P-Model/Susumu Hirasawa appriciation station

new album today (on Bandcamp!) and it's really excellent. real proggy in spots, a bunch of these songs are mini-epics. vocals and guitars kinda remind me of Yes. also he covers Klaus Nomi's "Cold Song" in the most grandiose way possible.

God it’s so so good. The number of ideas he crams into every song is astounding. Landing is a real highlight. Possible AOTY.

yeah between this and the last Kaku P-Model album he seems to be at another creative high point

these clips from his 24th Mandala performance are great...apparently he's playing with a band again? way more interesting than the last 25 years of shows where 75% of it was just prerecorded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRFvgpV6U3s

HAHAHAH yes put me in the poor house baby

https://columbia.jp/artist-info/hirasawa/info/76147.html

dude killed it at Fuji Rock. maybe the single best performance of his I've ever seen, even if the guitar pedal started wildly malfunctioning during "Solid Air"

just checked out Technique of Relief after seeing the very high rym rating and being familiar with Hirasawa's lovely Berserk OST already. I wouldn't say I love ToF but it has a charming, beautiful messiness and I want to check out more! I was also surprised that I already knew one of the ToF tracks from waayyy back in the Napster days, where someone had mistakenly labelled it as a Berserk song haha

that should be ToR in both places, obv

The guitar solo on Chevron sounds like Fripp guesting on a '70s Eno vocal record.

Like probably most people on the internet, I first heard of him because of the Satoshi Kon soundtracks, and began to wonder about exploring further because of Frogbs. I've been poking around here and there for a month or two, feeling more "okay this is interesting but..." than really won over. But this week something shifted and now everything is starting to sound angelic. Been listening a lot to selections from Beacon and Big Body, and Kakeari Pop on repeat. All that has been awesome enough, but last night I heard The Iron Cutting Song, and now there's clearly no going back.

in a DJ set I played "Nice Nice Very Nice" and some people thought that was Fripp as well. I do think he might be a lapsed progressive rock dork - P-Model did evolve out of a prog band, after all - if you look for them you can find all sorts of King Crimson/Mike Oldfield influences on his albums. parts of the latest one even sound like Yes to me.

it has been awesome seeing his actual albums start to get attention. always found it a bit frustrating how much praise there was for Paprika and the Berserk stuff...reading some of those reviews all I could think was "an actual Hirasawa LP would take your head off"