Koichi Kawamura is a talented Japanese musician who mainly makes summer-themed music. This is his first album released in 1989. The physical CD, released on Air Records, is pretty rare nowadays.
Although being pretty talented and produced some of my favorites songs, Mr. Kawamura is never famous in the music scene. He even had to start a crowdfunding project in order to support his third release entitled \"Summer Breeze\", though the project never collected the desired amount of money. Lack of fund aside, the EP is actually pretty good by my standards and it is available on Spotify.
I first found this album on a Japanese music blog when I was searching for Trade Love's album \"Paradise Door\". I fell in love with it after listening to part of it on Koichi Kawamura's Youtube channel. I searched everywhere on the web to download the album, only to find out that it is not yet available for neither download nor listen on the web. There are also only a few pieces of information about it. So I decided to buy the physical CD of the album in order to listen to it in a higher resolution. However, it turns out that this album is rarer and more expensive than I thought. There was a buy-it-now listing for this album on Yahoo Auction for about 5000 JPY. I thought it was too expensive and did not get it. That listing was sold shortly, and I quickly realized that I have lost one of the most important chances to get the album since it is not likely to show up again anytime soon on Yahoo auctions. It really did not. I searched it through a span of 2 months and saw no new listing.
So I was pretty surprised to come across my copy at a local second-hand retailer. I do not live in Japan and never expected that a rare Japanese CD that usually sells for 30-50USD in Japan online is available for sale for 7 bucks in my country. I purchased it the day I saw it online. The case is pretty beat up and the OBI is lost but the booklet and disc are clean.
The next album on my want list would definitely be his second album released in 1990 entitled \"Step On The Cherry Wave\". It is even rarer than this one. In the past 120 days, this album was sold 3 times but the rarer one was never spotted. This album is recorded in Hawaii with members of Kalapana to enhance the summer feeling to it. You can find songs from this album on Youtube in this playlist:
