A 	Off The Wall I 	20:27
B 	Off The Wall II 	20:02

Yoshi Wada - bagpipes
Wayne Hankin - bagpipes
Marilyn Bogerd - organ
Andreas Schmidt Neri - percussion

Off the Wall was the second Wada LP to be released, on FMP’s SAJ subsidiary (named for Swedish percussionist Sven-Åke Johansson) in 1985, and was recorded in Berlin. The music was arrived at through performing in a number of different churches and similar spaces, allowing for mobile engagement with natural reverb in addition to the layered sonorities of pipes, homemade organ, cymbals, and tuned percussion. The percussionist is Andreas Schmidt Neri and the organist is Marilyn Bogerd, who worked with Wada throughout this period. This LP reissue was remastered by Rashad Becker and issued on Saltern, the label of Yoshi’s son, Tashi Wada, also a composer and contemporary music historian. Compared to the original, this reissue is incredibly rich and balanced, with a presence that the original LP couldn’t quite reach.

Following an alap phase that sets pipes and organ in motion, not to mention their brassy undercurrents, with robust chordal calls and sinewy, plasticized clamber, the ensemble (with kettle drum) sets into a driving, stippled advance. As the bagpipes, played by Wada and Wayne Hankin, skirl and intertwine, it’s not difficult to hear the attraction of this music to an audience more inclined toward free music, as unaccompanied, incisive twitter reminiscent of soprano and alto saxophones breaks against warped unity toward an incredibly dense first-side conclusion. In a bright holding pattern against clattering cymbals and metallic shake, interspersed with deep chordal fluffs, the second half presents more sparsely at the outset, Neri’s mallets dancing an insistent two-step and rendered with clarity. Bogerd’s organ once again takes on grainy, brassy qualities against low rhythmic thrums, pipes bouncing off of gooey long tones in a reflective processional. The piece closes with skipping, loose reed exhalations, Wada and Hankin blurring in a controlled frenzy of muscle, breath, and sound atop the ensemble’s resonant pace. While a relatively basic concept front to back (the graphic score is reproduced inside the gatefold jacket), the results are exhilarating. Wada’s setting of resonance and variable tuning against supple rhythms also recalls Downtown New York contemporaries like Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca, and Off the Wall is similarly majestic. With this reissue, we can now hear the music as intended. ---Clifford Allen, tinymixtapes.com

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1 	Singing 	31:07
2 	Bagpipe 	33:17

Yoshi Wada - performer, producer, composer

Born in Kyoto, he moved to New York in the late 1960s. He is well-known as a Fluxus artist with links to La Monte Young, and has been involved in many performances and sound installations. However, he has released only two recordings (as his solo albums), both hard to find. Finally, a CD reissue of his most important and rarest LP, Lament For Rise And Fall Of The Elephantine Crocodile (Recorded in 1981, issued on India Navigation in 1982).

This CD contains two pieces: track 1 - solo overtone voice (he studied with legendary Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath) recorded at performance space 'Dry Pool', with a deep underground echo feeling; track 2 - dense psychedelic drones using bagpipe-like self-made instrument. These wondrous sounds will take you to another, better world!! ---emrecords.ocnk.net

Japanese sculptor and sound artist Yoshi Wada was a key figure in New York's Fluxus movement in the late 1960s and '70s. And yet, though he performed and collaborated with a number of Fluxus bigwigs (most notably composer and Dream Syndicate leader La Monte Young), he released only a pair of wonderful recordings, both as tantalizingly rare as hen's teeth. The harder to find of the two releases - and also the more celebrated - is Lament for the Rise and Fall of the Elephantine Crocodile, a record originally released on the India Navigation label in 1982 and which quickly achieved a holy grail status among drone aficionados and collectors of all things Fluxus.

The fact that Japan's EM Records has at long last made this classic album available for the first time on CD is cause for celebration. An enjoyably unpredictable and idiosyncratic imprint known for reissuing both avant-garde classics and wonderfully cheesy albums of singing saw virtuosos, EM gives the record the deluxe treatment, providing extensive liner notes, copious documentation, and rare photographs. More importantly, the folks at EM got hold of the original tapes, which they have digitally remastered and restored to their original, unedited lengths (the LP versions were both edited down and had less than ideal fidelity).

The album was recorded on November 29, 1981, at a venue called "Dry Pool" in Buffalo, NY, which, as its name suggests, was an empty swimming pool with unusually reverberant acoustics. As he prepared for the recording, Wada lived and slept in the space before recording a two-part, improvisatory piece. The first part, "Singing," features Wada's powerful chanting (he studied with the Indian vocal master, Pandit Pran Nath), his deep, ragged baritone soaring and drifting as he explores the sonic particularities of the space. In his liner notes to the original LP, Wada wrote that he felt, at times, the room itself seemed to drone, contributing to the overall hallucinatory quality of the music. And it is thoroughly mesmerizing.

With the arrival of 'The Elephantine Crocodile' and its cousin 'The Alligator' in part two of the disc, things get more intense and engrossing still. The aforementioned animals are two reed instruments, designed and built by Wada and played bagpipe-style, using bellows. As engrossing as the solo voice work is, it's this second piece, titled "Bagpipe," that is the true and utter mind-bender. The thick, swirling haze of overtones that Wada generates with his strange instruments - created from plumbing pipes, an air compressor, and other hardware - is spellbindingly complex. This is one record that thoroughly deserves its reputation as a classic. ---dustedmagazine.com

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