Phantom Limb reissue the vital 1985 compilation album by Japan’s half-forgotten, cult label DD. Records, featuring cuts from key outsider Japanese artists of the era. Disk Musik: A DD. Records Compilation (out on 11th April) encompasses a delightful treasure trove of avant-punk, cubist ambient, sound collage, pop concréte, jazz-prog, early computer music, and much more.

DD. Records opened and closed within a few frantic years. In that short time (from 1980 to 1985), they released exactly 222 cassettes (and a handful of vinyl records) of the strangest, boldest, most arresting and addictively subversive music within their small social and creative circles. Each of their cassettes came with abstract, xerographic artwork of found imagery taken from classical and Medieval literature, contemporary and historic photography, science textbooks, magazines, homemade erotica, and endless more. The records reveal the strength of the community the label had fostered and the insular self-reference and in-jokes that kept the music from outsiders for decades. Indeed, only a single US retailer was engaged to carry their releases outside Japan. Forty-plus years hence, many records have been lost to time, but occasionally surface when (so writes an online observer) “a private collector has a medical bill to cover.”

An artefact left behind was Disk Musik. Though compilations were not unknown to DD. Records, vinyl releases were rare. It appears to be their final release: a parting gift to neatly bookend five feverish and productive years of new music, rubber-stamping their creative identity. In the twenty-first century, the second-hand market for original copies is limited to scarce private sales at seriously hefty prices.

There are endless and curious gems within. Opening with the fried psych-folk, dreamy vocals, and toybox percussion of trio サーカディアンリズム [Circadian Rhythm], Disk Musik’s stall is set out as much to bewilder as it is to beguile. Following, comes musician and painter Kumio Kurachi’s project Kum, with its homespun, acoustic glam-stomp always on the verge of falling to pieces, but revealing genuine songwriting chops and earworming melodic detail beneath the knowingly applied layers of hauntology, noise, and humour. Later, Tomomichi Nishiyama sends intergalactic plates spinning into black holes of solar storm feedback with 10T track “Israel”, while T. Isotani’s “½ Orange” provides a welcome return to earth, an edenic utopia of plantasic blossoms and blooms. Across an extended duration (over fifty minutes on a single disc), Disk Musik is relentless in its invention, wildly varied in its expression, and entrancing in its telling of a story truly unique in the world of independent and alternative music. Where else could Tadashi Tsukimoto’s rambling outsider folksong marry lo-fi Yip/Jump primitivism to the scorched Casiotone ambience of “In and Out” by Takahiro Kuramoto’s Mask?