Label: 川辺書林 – T-590594 Format: Cassette, Album, Box Set Country: Japan Released: 16 Oct 1995 Genre: Folk, World, & Country Style: Folk, Min'yō
Intense and otherworldly documentary book/tape hybrid capturing the transcendental power of Japan's mystical Goze people - that is blind, itinerant woman who travel door to door singing ancient folk tales for money. With beautiful picture booklet. Hard to find!!!! (NM)
Goze is a term that relates to visually-impaired female musicians who roam the countryside (mostly in the rugged North Westerly region of Niigata), scraping a living going door-to-door playing a particular style of vernacular folk music with voice and shamisen.Their stripped back and emotionally-intense improvised folk songs focus on sexually explicit content laced heavy with innuendo, double-love suicides or other dramatic / taboo content.Being outliers in a typically ridged Japanese society, they were often ostracised and persecuted, forming bonds within their own unit utilising a form of tactile language.Although, they carried the oral traditions of the countryside, almost as living history books of regional stories, tales and tragedies but as their numbers are dwindling, their culture is becoming extinct, leaving this box as an archival document of their heritage.
Their minimal min’yo style is totally hypnotic.Stripped-back cylindrical motifs on the shamisen, with a detached but at times emotionally-piecing vocal delivery, often solo but occasionally in an accompanying trio.It’s rare that music really transcends language, lyrically its way beyond ours (and most’s) comprehension, but years of struggle and hardship is heavily entwined within their sound like wrinkles on skin which speaks deeply to the human condition.We’ve still never really encountered anything as revelatory, profound and beautifully presented as this within the world of ethnographic music.A really special isolated artefact.
