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Trailblazing instrumental synth pop experiments created to soundtrack Japan’s booming 1980s cartoon and comic industries. The brightly futuristic instrumentals on this collection reflect the mindset of composers and musicians who believed in a technological future where everything was possible.

In the late 1980s Japan experienced a brief but heady period where societal changes combined with new-found wealth to open up a world of possibilities. A huge influx of cash - artificially created by slashed interest rates after an agreement with the US to weaken the dollar relative to the yen - resulted in the inflation of real estate and stock market at a rapid pace. While the economic bubble it created was unprecedented and impossible to sustain, for a while money was in plentiful supply.

The musical genre City Pop reflected the aspirations of the country’s booming leisure class. Video games flourished with Nintendo's 1983 launch of their Family Computer (or FamiCom). Studio Ghibli was founded 1985 to later became one of the most famous and respected animation studios in the world, and Anime and Manga were established as major forms of entertainment for all generations of the Japanese public.

Music was no mere footnote to the anime and manga boom: the two forms of media often went hand in hand, and not simply through the presence of background melodies. With generous budgets available, even two-dimensional static manga comics could be released with an accompanying soundtrack of original music known as an ‘Image Album’.

Composer and arranger Kazuhiko Izu was one such beneficiary of this open budget approach. Written to accompany artist Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga comic Domu, the composer and arranger took advantage of the world-leading (and wallet-busting) Japanese synthesiser technology available at King Records’ fully equipped studio. Featured on this compilation, A3: Act 2 Scene 26 reflected the story’s sci fi themes with a blazingly futuristic yet warmly funky slice of synth pop that presents a joyful celebration of synthesisers and their seemingly endless possibilities.

Kan Ogasawara was another composer who made early mastery of the litany of synthesisers, drum machines and sequencers that had become available. Two tracks written to accompany the 1985 period manga Yume No Ishibumi are featured here; Honowo’s experimental electronic textures add spice to a jaunty electro pop melody that recalls the Rah band’s 1983 hit Messages From Stars; the jazz-tinged Utage rounds out Ogasawara’s shimmering synth textures with beautifully crafted backing from legendary musicians Yuji Toriyama (guitar), Pecker (percussion) and Jun Fukamachi (piano).

Before becoming one of the pioneers of Japanese Kankyo Ongaku (Ambient Music), Takashi Kokubo worked on the proto techno track Kiki (Jungle At Night). It was put together for the 1984 anime film Shonen Keniya (Kenya Boy) using some of the most expensive music technologies available at the time. This Africa-Inspired dance track offers a contemporary parallel to the early techno music that young Detroit based producers were then creating using cheap Japanese Roland drum machines and synthesisers.

This is the first compilation of Japanese anime and manga soundtracks curated by Kay Suzuki and Rintaro Sekizuka from Vinyl Delivery Service (a Tokyo based online record shop which also operates in East London's renowned wine and hifi shop Idle Moments). With a cover by artist Kazuki Takakura and two pages of liner notes, this vinyl only compilation of music never before released outside of Japan, captures a vital aural snapshot of an era whose forward-thinking sounds went hand in hand with cutting edge technology.

New music from the HBO Series. Euphoria — which paved the way for Labrinth’s opportunity to score the show. His soundtrack, due out in album form this Friday, hums with soft electricity, perfectly complementing the journey of the main character, Rue, a teenager caught in limbo between the euphoria of a drug high and the harsh consequences of addiction. “When you look back to your teenage days,” he says, “it feels semi-magical but semi-crazy and semi-psychotic. I wanted to make sure the music felt like those things.”

Jamie Cullum, Melody Gardot, Gregory Porter, Stacey Kent and Nikki Yanofsky share one thing in common. It’s their love for the Disnes movies. The brand new project by Verve "Jazz loves gives proof of this. Each artist performs old and new Disney songs form the “Jungle Book” to “Frozen” in their very unique style.

Waxwork Records is honored to present THE Sword OF Doom Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Masaru Satô! Directed by Kihachi Okamoto, The Sword of Doom is a 1966 Japanese samurai movie that tells the bloody and brutal tale of revenge and redemption. This deluxe LP features new artwork from Yuko Shimizu and marks the first time that the soundtrack is available on vinyl!

Starring Tatsuya Nakadai and featuring Toshirô Mifune, The Sword of Doom tells the story of Ryunosuke Tsukue, a masterful but heartless swordsman in feudal Japan. After deliberately killing an opponent in a training exercise, Tsukue then murders his mistress and flees town. After spending time in a haunted geisha house, Tsukue sees the ghosts of all his victims and spirals into madness, leaving a trail of destruction and bloodshed in his wake. As time passes, the years of brutal killings and evil deeds begin to weigh on his mind, ending in a climactic battle between Tsukue, a group of assassins, and the ghost of his past.

The Sword of Doom soundtrack, composed by Masaru Satô (Yojimbo, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla), is full of dark and yet melodic cues, and takes many influences from traditional Japanese instruments and music. A minimalist yet powerful score that brings to life the struggles of Tsukue’s inner demons. The tone ranges from brash fight scene orchestrations into quiet and lilting flute themes, but underscoring it all, Satô's music feels the evils of Tsukue.

