Shinjuku Thief - The Scribbler (1992)

Released eighteen years ago already, Shinjuku Thief’s ‘The Scribbler’ is an integral album in the dark classical/ambient/industrial genre that seems to be overlooked by a lot of music goers. Shinjuku Thief if you’re not familiar with them, and I’m assuming you may be, is a project put together by Melbourne, Australia based composer Darrin Verhagen. The band began as a three piece, but by their third album, 'The Witch Hammer' was released Darrin was on his own and it has been that way every since.

The thing I like about this artist is that this music has a very cinematic feeling to it, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise since the bands name was taken from a Japanese film called, ‘Shinjuku Dorobo Nikki (Diary of a Shinjuku Thief).’ The songs within this album are mostly very dark and menacing, while some are calmer, but most are much more bombastic and stirring. The Scribbler could be described as dark classical with occasional noise & industrial sounds, ambient passages, piano crescendos and spoken samples in German. The album itself is truly supposed to be a musical performance of fiction writer Franz Kafka’s, ‘The Trial.’ So I could imagine this album would work well when reading this story.

Originally released in a limited run of just 500 copies on Darrin Verhagen’s own Dorobo Records, it saw a much needed re-issue on Cold Spring Records three years ago. This reissue contains an eleven minute video clip, which can be watched on your computer. The video shows pictures of Franz Kafka, as well as many abstract images and perhaps images from some of the film adaptations of The Trial. In any case its interesting to watch and listen too.

It’s good to see this gem of dark classical/industrial/ambient music available once again for those that have longed to own a physical copy of the album though regreatably this is the only Shinjuku Thief album I've gotten my hands on in the five years that I've known about the project.