A one-operator Italian label that started in contemporary harsh noise and became one of the most important archival projects in the field: the place where the Italian and Japanese noise undergrounds of the 1980s and 1990s were pulled back into print.
Urashima is an Italian noise and experimental-music label, founded in Milan in 2009 by Cristiano Renzoni, who also records as Alo Girl. I keep it at Tier II as a major single-scene label figure: not a founding institution of the music itself, but one of the two or three labels most responsible for the shape of the noise reissue landscape as it now stands, and the documentary custodian of catalogues that would otherwise be close to unobtainable.
The early catalogue, from 2009 to around 2011, was contemporary harsh noise, with some crossover into the UK and American scenes: early releases by Mutant Ape, Werewolf Jerusalem and The Rita, plus material from the French HNW artist Vomir. This is the part of the story that is easy to overlook, but it matters: Urashima came out of the working noise scene rather than out of a record-collector culture, and the reissue programme that followed was made by someone already inside the music.
The defining turn came in 2012, when Urashima began a run of reissue projects along two parallel lines. The first is the history of Italian noise: the Atrax Morgue catalogue and the wider Slaughter Productions tape series of Marco Corbelli, and the early industrial work of Maurizio Bianchi. The second is the back catalogue of the major Japanese noise artists: Merzbow, Masonna and his Space Machine alias, Solmania, Incapacitants, Aube and Grim, among others. Much of this material had only ever existed on limited cassette or CD; Urashima brought a great deal of it to vinyl for the first time, often in expanded editions.
The editions themselves are part of the point. These are deluxe analogue objects: hand-numbered vinyl in small runs, typically between about eighty and three hundred copies, wooden box sets, silkscreened sleeves, replica inserts and booklets, and frequently no digital version at all. Remastering is handled by names from within the scene and its orbit, James Plotkin, Lasse Marhaug, Andrea Marutti and others, which keeps the reissues credible as documents rather than as mere repackaging. The result is a catalogue that is simultaneously an archive and a collector's object, carried under the running UMA catalogue number.
There is a deliberate near-obscurity to how the label operates. Renzoni declines most interviews, and has said in effect that the artists are not especially interested in being profiled either; the William Burroughs line that there is "nothing here but the recordings" fits the house philosophy exactly. The work is made possible in part through Fabio Carboni of Die Schachtel, Blume and Soundohm Distribution, which is also how the editions reach the collectors who sustain them.
Citation. Where Urashima sits in the archive: a Tier II noise label; the documentary custodian of the Slaughter Productions / Atrax Morgue catalogue and of the early Maurizio Bianchi material on the Italian side; the vinyl home, retrospectively, of the golden-age Japanese noise catalogues of Merzbow, Masonna, Solmania, Incapacitants and Aube; and a working example of a label whose editorial act is reissue and preservation rather than discovery.
VAGO · c. the Anthropocene