Bandcamp Friday One-Minute Challenge!

All it takes to enter a different world.....

Happy Bandcamp Friday!

Love or hate it, the indie-music portal remains one of the most consistent and surprising platforms for exploring the unfamiliar. From everywhere. Across all eras of recorded sound. And all genres.

Within seconds of landing on the home page, the browse begins: There’s a real-time-updated “Selling Right Now” panel that shows what is captivating other seekers, and of course, the drop-down menu arranged by genre. Yesterday I set a one-minute timer on my phone, and set up a basic challenge: Could I find something from the vaults, recent discovery or reissue, that surfaced within the last 2 weeks (so, a new release) that might interest readers of Echo Locator?

It took approximately 37 seconds.

Clicked on the first compilation that scrolled across the “Selling Now” bar, an anthology of jazz released by the Japanese King Record label, which documented some of the most interesting instrumentalists of the 1960s, including drummer Hideo Shiraki and saxophonist Akira Miyazawa. Randomly pressed play on a few straightahead tracks before landing on “Introduction” from the drummer Takeshi Inomata and his Sound Limited.

This dramatic suitelike piece appeared on Inomata’s 1971 Innocent Canon for King, and was released for digital download/streaming for the first time earlier this week. Inomata is a drummer with a Ginger Baker-sized audacious streak; his self-titled first record with Sound Limited, released in 1970, is considered one of the founding documents of Japanese jazz-rock. His career hit overdrive after that album — in 1971 alone, he put out several Sound Unlimited titles as well as the soundtrack for a Charles Bronson film called The Man. (Checking that out next….).

Innocent Canon offers unhurried, cresting grooves with a time-capsule quirkiness to them: “Go For Nothing” bubbles along for over seven minutes as a sort-of boogaloo that’s lit up by little brass-section pops and wild, psychedelic organ chords. Lead guitar ducks in and out at will, and while there are long solos, it’s these little commentary asides that keep the track interesting from start to finish.

I’ve spent way more time in the last 24 hours studying Inomata’s approach, and enjoying its meandering ways, than it took me to encounter it. That alone is an argument for why Bandcamp matters. Take the challenge!