Unbeltipo.

I have the last couple of months, spent a lot of time in front of my speakers listening to various artists and groups from Japan. There is something about the Japanese musicians that appeals to me big time and gets my attention. Their intensity, the power and the nerve they play and compose their music with, is in my ears nothing but amazing and very, very interesting. My "journey" into the Japanese progressive music has brought me far and wide. I have listened to amongst others the following bands and personalities with great pleasure: Acid Mothers Temple, Hoppy Kamiyama, Ruins, Koenjihyakkei, Korekyojinn, Bondage Fruit, KBB, Altered States, Yoshida Tatsuya, Tipographica and Unbeltipo just to name a few of them. One of the bands that caught my special attention and interest and also blew me completely away was the latter band UNBELTIPO.

Unbeltipo comes from the remains of the fantastic defunct band Tipographica, who were a band that existed from 1986 to 1998 and played experimental jazz-rock with strong inspiration from Frank Zappa and his sometimes strange twisted ,but always amazing music.

The man behind Unbeltipo is the Japanese guitarist Tsuneo Imahori who composes, produces and arranges all of the bands music. Unbeltipo mainly plays in the trio format with guitar, bass and drums. On the first release Imahori played with various different musicians, but on the last four he has created a main core version of the band with himself on guitars, Mitsuru Nasuno on bass and Yasuo Sano on drums. Imahori has among many different activities written and recorded various soundtracks for Japanese animated films and has been a guest musician on various releases by other artists. Unbeltipo plays a fantastic mix of experimental jazz / prog / rock with electronic elements. They are a band completely committed to playing instrumental music, with lots of complexity and crooked thoughts, that should get any fan of progressive music clapping their hands.

Unbeltipo has to date released 5 albums, each of them wildly exciting and an interesting listening :

Unbeltipo - 1999 (Sistema Record)
Joujoushka - 2004 (Out One Disc)
Live 2006 - 2006 (Sistema Record)
Live 2007 - 2007 (Sistema Record)
Pheasanthism - 2007 (Out One Disc)

One of the very few places where you can buy the cd's from this amazing band is at Pierre Tassone's great webshop Music by mail, who can be found at the following adress www.musicbymail.dk