Amok Age follow last year's Mentocome pressing with this first-time vinyl edition of a Japanese underground holy grail from 1993. Fumio Kosakai is a founding member of Incapacitants, C.C.C.C., and Hijokaidan. »The Warm Garden« is an extended work for treated violin and electronics.

Originally released on tape in 1993, Fumio Kosakai’s second solo album came a good six years after »Earth Calling«, the debut release on his own Anciant private press. Both are required listening for literally anyone with an interest in underground industrial tape music, but this one’s the choice pick. Kosakai was already working with Incapacitants by this stage in his career, and »The Warm Garden« offsets some of that chaos with meditational expressiveness. Improvised at home between 1990–1991, he followed his nose for glacially unfurling structures that subtly contrast in their icy tension and more manacled grasp of gnawing, yet still mesmerising, string-led atonalities, using a cheapo Casiotone synthesizer, a metal plate, a violin, and a signal generator to slant the record to the horizontal.

The titular »Warm Garden« is a bit of a misnomer, as its 24 minutes of diaphanous, spectral morphing definitely feels tense with dread and as haunted as an abandoned cabin deep in some vast tundra, leading us to half expect a xenomorphic facehugger to scuttle out of a blindspot in its super-wide stereo field. »Violin Traveler« introduces the more discernibly acoustic, skin-on-string tone of the violin, slowly and expressively shearing in space with a tension reminding us of Harley Gaber’s almighty »The Winds Rise in the North« or the metallic atelier clangour of Harry Bertoia, but also displaced from those nods with sweeping oscillations submerged in the nether regions.

A raft of Midwestern operatives would circle this territory again over a decade later, so it’s fascinating to hear—yet again—that on the other side of the world, one of Japan’s most celebrated noisemakers had already pretty much drawn up the blueprint.