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Kitarō: Ten Kai (Astral Trip)

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Domo Records
Released: 1978
Time:
 49:22
Category: New Age
Producer(s): Takayo Nanri
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.domomusicgroup.com/kitaro/
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2015
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] By The Sea Side (Kitarō) - 5:53
[2] Soul Of The Sea (Kitarō) - 2:39
[3] Micro Cosmos (Kitarō) - 5:09
[4] Beat (Kitarō) - 4:42
[5] Fire (Kitarō) - 7:20
[6] Mu (Kitarō) - 2:50
[7] Dawn Of The Astral (Kitarō) - 5:11
[8] Endless Dreamy World (Kitarō) - 2:42
[9] Kaiso (Kitarō) - 5:09
[10] Astral Trip (Kitarō) - 7:41

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Kitarō - Bass, Drums, Acoustic Guitar, Koto, Mandolin, Moog Synthesizer, Synthesizer, Percussion, Illustration, Arrangements, Engineer

Ryusuke Seto - Biwa, Shakuhachi
Lavi - Sitar

Taka Nanri - Producer
Moko Nanri - Executive producer
Makoto Hasegawa - Executive-Producer
Y. Kawanishi - Engineer
Hiroki Katayama »Neue« - Art Direction
Jeffrey Kent Ayeroff - Cover design

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Recorded between November 1977 - February 1978 in Thunder Sound Studios, Tokyo. Remixed at Victor Studio, Tokyo, March 1978.

Original title: Ten Kai. Also sold as "Astral Voyage" (US) and "Astral Trip" (Germany). Re-released in 1985 by Geffen Records.

Astral Voyage (released in Japan as Ten Kai) is the first studio album by Japanese New Age musician, Kitarō. Released as Ten Kai in 1978, the album was re-released as Astral Voyage in 1985 by Geffen Records after Kitarō signed a worldwide distribution deal with them.



Brilliant melodies and powerful Japanese taiko drums soar with grace in the 10 compositions of the album. For someone who has a taste in some new age with some spirit and oriental art, this is for you.

Sound: The music of Kitaro is new age but unlike the average new age that is just soft sounds and is just plain boring, I can really feel the art and 'spirit' of Kitaro's music. Brilliant melodies and powerful Japanese taiko drums soar with grace in the 10 compositions of the album. He is an inspiration to the symphonic side of my interest in music. The music can be described as spiritual. "Feeling is the most important element in my music." once said Kitaro.  About Kitaro. He was born into a Japanese Shinto farming family in Toyohashi, Japan in 1953. As a teenager, he was inspired by Otis Redding, and taught himself the electric guitar in high school and formed the Far East Family Band, which released two progressive rock albums in the early '70s. One remarkable thing about him is that he records all his albums in the privacy of his home studio near Mt. Fuji, Japan, which is 2500 square feet! "It's large enough to hold a 70-piece orchestra -- big enough for me!" (special thanks to http://www.op.net/~kitaro/Kitaro5.htm for this information). He was one of the 'underground artists' until he was picked up by Geffen Records.  About the music on this album it kicks off with "By The Sea Side", which features waves of sea water at the very beginning. The next track "Soul Of The Sea" is more livelier, with a pretty cool wind instrument and some taiko drum beats. "Micro Cosmos" features what appears to be a sitar. "Beat" features some weird beats, which I assume was made by some weird keyboard setting. Around the middle of the track, features the wind instrument again. and harmony kicks in. It ends abruptly after some staticky wave of sound. "Fire" is a personal favorite. Features a stringed instrument close to a siter but is closer to the sound of an acoustic. The second half of the song kicks in with some bass-like sounds and more taiko drums, but with a slow tempo. The outro of the son gis a softer sequence with that stringed picking instrument. "Mu" is not a very big deal but features a bit of picking instruments. "Dawn of the Astral" is also a favorite, features something like a keyboard sound and somehting close to a real acoustic. "Endless Dreamy World" has a wind instrument with deeper tone. The drums are wild on this one. "Kaiso" has a good stringed picking instrument intro. Then there is keyboards, and the sharp-sounding wind instrument (high tone) comes in, and soon the track becomes semi-lively, with an acoustic-like instrument. The final track is "Astral Voyage" (on the tape it said "Astral Trip" but I assumed it was "Voyage"). It has an intro with train sounds (mostly inside the train, where there's conversation). Then there is slight symphony. There is also some cool taiko drums. The wind instrument comes back again, accompanying the drums. Gradually, the drums fade and is left with the harmonies of the wind instrument, and satisfyingly ends the album.

Lyrics: There are no lyrics to this album. All instrumental, but Kitaro's melodic elements cannot beat vocals in my opinion.

Overall Impression: Good thing my mom had a tape of this or I wouldn't have explored or have known the very existence of art in music. Really inspiring. For someone who has a taste in some new age with some spirit and oriental art, this is for you. But I doubt 99% of the people in UG has even heard of him. I doubt you'd find this in most stores, so you can order the CD online of something. Oh, and for the record, Kitaro plays taiko drums every year on Mt. Fuji for the ritual drum ceremony, and he plays them so passionately his hands often bled.

© 2015 Ultimate-Guitar.com



Given the large amount of outright abominations created in its name, it is easy to dismiss out-of-hand the practitioners of the nascent late seventies and early eighties New-Age movement. More importantly, arguably more so than any other nation, it is the Japanese that are guilty of serving up more than their fair share of this smorgasbord of light, airy synthesizers, tree-bells, and water-garden samples. That said, if ever there was a justifiable case of ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ in this most detested of musical idioms, then it might well be Kitaro’s first solo LP proper: the (mostly) delightful Ten-Kai (Astral Voyage) of 1978.