Available for the very first time on vinyl, Waxwork Records is honored to work with Toho to present The Sword Of Doom re-mastered on 180 gram Snow, Blood, Flames, and Katana swirled color vinyl, deluxe packaging, new artwork by Yuko Shimizu, heavyweight gatefold jackets with matte satin coating, a 12"x12" art print, and more!

THE Sword OF Doom Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Features:

The Complete Soundrack by Masaru Satô Available For The First Time On Vinyl 180 Gram "Snow, Blood, Flames, and Katana" Swirled Color Vinyl New Artwork By Yuko Shimizu Heavyweight Gatefold Jackets with Matte Satin Coating 12"x12" Art Print

Since its opening in spring 2021, Jubg, a still young Cologne gallery for contemporary art, has specialized in the broad field of artists and collaborations working along artistic interfaces, especially those between visual art and experimental and/or electronic music. For example, Jubg has already hosted exhibitions by Markus Oehlen, Kim Gordon, Wolfgang Voigt, Matthias and Aksel "Superpitcher" Schaufler, Sven-Åke Johansson, and Emil Schult. Albert Oehlen, who is a kind of mentor and supporter of the gallery, was also a guest at Albertusstraße this summer, where he presented the exhibition D-i-e Orpheusmaschine together with Michael Wertmüller, Thomas Stammer and the poet Rainald Goetz.

It is only logical that the gallery now expands its sphere of activity to include its own label, on which music appears that comes from similar contexts as the artists listed above already suggest.

As catalog number 1, Jubg is now releasing the official soundtrack to "The Painter" from 2021. The film, German title "Der Maler", is a mixture of feature film and documentary and a collaboration between German director Oliver Hirschbiegel, best known for his Oscar-nominated film "Downfall", and Albert Oehlen, with whom Hirschbiegel has a long friendship, as they both once studied together at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste in Hamburg.

The docu-fiction shows Oehlen struggling with a painting and pondering the meaning of his work. Oehlen is played by German actor and musician Ben Becker, accompanied by the off-screen voice of Charlotte Rampling. In the film, Becker makes a painting that Oehlen himself creates step by step behind the camera, while the actor improvises the process in front of the camera.

The wonderful music for this film comes from no less than two outstanding personalities whose individual biographies and musical signatures could hardly be better suited to this project. On the A-side it is Gudrun Gut, icon not only of the German electronic music scene since at least the 90's, singer, composer, DJ, label owner (Monika Enterprise) and of course founding member of the legendary 80's New Wave band Malaria. On the B-side it’s the world famous and award winning US avant-garde trumpeter and improvisational musician Nathan "Nate" Wooley, who has played with Fred Frith and John Zorn among others.

Gudrun Gut's tracks bear such beautiful titles as "Bewegung", "Küste" or "Weinen" and she once again pulls out all the stops of her great skills and decades of experience as a producer of the most diverse electronic music genres. These are unusual and much more experimental musical paintings that she creates here than on her recent solo works. Edgy, angular, raw and unpolished, yet always elegant and clever, she subverts the male artist madness depicted extensively in the film in her own unique way.

Nathan Wooley answers with the instrument he has been familiar with since childhood, the trumpet, with which he is able to create a ravishingly virtuosic noise. His pieces are more like sketches, often only 90 seconds or a few minutes long, but in all their abstractness underpin the narrative of the film almost perfectly.

In partnership with Milan Records, Waxwork Records is proud to announce the deluxe soundtrack vinyl release to COLOR OUT OF SPACE Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Grammy Award-winning saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist, song writer and composer Colin Stetson!

Directed by Richard Stanley (Hardware, Dust Devil), Color Out of Space is based on the short story by H.P. Lovecraft. After a meteorite lands in the front yard of their farmstead, Nathan Gardner (Nicolas Cage) and his family find themselves battling a mutant extraterrestrial organism as it infects their minds and bodies, transforming their quiet rural life into a technicolor nightmare.

About Colin Stetson:

A highly-coveted collaborator to Bon Iver, Arcade Fire, Tom Waits, LCD Soundsystem, The National and more, Stetson brings with him an expansive body of work that includes both genre-defying, avant-jazz records as well as critically-acclaimed original scores for major film, television and game titles (Ari Aster’s Hereditary, Red Dead Redemption 2). Of the soundtrack, Stetson says:

"The question posed initially when conceiving of this score was what exactly is the sonic representation of a cosmic alien color that does not exist in this terrestrial reality? I began trying to answer that by layering the sounds of coral reefs, processing that cacophony and finding the order revealed through harmonic generation of these hyperdensities, and then continued to chase that same concept of 'transfiguring the natural' down every path and application I could see. Turns out it's somewhere between magenta and hot pink :)"

Waxwork Records is thrilled to present the complete soundtrack by Stetson pressed to 180 gram "Cosmic Magenta" swirled vinyl, housed within a heavyweight printed inner sleeve inserted into an old-style tip-on jacket with film laminate gloss coating, and new art by Matt Taylor.

180 gram vinyl. Minor bumped corner, othersie NM. Insert included. Records look like new.

Purple and red vinyl. Small damage in top edge and creases top right corner, otherwise NM. Records look like new.

Like new condition, apart from minimal and barely noticeable tiny corner crease. Records seem likely unplayed.

Top right corner has tiny bump. Records look like new. Comes with poster.