With its accrued meanings and wider implications—as “song of the people”; as story and melody transmitted through generations; as a “return to the garden” via song; as chronicles of the surreal and sublime of the everyday—folk music is well-placed indeed to go psychedelic. You can hear it in the way English folk got marvelously strange in the 1970s, with groups like Incredible String Band, Comus, and Jan Dukes De Grey. Australia had Extradition; America had Pearls Before Swine; Germany had curious krautrock-folk crossovers like Kalacakra and Hölderlin. But Japan offered particularly fertile ground for “psych folk,” or “acid folk,” as it’s sometimes known.
Folk musicians were often the unofficial documenters of the anxieties of late ’60s and early ’70s Japan. As Japanese music scholar Alan Cummings has noted, in that time of great social unrest—the Vietnam War; U.S. occupation; widespread demonstrations and dissent; radical student activism—it was folk singers that Japanese countercultural youth often turned to as the soundtrack to their disruption. A folk movement developed out of the actions of protest singers, and consequently, groups like Itsutsu No Akai Fusen, Yasumi No Kuni, and The Folk Crusaders, and singers like Kenji Endo, Masato Minami, and Nobuyasu Okabayashi became part of the lingua franca of Japanese folk.
But there were also other things developing during that time—see, for example, the romanticized West Coast sound you can hear in some songs by Happy End, perhaps the best-known Japanese folk group from the ’70s. There were also fantastically deep albums made by the likes of Morita Doji, Maki Asakawa, and Teruko Fujii that crossed over into chanson and smoky late-night jazz. As the decades passed, psych folk became more of an underground phenomenon, with singer-songwriters like Shuji Inaba and groups like Ché-SHIZU and Ghost adopting aspects of the genre. There is also a loose thread woven, at times, back to Japanese folk song traditions like min’yō.
This list is particularly interested in the different manifestations of psychedelic folk music in Japan over the past few decades. For some, psych or acid folk designates the more disorienting side of folk and performers of great intensity and fury, such as Kan Mikami, Kazuki Tomokawa, Mibu Kogawa, and Kengo Iuchi. For others, the terms connect more to gentler, more pastoral styles of folk (see the presence of Ché-SHIZU and Nagisa Ni Te.)
Various Artists
Nippon Acid Folk 1970–1980
Vinyl LP
Time Capsule’s lovely Nippon Acid Folk 1970–1980 compilation hews gentler, with some gorgeous melancholy from the likes of Ken Narika and Happy End. You can hear the Japanese folk musicians reckoning with the influence of the West Coast’s breezy, lightly stoned singer-songwriter aesthetics. The highlight is Tokedashita Garasubako’s startling “Anmari Fukasugite,” where members of Itsutsu No Akai Fusen and Jacks turn a drony, whispering folk song into a musique concrète wonderland.
Abeichizoku
Abeichizoku
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
The First & Last label from Brooklyn haven’t been around for too long, but they’ve already reissued three fantastic private press releases from ‘70s Japan. The self-titled Abeichizoku album from 1973 is a great place to start: An understated collection of folk songs by members of a university folk club, it captures much of what makes these kinds of self-released projects so disarmingly attractive to listeners and collectors. The music’s unforced, the melodies are enveloping, and the vérité capture of the recording makes you feel as though you’re in the room as the musicians play.
Joyama no Narazumono
Joyama no Narazumono
Vinyl LP
The second release on First & Last is from later in the decade, and it’s a wild one. The children’s chorus and pattering percussion that open the album catches the listener off guard; it disappears soon enough, making way for one of the most quietly yearning performances in Japanese folk, the beautiful “Kagura Song.” The duo of Shigeki Kobayashi and Yasuo Yamada had a light touch; their songs feel age-old, even as they’re sculpted by period piece gestures: glinting slide, thunking bass, and an overarching sense of pleasant disorientation.
Niningashi
Heavy Way
Vinyl LP
The project of pharmacy student Kazuhisa Okubo, Niningashi are particularly deft at navigating the kind of forlorn yet slightly sidereal songwriting that was core to psych and acid folk. Another private press gem, Heavy Way takes flight when the group add smart flourishes to the arrangements that catch you looking – the searing fuzz guitar solo of “Ameagari” is luscious, meandering across the group’s groove with sly intent; “Chikan n Uta” is a surprisingly roughhousing acid rock churn.
