Feel, the new record by the Osaka band Nagisa Ni te (aka Shinji Shibayama and Masako Takeda) is now available for the first time outside of Japan, the first in a series of Nagisa Ni te records to be released in the United States and Europe by Jagjaguwar. Nagisa Ni te (“On the Beach” in English) are on the vanguard of the burgeoning psych-avant-folk movement in Japan. Their contemporaries include Maher Shalal Hash Baz and Naoki Zushi, artists who also have work on the inspirational Osaka-based label Org (founded by Nagisa Ni te”s Shibayama.) The songs within Feel bring to mind the very best of sixties’ and seventies’ psychedelic, progressive and folk rock (i.e. early to middle-era Pink Floyd or George Harrison) while steadfastly remaining in the modern by introducing to the mix avant touches ala’ Eric Dolphy, Derek Bailey or Robert Wyatt. Soaring Gilmour-esque guitar solos abet the colliding forces of heaven and nature. And that is where Shibayama and Takeda reside, either on their way towards or in the process of departing the Garden of Eden. On Feel they sing about love, light, stars and the sea, words about both the spiritual and visceral worlds that the poet Pablo Neruda would be proud to call his own. David Grubbs may put it best when he states that “Nagisa Ni te are possessed of a beatific quality in which they come across as a gentler, more otherworldly confident Crazy Horse…” According to Maher Shalal Hash Baz’s Tori Kudo, “Nagisa Ni te’s naked, Progressive rock-based worldly songs, which are sung not so much deliberately as seriously, on their love beach, now fill a blank somewhere between underground hi-fi and overground lo-fi.” Shinji and Masako are joined on several of Feel’s tracks by guests including Seiichi Yamamoto (of Boredoms/Omoide Hatoba/Rovo) and Tim Barnes (Tower Recordings).
