Japanese singer
Kan Mikami is a legend of the Tokyo underground music scene, and, like the dark avant-garde guitarist
Keiji Haino, he has tenure with the PSF label. The pair collaborate in the group
Vajra and share similar passion for the emotional extreme in their music. They also share a highly prolific recorded output and came to the avant-garde scene in the '80s and '90s while spending the '70s active yet outside on the fringes of Japanese music. Additionally, the comparison with
Keiji Haino is valid only for
Kan Mikami in that they are both artists who have, throughout their careers, shaped strikingly singular aesthetics; hence the comparison stops there.
Kan Mikami is a folk singer and guitar player who delivers his edgy and often-aggressively powerful music in a voice that communicates reams, yet it is sung in a Japanese dialect that can be difficult for even masters of the language to comprehend. While on this album there are traces of
Tim Buckley's most free-form folk circa
Starsailor --
Captain Beefheart in his most wretched blues, and even the '90s work of
Tom Waits spring to mind -- and if one can imagine a similarly impassioned music abstracted through a vortex where forms of rock, blues, and avant-garde are touched upon with a reckless disregard for such formalities, then you're getting close to the realm that this album occupies. As the title may be testament to the fact that this artist may be an outsider even in the most extremely avant-garde circles, there is no doubt that the music of
Kan Mikami comes straight from the soul.
I'm the Only One Around is a prime collection of his self-defined "Japanese blues" music, and is produced in a raw fashion that lends a great deal to the mood. Call it blues, improvisation, or anything in between; this stunning album provides excellent insight into a world which
Kan Mikami inhabits all alone. ~ Skip Jansen