Back in the 90s and early 2000s a spiraling, almost endless blast of cassettes (and videos, CDr boxsets) issued forth from Japan in (mostly) black and white sleeves, dubbed onto blank cassettes in tinted cases.
Nanjo Asahito (
High Rise, Mainliner, Toho Sara and a million more) documented his own history and the Japanese underground with an avalanche of releases on his La Music Records label. Dozens of releases from Nanjo's projects and others in his universe painted a weird ass picture of the deepest pool of psych in the world at the time. My fave among the handful of cassettes I have heard is almost too good to be true.
Leningrad Psychedelic Blues Machine was a meeting of hard psych weirdos
Leningrad Blues Machine's Tabata Mara with Nanjo and
Kawabata Makoto of Acid Mothers Temple,
Mainliner and Toho Sara. They are joined by my favorite of Acid Mothers Temple's many drummers, Koizumi Hajime. And this meeting of the burnt psych spirit decided to take on the Grateful Dead's "Dark Star!" Fuzzed out bass notes keep the Dead's riff rolling for most of the 20 or so minutes while Kawabata taps into the mystical jazz of the Garcia archetype jam, sending shooting star notes into the black fog of Nanjo's rumble.
As far as I know this is the only release from this group and it was recorded in 1995. It carries the La Musica catalog number of LA-054).
Nanjo seems to have dropped of the face of the earth the last few years; it is difficult to find any mention of his La Musica label on the internet (much less a discography). Kawabata has kept on truckin' with Acid Mothers Temple (Koizumi joins him in AMT on occasion) and plays with Tabata in the
Cosmic Inferno version of Acid Mothers Temple.
Leningrad Psychedelic Blues Machine-
Dark Star from
Dark Star (La Musica cassette, LA-054)
