Enigmatic sounds from the early years of the recording industry in Japan – served up in a style billed as ryukoka, which mixes older elements of traditional music with some of the newer flavors emerging from the west in the early 20th century! To our ears, these tunes still sound very traditional overall – but because of the lack of recordings, we also can't tell you what the Japanese music sounded like a generation before – and the whole package is a wonderful presentation of lost relics from the shellac era, similar to sets of this nature from Dust To Digital (although not in a larger book format.) CD features 16 tracks in all – work by Yayoi Tanaka, Mitsuko Nemoto, Ichiro Fujiyama, Chiyako Sato, Otomaru, Hamako Watanabe, Seki Taneko, Kouta Katutaro, and others. (Japanese, Global Grooves) LP, Vinyl record album