Azathoth's Abode on the Plateau of Leng

Ok, picture this: Legendary Japanese avant-garde composer Toshi Ichiyanagi enters into a mythical collaboration with the psych band The Flowers and one of Japan's most prolific and successful graphic designers and psychedelic artists - Tadanori Yokoo to create an opera.

Crazy you say? Well, it happened! In 1969 they created what is, perhaps, the ultimate instance of Japanese demented avant-garde psychedelic musical assault. The ultra-rare "Opera from the Works of Tadanori Yokoo by Toshi Ichiyanagi" is one of Japan's most sought after vinyl artifacts. Released in 1969 on the private End Records it is a visually stunning beauty of an album - one of the best looking ever to be released - a 2 LP picture disc decorated lavishly with Tadanori Yokoo's Fluxus inspired psych art and housed in similarly decorated 2-LP foldout jacket... and on the inside a 4 page inner booklet of 24 postcards depicting posters done by Tadanori for various theatre troupes. And all that before you even hear the music!

You can view some of these postcards and other Tadanori Artwork in the album I added to my Photo Gallery to accompany this post.


Musically you get an equally beautiful, original, and warped trip containing all kinds of stuff including: operatic singing, acid folk ramblings, psychedelic electronic music and tape noise experiments interspersed with a cappella enka ballads, field-recordings, radio commercial snippets and bits of news broadcasts, kayokyoku pop music, spoken word fragments, chirping cricket orchestras, frogs mating, and nearly two whole sides of improvised fuzz-guitar psych jams. The dream album for every self-respecting lover of the deranged.

About the musician: Toshi Ichiyanagi (一柳 慧 Ichiyanagi Toshi, born 4 February 1933, Kobe, Japan) is a Japanese composer of avant-garde music. Toshi Ichiyanagi studied composition with Kishio Hirao and John Cage, and piano with Chieko Hara, Barnhard Weiser and Beveridge Webster. After attending the Julliard School of Music and the New School for Social Research in New York between 1954-60, he returned to Japan in 1961, and introduced many new musical concepts, including Cage's idea of indeterminacy, exerting a strong influence on the direction of Japanese contemporary music.

As one of the leading composers in Japan, Ichiyanagi has composed in most genres of music: operas, orchestral, chamber and instrumental works. Among his major works are his Violin Concerto "Circulating Scenery" (1983), Piano Concerto No.2 "Winter Portrait" (1987) and Opera "Momo" (1995), based on a novel by Michael Ende While composing these large-scale pieces, he also became known for his compositions using Japanese traditional instruments such as sho and gagaku ensemble. Many of them have been performed throughout the world, especially by the Tokyo International Music Ensemble - an organization where he serves as Artistic Director. . One of his most notable works is the 1960 composition, Kaiki, which combined Japanese instruments, sho and koto, and western instruments, harmonica and saxophone. Another work Distance (1961) requires the performers to play from a distance of three meters from their instruments. Anima 7 (1964) states that chosen action should be performed "as slowly as possible."

Ichiyanagi won the Elizabeth A. Coolidge Prize (1954) and the Serge Koussevitzky Prize (1956) during his studies in New York. He was also a member of Fluxus. Since his return to Japan, he has received numerous awards including the prestigious Nakajima Kenzo Award (1984), the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the French Government (1985) and Grand Prix of the Kyoto Music Award (1989). In 1990, he was awarded the Otaka Prize for the fourth time, for his unique symphony "Berlin Renshi".
His recent works include "Coexistence" for ondes martenot and orchestra (1996), Symphony No.5 "Time Perspective"(1997), "Coexistence" for orchestra (1997) and "Mirage" for shakuhachi and piano (1998). Ichiyanagi was married to Yoko Ono from 1956 to 1963, but don't hold that against him.


About the artist: TANADORI YOKOO (横尾忠則) is a Japanese graphic designer, illustrator,
printmaker and painter who was born 1936.

Tadanori Yokoo, (pronounced "yoko-o") born in Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, in 1936, is one of Japan's most successful and internationally recognized graphic designers and artists. He began his career as a stage designer for avant garde theatre in Tokyo. His early work shows the influence of the New York based Push Pin Studio (Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast in particular) but Yokoo himself cites filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and writer Yukio Mishima as two of his most formative influences.

