K. Yoshimatsu – Zentai: The Collected Works of K. Yoshimatsu [volume II] (2025)

Following the success of 2024’s reissue of 1980’s key works by cult Japanese outsider composer K. Yoshimatsu, Phantom Limb return with compendium release Zentai: The Collected Works of K. Yoshimatsu, collecting nine albums created from 1980-1985, over three volumes spanning exploratory home-recorded 4-track experiments.

Over a furiously prolific period from 1980 to 1985, K. [Koshiro] Yoshimatsu composed, recorded and released some forty albums. These records primarily appeared under his own name, some required aliases, and others saw him compose, arrange, and produce for friends and peers in his creative circle. All of them, however, surfaced on Japan’s cult and inimitably fertile DD. Records, an astonishingly exhaustive catalogue once described as “the most amazing DIY effort ever undertaken to document an alternative music scene”. Led by close Yoshimatsu associate T. [Tadashi] Kamada, DD. Records released exactly 222 cassettes of brazenly, addictively weird Japanese outsider music over a period of five years, each with typewritten liner notes and enigmatically constructed Xerox artwork of found materials. The cassettes remain the stuff of collectors’ dreams, fetching astronomic prices on the rare occasions they surface in record stores or private sales. However, a keen archivist, Koshiro Yoshimatsu’s master recordings remained in his possession (a not unreasonable outcome given that his work was all self-recorded in his home) and meticulously filed, ready for rediscovery.

Over the breadth of Yoshimatsu’s work - solo, ensemble, and in composition for labelmates - we see a remarkable generosity of musical talent. Some records (such as those produced for Fumie Yasamura) are formed of hazy, gliding 4-track pop songs coursing with hallucinogenic electricity. Others, such as 1982’s Poplar combine bucolic nylon-string guitar rambles, vibrantly coloured with sequenced MIDI arpeggiation and the dulcet bloops of early computer programming. Further still, Pastel Nostalgia, from 1983, marries primitivist piano with wailing siren tones and dripping tap percussion. It is significantly creepier, more acerbic and disembodying than the ambient or New Age music of the era, despite a similarity in raw materials.

Zentai Vol. I bundles together Spherical Voyage (1982), Strawberry Secret, and Sepia Renaissance (both 1983) and focuses on Yoshimatsu’s pastoral and organic period. Vol II includes Life In The Water, Commercial Romanticists, and C’est La Vie (all 1983), records all in a (roughly) pop or songwriter vein. Vol III covers Curios (1982), Pastel Nostalgia, and Last Lizard (both 1983), leaning into Yoshimatsu’s most experimental collage recordings. “My musical interests were diverse, and I created works aiming to expand my musical worldview,” he tells us. “During the five years from 1981 to 1985, I was obsessed. It was a very magical experience.”

Alongside 2024’s career retrospective album Fossil Cocoon, Yoshimatsu’s substantial catalogue now happily, newly sits in a neat collection, compressing his enormous abilities into single moments. Koshiro himself was an invaluable lighthouse throughout the curation process, a guide through the depths and annals of his recording career, now forty years hence, shining light onto forgotten music rescued from home-recorded tapes. The result may be an expressly varied collection of works, but it is held magically together by Yoshimatsu’s profoundly singular creative alchemy.

Koshiro Yoshimatsu was born in 1960 in Yamaguchi City in the Chugoku region of southern Japan. In 1978, then a student of Yamaguchi University and already deeply engaged in the local arts scene, in the classified ads of communications magazine PUMP, he chanced upon the creative work and curatorial interests of the aforementioned Tadashi Kamada, at the time a medical student in a nearby town, and there DD. Records was born.