much of his own making for over twenty-five years now. A world where the most limpid of minor melodies and symbolism-inspired natural imagery can happily rub shoulders with EXTREMELY peaked torrents of pained screams over the densest of acoustic noise-scapes. What welds it all together is Tomokawas self-evident to desire to take himself and his audience through the wall with every performance. Forget any image of the sensitive folkie, Tomokawas music is as violent and cathartic as anything in the underground rock or free jazz canon. For anyone at all still concerned with the possibilities of words, voice, and acoustic communication, Tomokawa is an unparalleled contemporary touchstone. There is more truth and beauty in any one of his songs than in most singer-songwriters entire repertoires. Believe it. - Alan Cummings.