After the disastrous break-up of the original Far East Family Band line-up - following the recording of Parallel World - keyboardist Kitaro retreated to the Japanese countryside, something which shows in the pastoral shadings of this album,. The fade in to “By the Sea-Side,” for example, takes upwards of a minute before even the most gentlest of sounds is heard amongst the samples of tidal shores softly buttressing this aural shoreline. Feverish electronic chattering beaches itself upon this most peaceful of musical environments, as the tide ebbs out, leaving only a high whistling synth-line to accompany these chimp-like mutant electro sounds. A peaceful Japanese melody sounds out, joined eventually by a brand new tidal undertow borne out of huge chordal swipes of string-ensemble synthesisers. Aqueous bubbles of electronica fizz all around, as if to keep the (sub-)marine sonic metaphor intact. This is up there with the most sublime of late-seventies Ashra (sounding very similar to that group’s fantastic meta-hymn, “Deep Distance,” from the New Age of Earth album).

“Soul of the Sea,” perhaps sails nearest to the candle-pale whimsy of the burgeoning New-Age idiom; but even this track somehow retains its dignity throughout, earthy picked acoustics and creamy keyboards, possessing a lot more bounce than Kitaro’s later piss-poor collaborations with the New-Age-obsessed Jon Anderson. Luckily, tracks three and four completely seal the deal for me with this LP: “Micro-cosmos” is a particular highlight - as thunderous sound-FX and wanton Eastern percussion accumulate behind a fabulous sitar-and-moog mantra. The queasily fat moog-sound slithers around the stereo band like a bloated python after the kill, as the resonance and cut-off knobs are skilfully manipulated by this acknowledged master of analogue gadgetry. There is a rarefied air about the piece - as solemn, processional eastern traditionalism meets outright futuristic abstraction - the sitars, bending around a fulsome drone, and the wiggly analogue tendrils, put me in mind of fellow musical mystic: Al Gromer. Resultantly, this piece would not sound at all out of place hibernating within the interim period asserted between Popol Vuh’s In den Garten Pharos and Hosianna Mantra LP’s, or even tucked away on the Nosferatu soundtrack. This track is made all the better by the proto-techno moogadelia that follows it on “Beat” - just the sort of plangent, meditative, tribal-space-funk that would have Juan Atkins or Derrick May a-creaming in their jeans come 85’ and the nascent Detroit uprising. [I’d love to hear this track played at 45rpm (but can’t as I only have a cd-r) - it would make an outright techno barnstormer of the highest order, and yet still retain its nourishing godhead-dedicational foundations]. Beginning with a high-pitched “game over” space invader yelping over a squawking deep-bass synth that grunts and belches out the bass line like some terminally grouchy space troll; a hypnotic mid-frequency sequencer soon joins the groove, and an eerie funk-hymnal develops, mournful synthesisers joining the ascent..until…

…Until…the rushing ocean-samples birth us back to the garden of Babylon just in time for us to kick back and relax for “Fire”: A slow water-garden trickle is heard (yes, alright, point taken), but, hey, this one is not heralding some twenty minute Yamaha DX7 synth wash (-with-occasional-biwa) yawnathon; but a holy acoustic mantra embellished with elegiac weeping synth, backed only by non-rhythmical wood blocks. That is until the band crash in, and we’re off into the LP’s biggest Far East Family moment yet: as majestic a collection of multi-layered keyboards as one could expect from one of the cats who laid down the mighty Nipponjin (1975). A lolloping strum-n-drum rhythm (with occasional avant-garde biwa abuse thrown in for good measure) - the keyboards twine around each other and the choral ascends momentarily, until everything is abandoned again for a more lone, stroked, acoustic guitar. Its up there with United Artists-era Popol Vuh or Gila’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for that classic creamy rock-guitar sound. Light, frothy, but with a strangely fulfilling body of substance!

“Mu” and “Dawn of the Astral” hint at the Ethnicatronic drama of the hugely-successful Silk Road soundtrack, all earnest synthesisers and mutant spaceship roars, over boundless bass-pedal drones, before mutating into the arpeggiated-choral of “Endless Dreamy World” which momentarily sounds like Tyndall-meeting-T.O.N.T.O to rescore Bobby Beausoleil's soundtrack to ‘Lucifer Rising,’ before shifting again to more abstract electronic doodling, in the vein of Bernard Sjazner’s ZED project, for the next track: “Kaiso” but this is a brief interlude, as solemn acoustic start to trill Far Out-like and a wearisome organ sings away - a very sad penultimate tune - it again stays just the right side of outright whimsy. Last Track “Astral Trip” begins with a raucous (free-)drum’n’biwa space raga, a spectral ostinato groove sounding ghost-like in the next room - before the trance-like synth arises once more - a slow moog sonnet - Rick Wright at the end of Shine On perhaps - a Shulze-like sonic horizon (slow mid-70s Schulze down a couple of hundred bpm and your left with Rick Wright anyway) - with fireworks displays of synthetic noise being blasted over to the beyond, spectral string instruments are occasionally hit, strange wind instruments blown, and still the elegiac melody holds court, the occasional hint of a choral emerging out of the mist - it’s a monument of seventies kosmiche exploration, and a fitting noble end to this (mostly passed over) LP.

Kitaro would hit big with the soundtrack to Silk Road, probably his last record with anything worthwhile on it, but with Ten Kai in particular, the keyboardist could hold his own with any of the exponents of seventies space-rock.

© 2015 Head Heritage
 

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