A Return To Slavery / RAMLEH
My first encounter with RAMLEH was the shocking cover of this album.
It appeared in reviews and advertisements in Fools Mate at the time, and I was surprised by how impactful it was, on par with SPK.
The cover of Hand Of Glory, which came out around the same time, was also shocking, and I wanted both, but they were out of reach in Hokkaido, and they quickly sold out in record stores in Tokyo, so I was never able to get my hands on them.
This album is a split record between RAMLEH and LIBERTARIAN RECORDINGS, but along with Hand of Glory, I consider it to be one of RAMLEH’s masterpieces.
After that, whenever I saw it, it was always in second-hand record stores at ridiculously high prices, so I wasn’t able to listen to it for a long time.
It seems RAMLEH himself came to Japan in the ’90s, and released a 12-inch single on VIS A VIS, the label run by Gerogerigegege.
They released several albums after that, and I had the opportunity to listen to their music. It had a mysterious feel, with elements of both garage and psychedelic, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on whether it was noise or not.
Then, surprisingly, a self-edited version, titled “We Created It, Let’s Take It Over Vol. II," was released on the PURE label with a different cover, with “Return To Slavery" included in Vol. III.
When I listened to it, I remember being excited to hear that it was all music from a noise band completely different from the RAMLEH of the time.
However, for some reason, the PURE label, which is thought to be organized by RAMLEH, had the same cover in the early days, with only the title and band name pasted on a sticker.
Once you peeled the sticker off, they all looked the same, and it felt lonely, lacking the distinctiveness of the covers that had been present since the BROKEN FLAG label days.
(It seems that PURE later released a different version with a slightly more unconventional cover…)
I was lucky enough to see RAMLEH perform live in 1994.
The opening act was SKULL FLOWER. Neither of them had the image of being a classic noise band, but RAMLEH had a psychedelic feel to them.
I like them in their own way, but I would have liked to have seen RAMLEH in their noise heyday…
They seem to have now safely(?) returned to being a noise band, so in a way I feel like I got to see a live performance from a rare period.