OSHARAKU by THE KASAI OSHARAKU PRESERVATION SOCIETY AND OTHERS

The fourth release in the EM Records/Riyo Mountains Japanese folk series - featuring legendary Osharaku masters, recorded in their homes, brilliantly capturing the casual warmth and vitality characteristic of the style.Osharaku is a traditional Japanese form of musical entertainment, featuring mainly voice, shamisen and percussion, with a repertoire of folk and popular songs, performed by farmers and fishermen for local audiences. Osharaku is unique in its use of shamisen, originally an “uptown” urban instrument, in a “downtown” non-urban setting. Riyo Mountains are a Japanese folk song research team formed by Mood Yama and Takumi Saito. They are resident DJs at the renowned party ''Soi48'' at Be-Wave, Tokyo, featuring music from all over the world. They produced the Japanese folk song mix-CD series entitled ''Riyo Mountains Mix'' and also direct the reissue series of Japanese folk music on EM Records, including the releases ''Yumi-kagura'', ''Sakai Ishinage Odori”, and ''Kizaki Ondo”. Riyo Mountains have appeared as DJs at many events/programs including NTS (London) and Japanese Bon-Odori traditional dance festivals. Their articles about Japanese folk music are now published serially in the Japanese web magazine “boid''.