Masayuki Takayanagi was one of the truly iconoclastic musicians to emerge from Japan, or anywhere else, in the 20th Century. Though he won acclaim in the 1950's and 60's as a master of the electric guitar and jazz improvisation, Takayanagi was a restless spirit, deeply engaged with the era's new movements in contemporary art, music, liter His work, beginning in the late 1960's, placed him on the leading edge of these developments; he began expanding on the most radical elements of American and European free jazz, infusing them with the raw feedback and dissonance of electronic and avant-garde music. With his various "New Direction" groups, Takayanagi broke free of traditional structures and developed new structures. theory of music that embraced an aggressive and unrelenting style of playing that has remained almost completely unparalleled in it's ferocity. Of all the albums to be released during Takayanagi's lifetime, 1975's ECLIPSE was perhaps the most enigmatic and sought after. Released in an edition of only 100, it almost immediately disappeared and became a Holy Grail for Japanese seurs of adventur ous music, and rightly so. It's first side contained a two-part realization of Takayanagi's "Gradually Projection" modality - a searching interplay between instruments- slowly emerging from a sparse open field and building with the tension of a looming thunderstorm. The second side contains an epic performance of a "Mass Projection", a high energy, densely layered barrage of sound that it in it. 25 minutes, never Once slackens it's intensity. It would be another 31 years before this key album in Takayangi's oeuvre would finally have a (slightly) wide audience through a CD release by Japan's P.S.F. Records. Black Editions is proud to present a deluxe vinyl edition of this masterwork, revealingly remastered from the original tapes by Elysian Masters. The album is packaged in a heavy double tip-on gate fold jacket that pays tribute to the original handmade packaging and features a previously unseen studio photograph of Takayanagi by Tatsuo Minami.
