A collection of exquisitely witchy dark ambience from Japan that was released by Charnel Music in 1997. Like all of the other Charnel Music releases that we currently stock, this title is hard to come by and we have some of the last copies in existence, obtained from the dusty forgotten corners of one of our suppliers. This amazing album is one of my favorite on Charnel, a twilight ghost-poem that is so opposite the hardcore noise rock/heavy psych that the label championed, but at the same time its ghostly beauty fits in perfectly with the Eastern psych leanings of label boss Mason Jones. Onna-Kodomo was a three piece of Yuko Hasegawa on vocals and bass, Shizuo Uchida on bass and guitar, and Shinmei Suzuki on electric violin, and they created these amazingly delicate shafts of darklight out of their austere instrumentation, combining deep, rumbling bass notes that linger in mid-air with simple, dolorous violin and scraping textures, a darkly ominous backdrop for Yuko's entrancing singing...her angelic voice has an ethereal, airy quality that reminds me of Elizabeth Fraser from Cocteau Twins, but far creepier as Yuko mouths wordless strains of angelic tones over the minimalist playing and increasingly eerie atmosphere that the musicians conjure up. Guitar and bass are plucked sparsely, the skeletal melodies suggesting ancient Japanese folk music...but in the shadows of Onna-Kodomo's soundworld, there are sounds that are less easy to identify. Squeaking noises enter and cross your line of hearing, disappearing into the darkness, and deep breathing sounds appear at the edges of your periphery. The whole album evokes images of wandering through a moonlit forest in ancient Japan and encountering dark spirits and demons, an otherwordly atmosphere marked by a bottomless well of sorrow via Yuko's chilling vocalisations. Fans of dark chamber-music groups like Amber Asylum and Dirty Three might really dig this, though the music of Onna-Kodomo is much darker and creepier than either of them...imagine if Amber Asylum had created the scores for the Japanese ghost stories Onibaba and Kwaidan. Immensely spooky and beautiful.