Naoki Zushi Paradise Vinyl LP 2025

Indies Exclusive

Tracklist:

1. ???

2. ???????

3. ????????

4. ????????

5. Black Hole

6. ????

7. ???????

8. Another Lonely Harpist

9. They’ve Gone, They Will Come - FOCUS TRACK

10. ?????

11. ??

12. Spirit In My Hair

Intimate and expansive, rich with revelatory songwriting and blasted, sky-scouring guitar, this reissue returns the album to print for the first time since the 2000s.

Recorded in Kyoto’s Townhouse Studios in mid 1987 and released in limited-to-500 vinyl pressing in 1988, 'Paradise' emerged from a scene in Kansai, Japan that was embracing the idiosyncracies of 1970s singer-songwriters, the soaring solos of early seventies psychedelia, and the DIY impulse of 1980s post-punk. While Zushi’s musical history stretched back to the early eighties – he was a founding member of Jojo Hiroshige’s noise outfit Hijokaidan – he found his feet with groups like Hallelujahs, whose dream-pop collection Niku O Kuraite Chikai Wo Tateyo was recently reissued by Black Editions, and Idiot O’Clock.

'Paradise' appeared two years after that Hallelujahs album and share much the same membership – Zushi’s backing band on several of the songs includes Shibayama on drums and Ken-Ichi Takayama (aka Idiot) on electric guitar, though just as often, Zushi plays all the instruments himself. The coordinates here are wide-reaching – you can hear the volume and intensity of Neil Young & Crazy Horse (on “Hallelujah: Left Side” and “Paradise: Midday”), the slow-motion magic of Galaxie 500, the idiosyncratic spirit of The Only Ones, all mixed up with tender guitar miniatures and stumbling garage-psych-pop moves.

When interviewed by Shibayama in the mid-nineties, Zushi said of Paradise, “it was a sort of collection of songs that had meant something to me up to that point… it was my paradise. I wanted to create paradise.”