Black Editions is pleased to present the first-ever vinyl edition of Nagisa Ni Te’s radiant 2014 album, A Long Swim (遠泳). First released on CD in Japan, the album was originally conceived as a double LP and is now, at last, presented in its intended form.

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Since their 1995 debut On the Love Beach, Nagisa Ni Te’s Shinji Shibayama and Masako Takeda have made some of the most intimate and searching music to come out of Japan’s underground, drawing on folk, psychedelia, and rock to build a world entirely their own. A Long Swim was their first album in six years and holds a special place in that world. Its songs carry a wide range of feeling, from memories of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami to the joy of watching children grow up. A Long Swim captures the depth of lived human experience.

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The album grew out of the longest rehearsals in the band’s history, as they prepared for a series of their own full-length concerts. Those sessions allowed the group to coalesce into a true ensemble, shaping every song together from tempo to structure and arriving at the studio with finely honed material. Keyboardist Masayuki Yoshida, formerly of the psychedelic folk-rock band Rashinban, had appeared as a guest on Nagisa Ni Te’s seventh album, Yosuga (2008). For A Long Swim he joined the band as a full member, contributing from the very first arrangements. An extraordinary player who pairs deep musicianship with warm lyricism, Yoshida flourished in Nagisa Ni Te, bringing a rich new dimension to the group’s music.

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Takashi Yamada’s bass and Takeda’s drums anchor the record with new weight. And guitarist Naoki Zushi, Shibayama’s best friend since college and a founding member of the legendary noise group Hijokaidan, brings rare power and transcendence to the album, drawing on decades of developing his own distinctive sound.

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Recorded mainly to analog over six months, the album’s thirteen songs and seventy-one minutes move from the patient title track through “Whispering Thunder” (遠雷) and “Animal Paths” (けものみち) to the closing “Two Notes Glowing” (ひかる ふたつ). It has a fuller sound that is heavier and more dynamic than any Nagisa Ni Te record before it, yet it never loses the quiet luminosity that has always defined the band’s music.

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Shibayama has said that with this album, after some twenty years together, the band had finally reached the kind of ensemble he’d always heard in his heroes: Pink Floyd from A Saucerful of Secrets to Obscured by Clouds, and The Band from Big Pink to Stage Fright.

A Long Swim is a record to sink into, best heard loud, and now spread across two audiophile LPs, exactly as it was always meant to be.