Few figures have played as pivotal a role in the recent history of Japanese avant-garde music as Hideo Ikeezumi, founder of P.S.F. Records, who passed away on Feb. 27 at the age of 67.
For more than three decades, Ikeezumi ran the label from the cluttered interior of Modern Music, his record shop in Tokyo's Meidaimae neighborhood. Along with the Osaka-based Alchemy Records, P.S.F. became the defining label for a generation of Japan's most uncompromising, and uncommercial, musicians.
In a pre-internet era, when Western listeners had to discover Japanese music via college radio, pricey import CDs and hyperbolic zine reviews, P.S.F. helped cement the country's reputation as home to some mind-bending psychedelic rock and free music.