Our favorite archival reissues and compilations of the year! As usual, the year-end selections continue with archival and compilation projects… This year, two collections of lost demos captivated […]
Black Editions Group releases Shizuka’s raw 1994 album ‘Heavenly Persona’

Black Editions Group presents Shizuka’s sole studio album, 1994’s Heavenly Persona, for the first time on vinyl.
Mind your volume control when dropping the needle on the opening few minutes of Shizuka’s recently reissued 1994 album Heavenly Persona. A dense electric guitar freakout by Shizuka Miura and Maki Miura, the married couple who created the work, the piece is a kind of palate cleanser seemingly designed to strip away expectations – and the paint from the studio walls.
Described in release notes from Black Editions Group as “a spectral figure, creating ghostly, childlike dolls and writing haunting, other-worldly songs,” Shizuka struggled with mental illness for much of her creative life and committed suicide in 2010. That tragic end adds a layer of heart-wrenching melancholy to Heavenly Persona. Not that it needs it. Driven by Maki Miura’s electric guitar, which also he played with Japanese noise-punk bands Fushitsusha and Les Rallizes Dénudés, the album is teeming with open-chord, unresolved emotion.

One way to get at Shizuka’s approach is to read a missive she wrote in July, 1994 about her inspiration for singing.
On September 6th, 1993, I felt a stranger’s presence flow through me. “The end of material civilization is near. Man will soon transcend the physical realm. But when this day comes, many souls will be lost forever,” she announced and then swiftly disappeared. She has since visited me occasionally, and with her help I’ve witnessed stars align to form a cross, and a golden country filled with waves of tremendous rapture. She says I have a divine duty to impart through my music a sense of the waves of delight I have experienced, even if I can only reach one other person.
Her voice has been described as ethereal, but don’t expect the Cocteau Twins. Shizuka sings with a certain raw desperateness – and a complete disregard for staying in key. The effect is a destabilizing listen, one that seems to teeter as if on the edge of an abyss.
In a 2010 blog post announcing her passing, writer Mason Jones captured what draws listeners to the group: “The other members of their band varied, but the two of them were the voice behind the band: Shizuka’s delicate, almost timorous vocals and softly-strummed guitar mixed perfectly with Maki’s intense playing, which would explode into some of the greatest psychedelic shredding this side of Fushitsusha, with whom he played in the past.”
Jones, who booked a few Shizuka shows in San Francisco and got to know her, added, “despite Shizuka’s somewhat timid stage presence, she was actually a very strong person: this wasn’t Maki’s band, it was truly hers, even though it wouldn’t have been what it was, of course, without his remarkable playing.”
For more information on Shizuka, hit Black Editions Group.