Vis à Vis Audio Arts is the Tokyo label founded around 1987 by Juntaro Yamanouchi-san to carry the catalogue of The Gerogerigegege, the project he began in Shinjuku in 1985. It is an artist-run imprint in the strictest sense: less a roster than the publishing arm of a single, singular body of work, and it belongs in the archive as the documentary channel through which one of the more notorious corners of the Japanese underground reached record.
The sequence is well established. The Gerogerigegege's first release, a very low-fidelity 1985 cassette, appeared on ZSF Produkt, the label run by Masami Akita-san of Merzbow. To carry the project forward on his own terms, Yamanouchi-san then established Vis à Vis, and in 1987 the label licensed and issued Senzuri Champion, the first Gerogerigegege LP. That record set out the group's method plainly: feedback and noise, but underpinned by an actual rhythm section, so that the results read as noisy punk assault rather than pure abstraction.
What the label existed to document was a body of work defined by deliberate provocation and formal restlessness in equal measure. The Gerogerigegege moved between straight rock, harsh noise, found-sound collage and ambient across their catalogue, and are best known for the 1990 Tokyo Anal Dynamite, seventy-five sub-minute tracks that splice Ramones-style punk to the jump-cut speed of John Zorn-san's Naked City. The provocation was as much about subversion as shock: the follow-up to Senzuri Champion opened with a degraded recording of the national anthem, a gesture aimed squarely at Japanese propriety. The archive documents this plainly and without relish; the point of interest is the work's place in the noise tradition, not its capacity to offend.
As an imprint Vis à Vis stayed small and personal, its identity inseparable from Yamanouchi-san himself, and its catalogue is correspondingly difficult to fix with any precision: short runs, split releases, seven-inches mixing styles, and the general opacity that surrounds the group. The label sits inside the Tokyo noise network alongside Merzbow, Masonna and Incapacitants, though the Gerogerigegege's punk and found-sound instincts always set them slightly apart from the harsh-noise mainstream of that scene. It is filed here as a connector node: the label is the record of the band, and the band is one of the genuine outliers of the Japanese underground.