My childhood friends“Origin from the six great elements” is a core Shingon Buddhist concept – the belief that everything that exists in the universe is made up of the elements of earth, water, fire, wind, air (space) and mind (consciousness).
The six albums that make up the Japanese keyboardist Masabumi Kikuchi‘s His parents The series, each dedicated to the name and one of these elements, were recorded between 1984 and 1987, first released on CD in 1988 and then on LaserDisc in 1991. Kikuchi’s recordings were never pressed on vinyl and were largely ignored until the Japanese writer, DJ, collector and curator decided to Mas.
Tokyo-based music label founder and producer Hara was first discovered by Kíkuchi’s His parents series in the mid-1990s, seven or eight years after the original release. “Even in Japan at the time, it was hard to get (those CDs),” he recalls. His parents it failed to reach a wider audience and the original CD series quickly disappeared from the market. It didn’t help that Geronimo, the publishing house that published the first limited edition, went out of business soon after its publication.
It was only after Masabumi Kikuchi’s death in 2015, at the age of 75, that interest in these works began to grow overseas. In general, 1980s music from Japan has seen a collector resurgence of late. Shortly thereafter, the streaming platform’s algorithms began recommending long-forgotten ambient music works by composers such as Midori Takada or Hiroshi Yoshimura to the island’s laptop workers, with great success.
In this new and more recognized atmosphere, the original His parents CDs have become highly sought after collectibles. Masaaki Hara had been mulling over the idea of a reissue for some time and finally found the right partners for the project in Japanese distributor Disk Union, enlisting the help of renowned mastering engineer and major producer of ambient music, Taylor Deupree, to remaster the work from the original tapes.
When it first appeared, His parents confused the audience. Masabumi Kikuchi was one of the great jazz pianists; He has played and recorded with Gary Peacock and Johnny Hartman, Miles Davis and Gil Evans, Dave Liebman and Al Foster. Despite the fact that this strange, sparse music was mostly improvised in the studio, it felt more like electro-acoustic art music than anything Kikuchi had worked on before.
Born in 1939, Kikuchi studied music in Tokyo and played with the likes of Lionel Hampton and the late Sonny Rollins when they toured Japan in the 1960s. He briefly moved to the United States at the end of the decade after winning a scholarship to Berklee College of Music, before moving back to Japan to return to the United States in 1974, this time settling permanently in New York.
During the latter half of the 1970s, working as keyboardist for Gil Evans’ Monday Night Orchestra, the pianist delved deeply into the fusion of funk and jazz, increasingly replacing his acoustic piano with an electric model or early synthesizer. His album It scares merecorded in the fall of 1980, reflected this new musical direction, and after continuing down this path One-way traveler (1982), began an even more experimental exploration of early electronic music.
In his Brooklyn loft, the pianist began collecting all kinds of synthesizers and drum machines, eventually turning the modest space into a real recording studio. His favorite instrument was the Yamaha DX7, whose distinctive sound is often associated with this era, but he also had several Moog and Korg synthesizers, a Roland sequencer and an Oberheim drum machine. He spent a lot of time alone at home with his equipment and developed the practice of recording his impromptu jam sessions directly onto two-track analog tape and mixing it on the fly without overdubbing.
He was inspired at the time by electroacoustic composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis – both of whom he began studying after moving to New York – but also by Brian Eno’s vision of ambient music and the Japanese movement. kankyo ongaku (“ambient music”), a minimalist style of music often composed for site-specific spaces, such as commissioned soundtracks for museums and galleries.
At the very least, it’s interesting to note how such crafty, exploratory work was effectively funded by corporate capital straight out of the Japanese bubble economy of the 1980s: Music His parents it was commissioned by the Japanese advertising agency Dentsu for a video project kankyo ongaku as part of the series neo-japanese“which presented the good aspects of traditional Japan from a new perspective,” as Masaaki Hara explains.
Since music was originally intended as an aural accompaniment to visual images, Kikuchi used his synthesizers not only to imitate the sounds of the natural world, but also to evoke their actual physicality in the listener’s mind, employing a unique sense of space that Hara refers to as a “quintessentially Japanese form of expression.”
Buddhist scholar, Shingon Buddhist priest and literature professor Suyu Kanaoko wrote about it His parentsits spiritual implications on the first CD in 1988, explaining that the Six Great Elements are inseparable: “The function of fire does not exist in isolation. Just as water, earth, wind, and space originate from the sun, the basic life force that animates everything in the universe appears to the human eye as six separate forces. Of the six separate forces, they do not yet exist. harmoniously merged into one, undivided.” whole.”
Kanaoko remembers their breakthrough when she first heard the recordings: “After she finished the audition (the His parents), I realized that we can return to our original state of engaging all of our senses to grasp the totality of cosmic forces (the Six Great Elements) that were once only expressed in words. . . . This work marks the emergence of a new form of spiritual activity that builds on the whole body and awakens through all the senses.”
“This work marks the emergence of a new form of spiritual activity that builds on the whole body and awakens through all the senses.”
This should have become clear by now His parents not exactly light, soft background music – most of it is actually quite challenging, calm and sparse, but also dynamic and energetic at times. On some pieces, the DX7 chords and the rhythms of robotic drum machines feel even distantly related to the punk-funk fusion of the downtown art scene of the 80s.
Just listen to the Earth opener “Reggae Triste,” which resembles the dub-jazz fusion Bill Laswell was playing with his band Material at the time. Other pieces are more like Luc Ferrari’s concrete music, and others may remind you of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Haruomi Hosono’s melodic but minimalist post-Yellow Magic Orchestra work.
The decision to record this as a real-time performance instead of multi-track recordings certainly leads to extreme limitations, but as we know, conscious limitations can be a catalyst for creativity. “Multitracking gives you too much leeway,” Kikuchi wrote in the original notes, “and it forces you to start organizing your thoughts.” When you start organizing your thoughts, it’s the same as regression.”
The music is still playing His parents nor was it completely improvised. After Kikuchi’s death, over 500 pages of handwritten sheet music and printed documents were found, possibly as some sort of blueprint for his improvisations; he may even have planned these designs only to drop them during his studio performances, which is actually what Cecil Taylor often does.
When he picked it up His parentsthe experienced pianist was in his mid to late forties. He had a solid career as a jazz musician, but was looking for new ways to express himself. While on the surface His parents it doesn’t sound like jazz, its principles and techniques are deeply embedded in the music. “(It) represents a true fusion of jazz and electronic music,” argues Hara. “I think it offers an approach that continues to inspire both contemporary jazz musicians and electronic musicians.”
So why would anyone listen to this in 2026, when the music wasn’t even popular when it was created forty years ago? The answer to this question can only be given to those who listen deeply and attentively, even then, as now.
“People are looking for an environment where they can really immerse themselves in the sound,” says Hara, pointing to the spread of “jazz.” cat“, Japanese-style listening bars and audiophile listening rooms in recent years. Referring to a venue in Tokyo where he regularly plays sophisticated music to attentive audiences, he says: “The experience of listening to music with others is refreshing, and recordings such as His parents they are perfect (for this).
