Shigeaki Saegusa & DKW-57349 - Radiation Missa (1981)

An electronic-prog mass for... I'm guessing Hiroshima/Nagasaki, given the album title?  That's all I can really guess about this incredibly strange release by composer Shigeaki Saegusa (b. 1942 in Tokyo, seems to have gone on to do both manga soundtracks and orchestral/chamber works); there's lengthy liner notes for this CD, but only in Japanese.  Googling didn't really help, generally just showing up copies of the record for sale with brief descriptions of its content.

 

The lineup details of the four-keyboard, vocodered vocals and drums ensemble "DKW-57349" who perform the work are written in English, so their names are Minoru Mukaiya, Hiroyuki Nanba, Satoshi Nakamura, Nobuo Kurata (all keys), Yukimasa Morimoto (vocoder) and Daiji Okai (drums).  From looking up their other activities, the only band name I recognised was the jazz-fusion outfit Casiopea, who Mukaiya was a member of.

Anyway, if you've always wondered what the standard Latin mass would sound like arranged for an early 80s keyboard army of prog-minded Japanese musicians, with the text sung through a vocoder throughout, you've come to the right place.  Radiation Missa certainly gets full marks from me for utter uniqueness, as well as some nifty fusion grooves here and there, and ingenious arrangements - especially on the 11-minute Credo.  That longest track even has a neat drum solo towards the end, with phaser effects all over it.  In another highlight, the piano-based Benedictus is a nice calm interlude from all the crazy twists and turns.  Just a couple of the lovely quirks of this odd record - if anyone knows more about Radiation Missa, I'd love to hear about how it came to be.

Original LP cover

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pw: sgtg

Brast Burn - Debon (1975)

This album seemed like one of these "too good to be true" musical legends when I read about it a few weeks back.  An obscure one-off by a Japanese musician, who may have also been responsible for another album credited to 'Karuna Khyal' on the same tiny label, that briefly appeared in one record shop in Nakano, Tokyo, and sounded like someone doing a mashup of every krautrock album you've ever heard with a dash of Ry Cooder on top?

So when I found a copy of this CD (from the same Paradigm label responsible for reissuing Journey Through Space and Acezantez) going for peanuts shortly afterwards, it was impossible to resist.  The low price was due to library stickers - seriously, the fact that an English public library had something like this in its CD racks at some point was just the icing on the cake - wonder how often it was borrowed?  And of course, there was still the music...

True to the reviews I'd read, the two 23-minute pieces that make up Debon have a very strong krautrock flavour - there's echoes here of both Amon Düüls, Ash Ra Tempel in their mellower moments, a bit of a Faustlike sensibility... you get the idea.  Long, raga-like sections of guitar and percussion jamming cut into each other with occasional vocal declamations and incantations.  Bells, electronic whooshes and other odd bits of studio noise complete the picture of an album that reminds you of a lot of things, sure, but the way it's all put together is utterly unique and mindbending.  One of these wonderful discoveries that always remind me there's infinitely more great music out there still to be found.

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Joji Yuasa - Piano Works & Tape Music (compi of works spanning '57-'72)

Joji Yuasa (b. 1929, Koriyama) is a wide-ranging Japanese composer, with a particular niche in pioneering electronic/electroacoustic work.  This handy sampler is preceded by a trio of piano pieces, recorded in 1973 by Yuji Takahashi, that are worth a listen, but the remaining 48 minutes of this compilation are mindblowing, and I'll definitely be seeking out more of Yuasa's tape music.

First up is Music For Space Projection, created for the 'Fiber Pavilion' at the 1970 World's Fair in Osaka.  A choppy brass fanfare announces the 15-minute hallucinatory nightmare of orchestral fragments and electronic sounds, like a much more striking, dramatic companion to Xenakis' Hibiki-Hana-Ma  from the same event.

Then there's two great examples of Yuasa's work produced in the NHK Electronic Music Studio in the 60s.  Voices Coming chops and mutates various snatches of telephone conversation, suddenly switching in its last four minutes to words of much more historical weight, focusing on speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr, this work coming from the year after his assassination.  Lastly, "Icon" On The Source Of White Noise from 1966 is fairly self-explanatory, and hisses with great clouds of processed sound for its 13 minutes.  A highly recommended introduction to a trailblazer in sonic manipulation.

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Iancu Dumitrescu / Ana-Maria Avram - In Tokyo (2003)

Let's have another Avram/Dumitrescu, shall we?  This one, as the title suggests, is centred around two live recordings from an October 2002 concert in Hamarikyu Asahi Hall in Tokyo, the first of which is Iancu's Abysses Latents.  Dark percussive clouds, mostly ominous gongs a la early NWW combine with rock-boring sax and a wordless, free vocal from Japanese avant-garde singer Keiko Hatanaka.  Yoko Ono is a lazy comparison to make, but hey, I'm on a holiday week and engaging my brain as little as possible.

On either side of this piece, Dumitrescu offers some of his trademark "computer-assisted" studio work, in the opener Implosive Eternity and the multi-part Bolids & Contemplations.  Sounding a bit like 90s Whitehouse played underwater in the latter piece and a bit like a less-clinical Autechre on the former, this stuff is the most engaging on the disc for me.

Avram contributes the most substantive work, certainly in numbers of players, with La Légende D'icaire for the full Hyperion Ensemble.  Tim Hodgkinson takes the lead with a nice honking, skronking bass clarinet solo, up against various string and percussion clatter - some of it electronically treated, increasingly so as the track goes on.  And how better to close out this fascinating release than with 11 minutes of solo saxophone?  Dedicated to its player, Turkey-based musicologist Robert Reigle, Penumbra is another great rumble 'n' screech through registers of its instrument that only composers with this strength of vision can go to.

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Yoshihiro Kanno - The Four Seasons In Resonance (1983)

Picked this up for cheap recently when reading about the Japanese audiophile label Denon (who also made hi-fi equipment, and blank tapes that I remember owning).  By 1983 when this release came out on vinyl and CD, they were already old hands at digital recording - so needless to say it sounds great, and the music itself is charming, impressionistic and highly listenable in its variety of sounds.

Yoshihiro Kanno was born in Tokyo in 1953, and has composed film soundtracks as well as a neat body of standalone work.  Out of the latter, this suite for percussion is conspicuous in its absence from the lists of works/releases on Kanno's official website, but it definitely deserves attention. 

Starting with a softly twinkling track for December, followed by the even more entrancing gossamer shimmer of January: Silver Storm Illusion, these Four Seasons (nothing to do with Vivaldi) go through several different percussive shadings courtesy of the Tomoyuki Okada Percussion Ensemble.  Arrangements are mostly subtle but cook up a storm when necessary, most notably in September: Typhoon Sphere.  And don't miss the imitation frog noises on May: Dream of the Frog in the Well!

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