Various Artists - URC Selection Compiled by Keiichi Sokabe

URC Selection Compiled by Keiichi Sokabe is a love letter from one generation of Japanese underground music to the one that started it, and all eleven tracks here are exclusive to this vinyl pressing.

URC started in 1969 as a mail order subscription club, a workaround dreamed up by former activist Masaaki Hata to dodge the ethics committees major labels answered to, and it grew into Japan's first true independent label almost by accident. Everyone who mattered in the birth of Japanese folk and rock passed through it, Takada Wataru, Endo Kenji, Okabayashi Nobuyasu, and a young backing band called Happy End who cut their teeth behind Okabayashi before becoming legends themselves. Keiichi Sokabe, longtime frontman of Sunny Day Service and an obsessive URC historian, hand picked every song here, and also handled the jacket and liner notes.

Koroshiteshimaou opens things with Itsutsu no Akai Fusen at their most unguarded, and Zeni ga Nakerya lets Takada Wataru turn poverty into something you can actually hum along to. Salvia no Hana is Hayakawa Yoshio at his gentlest, closer to a lullaby than a protest song, and the live cut of Yume wa Yoru Hiraku catches Mikami Kan mid performance, rougher and stranger than any studio version could manage.

Eleven songs, one obsessive curator, and none of them anywhere else on wax.

Tracklist 

SIDE A 

1. Koroshiteshimaou / Itsutsu no Akai Fusen
2. Talking Jidousha Race Blues / Tomobe Masato
3. Ameagari no Build gai 'Boku wa Machisugite Totemo Tsukarete Shimatta' / Endo Kenji
4. Sora wa Fukigen / Kanenobu Sachiko
5. Yume wa Yoru Hiraku (Live) / Mikami Kan

SIDE B 

1. Agemasu / Rokumonsen
2. Sonoki ni Nareba / Nakagawa Isato
3. Salvia no Hana / Hayakawa Yoshio
4. Hirakata no Akichan / Kagawa Ryo
5. Zeni ga Nakerya / Takada Wataru
6. Rashinban de Hoshiuranai wa Dekinai / Furukawa Go