Search Results for:
YOKO ONO
This long-overdue vinyl reissue of Yoko Ono’s seminal but massively under-appreciated ‘Plastic Ono Band’ has all the makings of a classic rock nostalgia trip: Ono, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Klaus Voorman and free-jazz legend Ornette Coleman. All the pieces are here to stir up a dangerous amount of nostalgia but once the needle drops the record achieves something exactly perpendicular to nostalgia.
Released in 1971, the album not only influenced the approach of other musicians for decades, it also sounds absolutely modern 44 years out, eternally fresh despite the forward march of time.
‘Plastic Ono Band’ not only predicted the intersection of the avant-garde and rock that would take place in the second half of that decade, the album would sound right at home at where that intersection is happening today.
Released in 1971, the album not only influenced the approach of other musicians for decades, it also sounds absolutely modern 44 years out, eternally fresh despite the forward march of time.
‘Plastic Ono Band’ not only predicted the intersection of the avant-garde and rock that would take place in the second half of that decade, the album would sound right at home at where that intersection is happening today.
TRACK LISTING
Why
Why Not
Greenfield Morning I Pushed An Empty Baby Carriage All Over The City
AOS
Touch Me
Paper Shoes
If you’ve listened to ‘Feeling The Space’, Yoko Ono’s personalis- political 1973 album, it should come as no surprise that the once-reviled artist is inspiring a new generation of activists in 2017.
On such songs as the righteous chant ‘Woman Power’, the empathetic ballad ‘Angry Young Woman’, the hilarious protogrrrl ‘Potbelly Rocker’ and the satirical ‘Men, Men, Men’, Yoko sings in surprisingly straightforward fashion about the burdens carried by women and the mandate for feminism.
Supported by such skilled studio vets as guitarist David Spinozza, sax player Michael Brecker and drummer Jim Keltner, this is perhaps Yoko’s most accessible album and her most intimate.
‘Feeling The Space’ was recorded during the time when the avant-garde visionary artist became estranged from her rock star husband John Lennon. He plays only briefly on the album (billed as Johnny O’Cean); she produced and wrote all the songs. The result is a definitive soundtrack / document of the era of consciousness raising and of radical critique of the family structure. Yoko and company deliver this hard message soft rock style, or as soft as Yoko could get. Yoko was on the front lines of the women’s liberation movement.
Dedicated “to the sisters who died in pain and sorrow and those who are now in prisons and in mental hospitals for being unable to survive in the male society,” it’s an emotional exploration of the psychological toll of oppression.
Available again for the first time in decades.
On such songs as the righteous chant ‘Woman Power’, the empathetic ballad ‘Angry Young Woman’, the hilarious protogrrrl ‘Potbelly Rocker’ and the satirical ‘Men, Men, Men’, Yoko sings in surprisingly straightforward fashion about the burdens carried by women and the mandate for feminism.
Supported by such skilled studio vets as guitarist David Spinozza, sax player Michael Brecker and drummer Jim Keltner, this is perhaps Yoko’s most accessible album and her most intimate.
‘Feeling The Space’ was recorded during the time when the avant-garde visionary artist became estranged from her rock star husband John Lennon. He plays only briefly on the album (billed as Johnny O’Cean); she produced and wrote all the songs. The result is a definitive soundtrack / document of the era of consciousness raising and of radical critique of the family structure. Yoko and company deliver this hard message soft rock style, or as soft as Yoko could get. Yoko was on the front lines of the women’s liberation movement.
Dedicated “to the sisters who died in pain and sorrow and those who are now in prisons and in mental hospitals for being unable to survive in the male society,” it’s an emotional exploration of the psychological toll of oppression.
Available again for the first time in decades.
TRACK LISTING
Growing Pain
Yellow Girl (Stand By For Life)
Coffin Car
Woman Of Salem
Run, Run, Run
If Only
A Thousand Times Yes
Straight Talk
Angry Young Woman
She Hits Back
Woman Power
Men, Men, Men
What you hear on ‘Fly’ is Yoko Ono’s disarming combination of opacity and visceral, personal transparency in full bloom. It’s one of the most unbridled, most captivating soul albums ever made. And that’s right where she wants you: vulnerable, wide open to any-andeverything, ready to have your world tipped onto its head. She’s a master of spinning your head around.
First, you get the Bar Band from Hell of ‘Midsummer New York’ to kick things off. It’s about the last thing you’d expect from Ono coming off Plastic Ono Band.
At 16-minute-plus, the tranced-out, motorik-inspired boogie ‘Mind Train’ is rough-and-ready for your next basement get down.
Then we have the absolutely gutting blues of ‘Don’t Worry, Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow)’. Full of ache and raw emotion, the song is a love note, a plea for forgiveness, to her estranged daughter Kyoko shot across the universe on a flaming arrow.
