in japan, find you fresh tunes.

Aus - Small Time.

The air conditioning continues to break in my office. The maintenence crew will come on Thursday and the unit will be broken again by Friday. It's easily 85 degrees of dead heat in there. It's not the worst thing in the world, but it certainly makes it unpleasant, ya know? So thank god fo Aus. This is just the coolest album, and I mean that in a literal sense. It's a record that really snuck up on me. I burn through a lot of promo CDs in the course of a given day, and not many make it back in there for a second round. And while Aus didn't immediately jump out at me, I found myself returning to it time and time again, just to cool off.

Turns out it's an amazing little record. 9 songs, 42 minutes. All of it just wonderful, quiet beauty. The band is actually one guy - Yasuhiko Fukuzono from Tokyo. This is his third record, and I haven't yet had the opportunity to hear his others yet. His latest, Sonorapid is just wonderful. Everyone I play it for falls in love with it. I mean, what's not to like? Listen for yourselves. It's quite delicate and sparse, but never cold or informal. It's like a nice glass of lemonade, and not in some old fashioned country kinda way.

At any rate, the fine folks over at Music Related records have decided to put this out here in the states. And I can't blame them one bit. I have no idea who they found Yasuhiko, or how any of that transpired (although it seems they travel to japan a lot). Their putting out the record on June 20th. You can head on over to the shop and pick up a copy*. Highly recommended.

*it would appear that the ML dudes are over in Japan as we speak, finding new music. They'll be back on the 7th and you can buy whatever you want next Monday. Cheers!