Posuposu Otani, Minimum Wage Immanence Unit, Dome Riders

Japanese throat singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Posuposu Otani returns to 33-33 with ShuHaRi, the follow-up to his acclaimed self-titled debut.

Moving between mountain life and inner space, folk song and altered consciousness, ecological unease and the strange assumptions around which contemporary life is organised, ShuHaRi expands the singular musical world introduced on Otani’s first internationally released album. Born in Kamakura in 1972, Otani began making music in his twenties through punk and home recording on four-track cassette. Time spent in San Francisco’s skateboarding scene and later travels through India and the Republic of Sakha — where encounters with throat singing and the Kohkin became part of his developing musical vocabulary — eventually fed into an approach to songwriting that now feels entirely his own.

From 2006 he became a distinctive presence in the Tokyo and Yokohama underground, closely associated with the experimental community surrounding Kouenji Enban. Yet there remains something strikingly modest about the distance between the originality of Otani’s music and the life from which it emerges. He spends much of his time in the mountains, fly fishing the rivers around his home, and his songs seem to grow from the same patient attention to landscape, people and small shifts in everyday life.