Les Rallizes Dénudés – The OZ Tapes
If this record isn’t already on the top of your 2022 pile for the most essential reissue, then it damn well should be. Les Rallizes Dénudés, the long storied Japanese psych band from the ‘70s has a spotty track record on official releases. They do have a wealth of crusted and corroded unofficial bootlegs to their name, or rather, in their name. Temporal Drift has set out to right a decades-long wrong by getting the band’s official recordings restored and remastered. They’re starting where quite a lot of the LRD story started, with The OZ Days material. When the Tokyo venue shut down, they threw a party and recorded a wealth of their regulars including Miyako Ochi, Acid Seven, Masato Minami, and Taj Mahal Travellers. Alongside that lineup, four songs from the day were included from Les Rallizes Dénudés on the hard to find, and now long out of print collector’s piece OZ DAYS LIVE.
If you’re an intrepid traveler of the internet, its likely that you’ve found some fidelity-parched versions of these tracks over the years, but Temporal Drift has not only restored the four tracks to their original luster, but added in an additional four that were recorded on the day nd have been in storage for the better part of the last 50 years. The band’s Makoto Kubota has been working to restore the tapes to a sound that’s worthy of the band’s legend. Included with the reissue are notes on the recording by Minoru Tezuka who put together the tapes for the original OZ DAYS. Among the unreleased material are a couple of searing takes, the storming “Vertigo others My Conviction,” and an alternate take on their showstopper “The Last One.”
Les Rallizes Dénudés has always felt like a name that’s shrouded in secrecy, a cypher to the Japanese underground. But the problem has always been — find the wrong bootleg and miss the point, dull the import of their intensity. Now, with the restoration of the live document on The OZ Tapes, there’s finally a proper entry point for fans and a version of the recordings that were not only kissed and blessed by the band, but that capture the spirit that’s made them the towering figures of ‘70s psych they are. The digital release of this one is out now, but the US release of the vinyl won’t land for quite a few months yet. Still, that leaves plenty of time to get in on the fire pouring out of the streamed speakers.
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