Yuta Matsumura - Red Ribbon
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Just hit the 'reserve' button at the checkout page as your shipping option when you've finished making your order, and your order will automatically be held in reserve here until you are ready for us to ship everything to you.You can keep as many orders in reserve with us via our site as you like, until you are ready to ship. Just send us an email when you are ready to ship your reserve orders, and we will get in touch with the combined shipping price, or ship for free if you have exceeded the minimum order amount for free shipping to your address.
Can the reserve function be used to get free shipping? Yes - If your combined order total is more than £50 within the UK, over £150 within the EU, or over £225 worldwide, we'll ship your order to you via courier service, for free.
Here's a step by step guide to using it:
1. Click on the account icon to log into your account.
If you don't have an account, please click 'create account' to make one. If you had an account on the old RWDFWD site, please create a new one with the same email address used on the old site - this will ensure your previous orders are brought through to your new account.
2. Add records to your cart as normal.
3. When you're ready to check out, select 'ship'.
4. Then select 'Reserve items' on the shipping method list, then continue to payment.
5. Once payment is complete, your order will show in your account as 'unfulfilled'. We will have put all the products aside in reserve for you to combine with other orders and ship later in bulk.
6. When you're ready to ship all the items you have in reserve, email us on info@rwdfwd.com and we will calculate the shipping due and arrange for payment to be taken.
7. Sit tight and wait for your records to arrive in the post!
Free Shipping?
We offer free shipping on orders over a certain value
UK orders over £50
EU orders over £150
Worldwide over £225
This is automatically applied at checkout and reserve orders also count towards it.
EU Order info
Unfortunately, the UK is no longer part of the EU - This means that certain shipments sent to addresses there from us may be subject to tax and / or import duty - All orders sent from RWDWD are sent ‘DDU’ - That is, duty unpaid - any import tax and/or duty is the sole responsibility of the buyer.
If you would like to use our reserve function to group several orders into one large shipment, we can arrange for it to be sent tax and duty pre-paid so you don’t have to worry about it at a later date - Contact us for more information.
As pretty much all the BEB / LC related goods, this one is a gem. If you didn't dig it yet, then please feel free to do so now.
Having played in bands like Low Life, M.O.B. and Orion, and the duo Jay & Yuta (with Jay Cruikshank), Red Ribbon is Matsumura’s first solo outing, and represents a conscious effort to move away from guitar-based songwriting. He composed its nine tracks mostly on piano - layering vocals, bass, keyboards, flute (courtesy of Maeve Parker), violin/cello (Laurence Quinn) and clacking drumbox rhythms into dynamic, dubwise avant-pop structures which are supple and spacious but fizzing with detail and ultra-vivid inner life.
The laconic 4/4 pulse, heat-warped synth-tones and haunting vaporous melodica of opener ‘Box Garden’ set the tone, its psychedelic patternings barely concealing a deep sting of longing and regret. Cryptic lyrics suggest chance encounters, hidden logic, missed opportunities, fatalism, serendipity. A city submerged: everyone else paused mid-movement, while you’re allowed to swim free and fish-like through the streets, over the rooftops...
‘Tangled Orchid’ is a tense night-drive through dry desert heat and into the unknown, running away from your old life, chased down by dust-devils of half-baked schemes and abandoned plans, while ‘Myth Machine’ drops the tempo and something mind-altering, pulling you down into a tripped-out dub-disco scuba among alien flora and fauna, a world of impossible shapes and fluorescences.
At which point, the mood of the album decisively shifts, firstly with ‘Soko No Oto’, sung in Japanese by Haruka Sato: an instant-classic, breathtakingly intimate lover's lament that sounds like it got lost on its way to heaven and is now doomed to orbit the earth forever. The songs that follow continue in this more confessional, imploring mode. As if the travelling's done, the baggage has been cast off, and we’ve arrived at our destination, where the real process of rebirth and repair can begin. The music’s textures become less overtly dubby and electronic, with more of an organic, earthy, chamber-pop/avant-folk feel, at once sad and hopeful-sounding. Three songs in particular bear the influence of Eno’s 70s work (and its mutant bedsit offspring Lifetones, Flaming Tunes, etc): ‘‘E. Potential’, where baroquely chorused vocals - half-agonised, half-beatific - teeter on top of simple oscillating piano loops, and the stately, dawntreading ballads ‘Tabula Rasa’ and ‘No Sleep For Birds’.
The bulk of the album was made prior to lockdowns and all that: its themes of reset, self-examination, the need to f**k it all off and take spiritual stock, are timeless. Though they perhaps have a more bittersweet resonance now the world has returned pretty much to how it was, only worse. "
2. Tangled Orchid 04:18
4. Red Ribbon 04:45
5. Soko No Ato 04:27
6. Tabula Rasa 03:48
8. No Sleep For Birds 04:13
9. Zookeeper's Trial 04:48
Tangled Orchid
Myth Machine
Soko No Ato
E. Potential
No Sleep For Birds
Zookeeper's Trial