JEAN TAKANAKA

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Aka Suga was in a record store in Osaka when she stumbled upon a record that had this mystical creature on the cover, she bought it based on the artwork and was blown away. She managed to Track down the elusive Jean Takanaka and via multiple phone calls and endless delays secured the rights to release the work of one of the most obscure, talented and craziest artists on the planet.
The little that we know is
Jean Takanaka was born in Yokohama in 1953 to a father who was a policeman and a mother who was an abusive drunk. She made a living in her teens singing jazz numbers to American military men and would claim to have stabbed a soldier in his scrotum and left him for dead after he tried to force himself on her. Numerous odd jobs followed including a mysterious 2 years in Vietnam that she refuses to talk about. She returned to Japan in 1978 settling in the Harajuku district of Tokyo. It was here that she managed to in her own words “Hustle her way into getting a record deal”. The album didn’t sell well. Rather than give them pop hits of the era. She created a psychedelic wall of sound that mostly fell on deaf ears but garnered her a cult following amongst the hipsters of Harajuku.  She was dropped by the label and to add insult they later released additional music from her recording sessions without her consent.  Good Find Records proudly presents 煙草と音  (Cigarette and Sound) by Jean Takanaka.