As a teenager, his modest dreams were to work at a post office and to paint. He entered the profession by replicating paintings, designing store wrapping paper, and drawing posters for the Chamber of Commerce. His first notable work, a self-titled poster at the Persona group's 1965 joint exhibition, attracted attention because it diverged from contemporary graphic styles. This shocking poster featured a hanged man against a blue sky with red rays emanating from a rising sun. His name appeared at the top; the bottom corners held childhood photographs and the simple ironic statement, "having reached a climax at the age of 29, I was dead." The rising sun motif, considered old-fashioned at the time, recurs throughout his body of work and has become emblematic of "Yokoo style" and an international symbol of Japanese pop art.


In the late 1960s he became interested in mysticism and psychedelia, deepened by travels in India. Because his work was so attuned to 1960s pop culture, he has often been (unfairly) described as the "Japanese Andy Warhol" or likened to psychedelic poster artist Peter Max, but Yokoo's complex and multi-layered imagery is intensely autobiographical and entirely original. By the late 60s he had already achieved international recognition for his work and was included in the 1968 "Word & Image" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Four years later MoMA mounted a solo exhibition of his graphic work.

In the 1970s, after injury in a traffic accident and the hara-kiri suicide of his close friend Yukio Mlshima, Yokoo stopped work to reflect. He became fearful of death and increasingly fascinated by Indian culture, Buddhism, UFOs, and extraterrestrial civilizations, and began to create collages using images of the universe and various religious symbols. Through his spiritual quest, Yokoo became acquainted with rock and folk musicians who often asked him to design their posters and album covers, including the Beatles, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Carlos Santana, and Cat Stevens. Yokoo was especially close to John Lennon and Carlos Santana. His cover for Santana's triple album "Lotus" was awarded the special jury prize at the sixth Brno Biennial in 1974.

In 1981 he unexpectedly "retired" from commercial work and took up painting.


By the early 1990s, Yokoo added computer design to his technique vocabulary and changed his style even further, by reassembling previous works digitally. For the first time in many years, a large-scale exhibition of Yokoo's posters was held in 1998 in Japan. Forty thousand people crowded the thirteen-day event, exposing a whole new generation to his work.

Several motifs recur in Yokoo's work. His fascination with waterfalls borders on obsession. In 1999, in a group exhibition titled "Ground Zero Japan" at the Mito Museum of Art, Yokoo filled an entire room from floor to ceiling with postcards of waterfalls which were reflected in a black mirrored floor. Other exhibitions on the subject include "Craze for Waterfalls" at the Kirin Art Space Harajuku and "Tadanori Yokoo's Magical Make a Pilgrimage Round" exhibition. In 1992, Absolut Vodka commissioned him to design an advertisement titled Absolut Yokoo featuring twenty-five of his waterfall paintings.

Yokoo is also known for his science-fiction posters and Ken Takakura gangster-film posters, and his designs have been used for theater sets in Japan and Italy.

Tadanori Yokoo's work, while highly successful commercially, is deeply personal. Employing his own themes, pictures, and references to himself and his anti-modernist collage style, his approach is instantly recognizable and individual. He has said that he learned in the late 1960s "to escape from compromise when designing by linking my creations directly to my lifestyle."

Yokoo's work crosses the border between design and fine art. Seemingly devoid of limitations or rules, his paintings are warm, autobiographical, and mystical and draw on a variety of seemingly incongruous influences such as spiritualism, Japanese aesthetics, the psychedelic posters of the '60s, science fiction, and comic art. It also consciously draws on Ukiyo-e, or "the art of the floating world," whose themes express the impermanence of life.

Tadanori Yokoo's work has appeared in exhibitions every year since 1965, as well as dozens of books, magazines, and advertisements. "He is unique," says his longtime friend and colleague, Paul Davis. "There isn't any other artist like him. Instead of taking a subject and just presenting it, he opens it up; and in finding so many ways to express himself and his passions, he has changed graphic design in the process."

His career as a fine artist continues to this day with numerous exhibitions of his paintings every year, but alongside this he remains fully engaged and prolific as a graphic designer.


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