karuna khyal: alomoni 1985

Karuna Khyal's album Alomoni 1985, originally released on Voice Records around 1976, is widely acknowledged as years ahead of its time, preceding other Japanese underground experimental outfits such as Fushitsusha and White Heaven by almost 20 years. The band's musical influences are, if anything, more Germanic than Japanese, with long, hypnotic free-form rock passages, a heavy use of tape loops, electronics, environmental sounds, distortion and backwards tapes underpinning some manic harmonica-playing on some gut-wrenching blues dirges. Can, Faust and Guru Guru clearly had an influence on the band, as did Captain Beefheart and Pere Ubu. Not much is known about the band's line-up, although it is widely thought there was some crossover in personnel with Brast Burn, another significant outfit of the same era which exerted such influence over newer participants in the Japanese psych scene as well as Nurse With Wound. At No.19 in Julian Cope's Japrocksampler publication, this is a true hidden treasure buried deep in time -- unearthed and digitally-remastered by Phoenix Records.