Hideo Ikeezumi had worked in Japanese record stores for a decade when he realized “there was almost nothing coming out that I liked.” So in 1980, he started his own shop in Tokyo called Modern Music, stocking it with underground sounds—noise, free jazz, and, most importantly to him, psychedelic music—that mainstream stores wouldn’t touch. A few years later, still unsatisfied with many of the records he heard, Ikeezumi decided to put one out himself. He chose a band called High Rise whose members often hung out at his store, and whom he liked because their music was “obscure and chaotic.”
High Rise’s 1984 debut album, a maelstrom of adrenaline-addicted rock damage, was titled Psychedelic Speed Freaks. Realizing that the record needed a catalog number, Ikeezumi added “PSF-1” to the spine. His label was henceforth known as PSF, and though Ikeezumi didn’t consider Psychedelic Speed Freaks an official name, that phrase certainly fit the music he went on to release. By the ’80s, psychedelic music had been around for almost 20 years, but the artists Ikeezumi supported—most of whom came from the Japanese avant-garde—found myriad ways to give it new life. “At that time, in the ’80s, the people who liked noise and free jazz...understood without explanation the value of psychedelia,” Ikeezumi said in 2000. “When they heard psychedelia, they really got it.”
The freshness of the psych-rock that Ikeezumi championed was clearest on 1991’s Tokyo Flashback, the label’s 12th release and first multi-artist compilation—an underground touchstone that influenced countless musical speed freaks around the globe, but went out of print for years before being reissued this month. Subtitled “a long awaited sampler of 8 artists who drive the Tokyo psychedelic scene,” the eight-track CD included noisy jamming, haunting folk, punkish blasts, and even experimental a cappella. It was all tied together by brutally-primitive sonics—Ikeezumi loved raw, imperfect production—and a communal vibe, due largely to the fact that many participants frequented Modern Music, including several who actually worked there.
The most immediately exciting material on Tokyo Flashback is drenched with fiery guitars and mammoth rhythms, mixed into a cacophonous lava pouring from speakers. High Rise, Marble Sheep & the Run-Down Sun’s Children, and Fushitsusha (whose first two albums on PSF, released before Tokyo Flashback, are legendary for their bleeding psych bombast) all stomp on the gas pedal until it breaks. But there are other gears on Tokyo Flashback too: Ghost’s seance-like acoustics, White Heaven’s Blue Cheer-style string wrangling, Kousokuya’s slow-burning metal, and a closer by Fushitsusha’s Keiji Haino that consists solely of his harrowing vocal calisthenics.
Tokyo Flashback’s initial release helped spread PSF’s name internationally and led to wider exposure for several of its artists. Examples include Ghost’s later work on Drag City and the still-growing stature of Haino, whose constant stream of diverse experiments over the past four decades have made him a living underground legend. And while Ikeezumi passed away this past February at 67, he had authorized American label Black Editions to reissue the PSF catalog. Their newly released version of Tokyo Flashback—the first on vinyl—features stunning packaging by Black Editions founder Peter Kolovos and Rob Carmichael, and original liner notes by Hideki Shimoji, a name the label says is likely a pseudonym for Ikeezumi himself.
Over 25 years later, Tokyo Flashback still offers the thrill of glimpsing the Japanese underworld circa 1991, dipping back into a vibrant moment when artists were finding something new and challenging in a forgotten genre. Even better, it’s a chance to connect with the thrill that Ikeezumi enjoyed as a maniacal music fan on a quest to unearth weird gems. “Do we really need this kind of music in this peaceful era of ours? Not necessarily,” Shimoji/Ikeezumi writes. “However, I believe the sounds on this compilation can serve as a good barometer, allowing us to distinguish true music from the overwhelming amount of background dross.” That claim has aged well: Tokyo Flashback still sounds loud, bold, and wild enough to drown out almost anything else that calls itself “psychedelic.”