Ono follows this stampede of emotion with the selfreferential torch song ‘Mrs. Lennon’, a wounded song that gets right into the Universal Loneliness.
Available again for the first time in decades.
First, you get the Bar Band from Hell of ‘Midsummer New York’ to kick things off. It’s about the last thing you’d expect from Ono coming off Plastic Ono Band.
At 16-minute-plus, the tranced-out, motorik-inspired boogie ‘Mind Train’ is rough-and-ready for your next basement get down.
Then we have the absolutely gutting blues of ‘Don’t Worry, Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow)’. Full of ache and raw emotion, the song is a love note, a plea for forgiveness, to her estranged daughter Kyoko shot across the universe on a flaming arrow.
Ono follows this stampede of emotion with the selfreferential torch song ‘Mrs. Lennon’, a wounded song that gets right into the Universal Loneliness.
Available again for the first time in decades.
TRACK LISTING
Midsummer New York
Mind Train
Mind Holes
Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow)
Mrs. Lennon
Hirake
Toilet Piece / Unknown
O’Wind (Body Is The Scar Of Your Mind)
Airmale
Don’t Count The Waves
You
Fly
Telephone Piece
There’s a fury at the core of Yoko Ono’s 1973 rock opus ‘Approximately Infinite Universe’ that was not apparent on previously recorded efforts. Ono has always been a master of turning pain and sadness into art but here there’s a clenched-fist intensity that sets it apart in her deep, unparalleled catalogue.
Ono is angry. She proved that one can carry a boundless love for humanity and still be furious - furious at male/female relationships, at war, at your partner. Meanwhile, on a sonic level, Ono ups the ante on the more centred rock & roll sounds she approached with 1971’s ‘Fly’.
The album is one of the most traditional-sounding rock chapters in Ono’s sprawling catalogue. There are moments here that absolutely rival Jersey legends the E Street Band, though of course Ono’s vision leads her band down darker, more mystical paths than the E Street Band ever dared tread.
‘Approximately Infinite Universe’ is an essential and progressive piece of Ono’s output, both in the advancements she made as a songwriter/conceptualist and as a solidified statement of her staunch feminist role within the very male-dominated mainstream rock ghetto of the mid-1970s.
Ono is angry. She proved that one can carry a boundless love for humanity and still be furious - furious at male/female relationships, at war, at your partner. Meanwhile, on a sonic level, Ono ups the ante on the more centred rock & roll sounds she approached with 1971’s ‘Fly’.
The album is one of the most traditional-sounding rock chapters in Ono’s sprawling catalogue. There are moments here that absolutely rival Jersey legends the E Street Band, though of course Ono’s vision leads her band down darker, more mystical paths than the E Street Band ever dared tread.
‘Approximately Infinite Universe’ is an essential and progressive piece of Ono’s output, both in the advancements she made as a songwriter/conceptualist and as a solidified statement of her staunch feminist role within the very male-dominated mainstream rock ghetto of the mid-1970s.
TRACK LISTING
Yang Yang
Death Of Samantha
I Want My Love To Rest Tonight
What Did I Do!
Have You Seen A Horizon Lately
Approximately Infinite Universe
Peter The Dealer
Song For John
Catman (The Rosies Are Coming)
What A Bastard The World Is
Waiting For The Sunrise
I Felt Like Smashing My Face In A Clear Glass Window
Winter Song
Kite Song
What A Mess
Shiranakatta (I Didn’t Know)
Air Talk
I Have A Woman Inside My Soul
Move On Fast
Now Or Never
Is Winter Here To Stay?
Looking Over From My Hotel Window
Originally released in 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s ‘Wedding Album’ was the couple’s third experimental album length record and one of the most remarkable of the duo’s testaments to an intense romantic and artistic partnership that would last fourteen years, until Lennon’s tragic passing in 1980.
On March 20, 1969, John and Yoko were married in a civil service in Gibraltar. To celebrate the event, in lieu of a conventional honeymoon, the newlyweds spent a week in bed at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam, inviting members of the press into their room for interviews and photo sessions and using their fame and the publicity generated by their ‘Bed-in’ to call attention to their campaign for world peace.
With ‘Wedding Album’, John and Yoko created an enduring snapshot of a vibrant pop-cultural moment, with the hostilities of the Vietnam War as its bracing backdrop. It captures the humour, earnestness, and spontaneity that marked the early years of the ‘Ballad of John and Yoko’ era.
‘Wedding Album’’s innovative, original packaging, created by graphic designer John Kosh, included a box filled with souvenirs of John and Yoko’s nuptials: photographs, a copy of the couple’s marriage certificate, both Lennon’s and Ono’s drawings, a picture of a slice of wedding cake and more. Now, with a faithful recreation of ‘Wedding Album’ on special edition white vinyl LP, as well as compact disc, Secretly Canadian are making one of the most unusual and emblematic recordings of the Sixties available again - fifty years after John and Yoko were married - to mark the Golden Wedding anniversary of two of the 20th Century’s most emblematic cultural figures.
On March 20, 1969, John and Yoko were married in a civil service in Gibraltar. To celebrate the event, in lieu of a conventional honeymoon, the newlyweds spent a week in bed at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam, inviting members of the press into their room for interviews and photo sessions and using their fame and the publicity generated by their ‘Bed-in’ to call attention to their campaign for world peace.
With ‘Wedding Album’, John and Yoko created an enduring snapshot of a vibrant pop-cultural moment, with the hostilities of the Vietnam War as its bracing backdrop. It captures the humour, earnestness, and spontaneity that marked the early years of the ‘Ballad of John and Yoko’ era.
‘Wedding Album’’s innovative, original packaging, created by graphic designer John Kosh, included a box filled with souvenirs of John and Yoko’s nuptials: photographs, a copy of the couple’s marriage certificate, both Lennon’s and Ono’s drawings, a picture of a slice of wedding cake and more. Now, with a faithful recreation of ‘Wedding Album’ on special edition white vinyl LP, as well as compact disc, Secretly Canadian are making one of the most unusual and emblematic recordings of the Sixties available again - fifty years after John and Yoko were married - to mark the Golden Wedding anniversary of two of the 20th Century’s most emblematic cultural figures.
TRACK LISTING
John & Yoko
Amsterdam
Following twenty albums over 50 years, Yoko Ono's Warzone is strikingly different from any record she has made previously, but it is also strikingly different from any album that anyone is making...
Yoko revisits and reimagines 13 songs from her past work, spanning 1970-2009, the lyrics and messages still pertinent—perhaps even more pertinent—in 2018. "The world is so messed up. Things are very difficult for everybody. It's a warzone that we are living in..." says Ono. "I like to create things in a new way. Every day things change."
The recordings and arrangements on Warzone are very stripped down, with a particular emphasis on Yoko's voice and lyrics. Here in this minimalist landscape the content of her message rings clear and unencumbered; sometimes somber warnings, sometimes uplifting encouragement, but her wisdom and fortitude are unflinchingly strong, her power having intensified with time and life experience. She ends the ominous questions of "Now Or Never" (1971) with one of her most famous and inspiring lines: "[a] Dream you dream alone is only a dream, but dream we dream together is reality."
Warzone further builds the legacy of an artist unparalleled in her unique and singular vision. At 85 years young, Ono is already plotting her next album... It is not too late to change the world. We need Yoko now more than ever.
Yoko revisits and reimagines 13 songs from her past work, spanning 1970-2009, the lyrics and messages still pertinent—perhaps even more pertinent—in 2018. "The world is so messed up. Things are very difficult for everybody. It's a warzone that we are living in..." says Ono. "I like to create things in a new way. Every day things change."
The recordings and arrangements on Warzone are very stripped down, with a particular emphasis on Yoko's voice and lyrics. Here in this minimalist landscape the content of her message rings clear and unencumbered; sometimes somber warnings, sometimes uplifting encouragement, but her wisdom and fortitude are unflinchingly strong, her power having intensified with time and life experience. She ends the ominous questions of "Now Or Never" (1971) with one of her most famous and inspiring lines: "[a] Dream you dream alone is only a dream, but dream we dream together is reality."
Warzone further builds the legacy of an artist unparalleled in her unique and singular vision. At 85 years young, Ono is already plotting her next album... It is not too late to change the world. We need Yoko now more than ever.
TRACK LISTING
1 Warzone
2 Hell In Paradise
3 Now Or Never
4 Where Do We Go From Here
5 Woman Power
6 It?s Gonna Rain
7 Why
8 Children Power
9 I Love All Of Me
10 Teddy Bear
11 I?m Alive
12 I Love You Earth
13 Imagine
The sound of Ono and Lennon validating their love as something impenetrable and timeless. It’s when we, the listener, begin to fully understand that the scope of their recording efforts was much more than a recording collaboration and something closer to a performative documentary, a declaration of “Our life and our love is our art - every nitty, gritty part of it.”
TRACK LISTING
Cambridge 1969
No Bed For Beatle John
Baby’s Heartbeat
Two Minutes Silence
Radio Play
Turns out the very sound of falling in love is just as abstract, subjective and loopy as the concept itself. Yoko Ono and John Lennon are two of history’s greatest lovers and ‘Two Virgins’ is the document of the pair falling in love in real time. The album is a curious and amazing suite recorded over one weekend in Spring 1968 at Lennon’s Kenwood home: Distant conversations; comedic role playing and footsteps; laughter, birdcalls and plunking piano lines; silly songs and space; tape delay stretching shrieks, bass rumbles and moans to the moon and back again.
