Kiyoko Itoh - 23 Ji no Onna (Toshiba, 1971)

C'est dans ce genre de disques que Tarantino va chercher les musiques de ses films. D'ailleurs, avec le temps, la musique finit par être la seule chose qu'on retienne de ses films - parce que niveau mise en scène et direction d'acteurs il y avait quand même de méchantes chutes de tension dans son Inglorious Bastards, mais ceci est une autre histoire et une question de goûts. Bref! Le vinyle original est un Graal, les rééditions CD sont presque aussi difficiles à se procurer  - à prix décent? vous rêvez! - et la musique est délicieusement datée, pop et cinématographique. Son érotisme bien inoffensif aujourd'hui ne l'empêche pas de garder son pouvoir de séduction intact.

Kiyoko Itoh
23 Ji no Onna (Woman at 23 Hour Love-in)
LP Toshiba (Japan, 1971)
CD Showboat SWAX-58 (Japan, 2002)

01. Goji kara juji made no watashi (From 5 O'Clock to 10 O'Clock)
02. Poem: "Moshimo ryuusei ga..." Shiroi mori (If Meteor / White Forest)
03. Check Mate
04. Kiken kashira (Be Dangerous or)
05. Watashi ga michi o aruku toki (When I Walk in the Town)
06. Chinmoku (A Silence)
07. Onna no sengen (The Woman's Declaration)
08. Poem: "Papa oboeteiru?..." (Does Papa Remember?)
09. Crayon
10. Dekigoto (Event)
11. Kyoujo (Mad Woman)
12. Poem: "Hitoribotchi no kokoro ga..." (Lonely Only Mind)
13. Itsumo to onaji asa (Same Morning)

Note : Deliriously mega rare and hardly known Itoh Kiyoko record. Normally if you want to score a copy of the original vinyl you are required to donate most of your vital organs to some yakuza-typed black marketer, but luckily enough, this one here is easier to attain without ripping out a lung or a liver to pound off. This was the final album Itoh recorded in 1971 and on this effort she got backed up by again a bunch of Tokyo underground heavy weights such as J.A. Seazer and Kuni Kawauchi of the Happenings Four. On this album, Itoh's talent is fully flowering and apart from merely eargasmatic songs she hushes into being, atmospheric city-life field recordings and sound snippets find their way in and between her compositions. These flashes of cosmopolitan Tokyo city life grandeur and the feeling of desperate desolation it tails along elevate her impeccable melancholic love ballads and softly erotic excursions to even higher levels of artistic expression, catapulting the whole affair towards eerie stratospheric heavenly delightful realms. Sadly enough, both of her albums failed to catch on, not poppy enough, too melancholic, way too creative, artistically too advanced, hard to categorize and probably even too erotically sophisticated without degrading herself to mere carnal sonic one hit wonders. In one word, a delicate soft psychedelic wonderland avenue of an album that will entrap simple airhead listeners into deadlock without giving them the chance to fully explore the absinthial pleasures it conceals. If one only cares to listen to what lies underneath its surface layer, a new form of aural addiction will commence to besiege you. One of the greatest underrated delicate psychedelic female vocal albums to seep out of Japan. Original copies just never surface and if they do, you have to trade in a limb to take one home with you.

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