Sachiko Kanenobu
Fork in the Road / Tokyo Song
Sadly, there isn’t much Sachiko Kanenobu available on Bandcamp; her stunning debut album from 1972, Misora, is an absolute must for anyone interested in the depth of Japanese singer-songwriter genius, but you’ll need to track that down elseways. This digital release of two Kanenobu songs from 1981, recorded in San Francisco, is enough to convince any listener of how singular Kanenobu was as a performer, though. The story behind these two luxurious folk-pop songs is just as curious: these recordings were “executive produced” by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, a supporter of Kanenobu and a big fan of Misora.
Ché-SHIZU
I Can’t Promise
The first album by Chie Mukai’s dream-folk outfit Ché-SHIZU was released in 1984, four years after the group formed. Mukai’s history up until then included studying with experimental composer Takehisa Kosugi, which led to her membership in the free-sound collective East Bionic Symphonia. That freedom informs the performances on I Can’t Promise, but the sound here is much closer to classic English folk-rock—think Fairport Convention, early Steeleye Span, Shirley Collins and the Albion Country Band’s No Roses—with the quixotic, buzzing drone and purr of Mukai’s er-hu (a Chinese bowed string instrument) weeping across the songs.
Nagisa Ni Te
On the Love Beach
Compact Disc (CD)
By the time he formed Nagisa Ni Te, Shinji Shibayama had already been involved in several excellent groups (Idiot O’Clock, Hallelujahs) and had released the debut albums by ex-Hijokaidan guitarist Naoki Zushi and Tori Kudo’s Maher Shalal Hash Baz outfit, on his Org label. With On The Love Beach, Shibayama reached back to the glimmers of innocence found on early Neil Young albums, writing disarmingly honest and simple folk pop songs that were burst open by Zushi’s soaring guitar solos. Currently a duo with partner Masako Takeda, Nagisa Ni Te are still, slowly, recording gorgeous music.
Yuka Ijichi
Peanuts Butter
When first released in 2010, Yuka Ijichi’s Peanuts Butter announced a songwriter of rare and gentle charm. She’s accompanied here by some legends from the Japanese underground: Kiyohiro ‘Doronco’ Takada, once a member of Les Rallizes Dénudés, sings and plays guitar, and Hiragi Fukuda appears on guitar and melodica. The magic here is all Ijichi’s, though. Her songs are playful, yet they carry a deep melancholy that comes through in the flourishes of weeping slide on songs like “doo dah,” as well as the chiming electric guitar of “Sunday Afternoon.”
macomelogy
マコメンタリー
This strange, beautiful album—the only one by macomelogy, the duo of Yoshiko Iguchi (yumbo, Anderses, Sekifu) and Mako Hasegawa (Ma-On, Los Doroncos, Maher Shalal Hash Baz)—is fragile at first blush; the spindly guitar, tangling around simply plucked and strummed strings, gifts the songs textural complexity, and the whole thing has a lightness of touch, and gentle grace, that’s evident in the lovely harmony vocals, too. But it’s made of strong stuff, with a sureness to its composition and a brittle intensity to the performances.
Eddie Marcon
Kura Kura Kurage
Compact Disc (CD)
Eddie Marcon are one of the best of a current wave of indie pop groups whose music overlaps with ’60s and ’70s psych and acid folk. They’re a wildly productive group, releasing a stream of EPs and full-lengths on CD-R over the past two decades, many on their own Pong-Kong label. They’re friends with indie pop duo Tenniscoats, which makes plenty of sense—there’s a shared adventurousness to their music, though Eddie Marcon hew closer to folk pop tropes. On Kura Kura Kurage, they’re playing at their very best, each song garlanded by excellent arrangements—huffing winds, chiming glockenspiel, pattering drums—all guided by Corman’s sweet, nostalgic voice, and guitar that’s as flinty and tangled as the best bossa nova.