The now-iconic cover (featuring Ono and Lennon standing nude together) notwithstanding, nothing about ‘Two Virgins’ is safe. It would be a risky move today for artists in the larger, pop culture conversation just as it was a risky move in 1969. However, this is an uncomfortably private, two-person dialogue about - and celebration of - experimentation, inspiration and play. These two souls bravely let us look through the keyhole.
The now-iconic cover (featuring Ono and Lennon standing nude together) notwithstanding, nothing about ‘Two Virgins’ is safe. It would be a risky move today for artists in the larger, pop culture conversation just as it was a risky move in 1969. However, this is an uncomfortably private, two-person dialogue about - and celebration of - experimentation, inspiration and play. These two souls bravely let us look through the keyhole.
TRACK LISTING
Side One
Side Two
MANIMAL GROUP is excited to announce the sequel to YOKO ONO’S critically acclaimed 2007 collaboration record Yes, I’m A Witch (Astralwerks).
'Yes, I’m A Witch Too' features new collaborations and remixes pairing ONO with Death Cab For Cutie, Peter, Bjorn and John, Sparks, tUnE-yArDs, MiikeSnow, Cibo Matto, Portugal The Man and more.
'Yes, I’m A Witch Too' features new collaborations and remixes pairing ONO with Death Cab For Cutie, Peter, Bjorn and John, Sparks, tUnE-yArDs, MiikeSnow, Cibo Matto, Portugal The Man and more.
TRACK LISTING
1: Walking On Thin Ice
2: Forgive Me My Love
3: Mrs. Lennon
4: Give Me Something
5: She Gets Down On Her Knees
6: Dogtown
7: Wouldnit
8: Move On Fast
9: Soul Got Out Of The Box
10: Approxmately Infinite Universe
11: Yes, I'm Your Angel
12: Warrior Woman
13: Coffin Car
14: I Have A Woman Inside My Soul
15: Catman
16: No Bed For Beatle John
17: Hell In Paradise
Following her hugely successful run as curator of London’s Meltdown Festival, this album continues an astonishing bout of creativity for Ono, who is celebrating her 80th birthday with major museum retrospectives around the world, her 10th #1 hit on the Billboard Dance charts, a sequel to her instruction book Grapefruit, winning "Digital Genius" MTV O Award, and spearheading the activist effort against fracking in her home state of New York. A career retrospective book will be published by Genesis in Autumn followed by reissues of her '60s-80s albums in 2014.
“My new album comes at a very special time for me. The energy I have right now, and the desire to continue to make as much great work as I can, is really moving me forward all the time. This album is the culmination of a lot of ideas I’ve been having over the last few years and I feel proud to release it at such an exciting time of my life."
Take Me To The Land Of Hell was recorded in New York and produced by Yoko, Sean Lennon and Yuka Honda. Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band includes members of Cornelius and Cibo Matto, plus – special guests for this album – tUnEyArDs, ?uestlove, Lenny Kravitz, Nels Cline and Andrew Wyatt. The album includes remixes by Mike D & Adrock and Keigo "Cornelius" Oyamada.
“My new album comes at a very special time for me. The energy I have right now, and the desire to continue to make as much great work as I can, is really moving me forward all the time. This album is the culmination of a lot of ideas I’ve been having over the last few years and I feel proud to release it at such an exciting time of my life."
Take Me To The Land Of Hell was recorded in New York and produced by Yoko, Sean Lennon and Yuka Honda. Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band includes members of Cornelius and Cibo Matto, plus – special guests for this album – tUnEyArDs, ?uestlove, Lenny Kravitz, Nels Cline and Andrew Wyatt. The album includes remixes by Mike D & Adrock and Keigo "Cornelius" Oyamada.
From Fluxus and performance-art pioneer and Two Virgins to chart-topping dance-music heroine(inspiring punk rock along the way), Yoko Ono has been an innovative and influential force on music and art, while simultaneously campaigning for peace on the world's stage. At 76 years young, Yoko continues to kick ass. "Between My Head And The Sky", a career-defining album made with her new Plastic Ono Band. The record is a gorgeous, mind-melting blend of styles, restating and sharpening themes while plunging into the always-mysterious future. Band includes Keigo 'Cornelius' Oyamada and his band members Yuko Araki and Shimmy Shimizu, Sean Lennon, Yuka Honda (of Cibo Matto) as well as NYC improvisers Erik Friedlander, Shahzad Ismaily, Michael Leonhart, Daniel Carter and Indigo Street. Raw rockers, electronic pulse glimmers, dark late-night improvisations and heart-breaking elegiac ballads- Yoko takes a variety of textual approaches on this beautifully balanced collection of work. A career-defining album by one of contemporary culture's reigning geniuses.