Please note this is a pre-order item due for release 5th September 2025

Indies Exclusive

Tracklist:

1.

2.

3.

4.

5. Black Hole

6.

7.

8. Another Lonely Harpist

9. Theyve Gone, They Will Come – FOCUS TRACK

10.

11.

12. Spirit In My Hair

Intimate and expansive, rich with revelatory songwriting and blasted, sky-scouring guitar, this reissue returns the album to print for the first time since the 2000s.

Recorded in Kyotos Townhouse Studios in mid 1987 and released in limited-to-500 vinyl pressing in 1988, ‘Paradise’ emerged from a scene in Kansai, Japan that was embracing the idiosyncracies of 1970s singer-songwriters, the soaring solos of early seventies psychedelia, and the DIY impulse of 1980s post-punk. While Zushis musical history stretched back to the early eighties he was a founding member of Jojo Hiroshiges noise outfit Hijokaidan he found his feet with groups like Hallelujahs, whose dream-pop collection Niku O Kuraite Chikai Wo Tateyo was recently reissued by Black Editions, and Idiot OClock.

‘Paradise’ appeared two years after that Hallelujahs album and share much the same membership Zushis backing band on several of the songs includes Shibayama on drums and Ken-Ichi Takayama (aka Idiot) on electric guitar, though just as often, Zushi plays all the instruments himself. The coordinates here are wide-reaching you can hear the volume and intensity of Neil Young & Crazy Horse (on Hallelujah: Left Side and Paradise: Midday), the slow-motion magic of Galaxie 500, the idiosyncratic spirit of The Only Ones, all mixed up with tender guitar miniatures and stumbling garage-psych-pop moves.

When interviewed by Shibayama in the mid-nineties, Zushi said of Paradise, it was a sort of collection of songs that had meant something to me up to that point it was my paradise. I wanted to create paradise.