This week, we welcome our eleventh guest mix selection - this time from Japanese New Age music guru and obscure Anime soundtrack specialist Tsunaki Kadowaki.

Tsunaki is a Tottori-based collector, writer and new age music enthusiast. He works at Meditations record store in Kyoto - arguably the best spot for vinyl in Japan and recently published New Age Music Disc Guide, a book of 600 new age and ambient album recommendations. The guide provides a comprehensive overview of new age music, covering releases from the ‘70s all the way up to the genre’s recent revival. For now, it’s only been published in Japanese, but thanks to the album artworks that beautifully adorn each page, it’s still an absolutely essential document for devotees of the genre.

Tsunaki’s guest mix is titled Japanese Obscure Anime Music for Experimental Music Freaks and it does just that - assembling music primarily collected from rare Japanese anime and manga image albums and soundtracks of the late 1980s/90s. It’s a collection of many moods; mysterious and intricate, delirious and luxurious. Revisiting the halcyon days of such movements are always interesting – the amateur enthusiast hasn’t yet been banned, or bartered out of existence; distribution is among friends. Rough edges remain, are encouraged. Odd characters linger on the circumference engaged in extracurricular experiments and unlikely crosscurrents.

For enthusiasts, this is a seductive prospect of both escape and compensation, insight and freakout. A unique collection of sounds that leaves you wanting more.

chOOn!!