SOMEI SATOH – Mandala / Sumeru (ALM Records - AL-26 / LP-1982)

Label: ALM Records - AL-26
Format: Vinyl , LP, Album / Country: Japan / Released: 1982
Style: Contemporary
Recorded At - NHK Electronic Music Studio
Mandala for vocal drones and electronics recorded at NHK Electronic Music Studio in October 1982.
Sumeru was recorded in December 1982.
Comes with insert
Cover [Design] – Hitoshi Susuki , Kohei Sugiura
Illustration – Fujio Watanabe
Liner Notes – Ishida Kazushi 石田 一 志 , Sato Clever 佐藤 聰明
Producer  Yukio Kojima

Matrix / Runout (Side A runout, stamped): AL 26 A ⁜ Y 1
Matrix / Runout (Side B runout, stamped): AL 26 B ⁜

side 1:
A - Mandala ............................................................................................................. 19:00
      (for vocal drones and electronics)
      Special thanks to Wataru Uenami

side 2:
B - Sumeru .............................................................................................................. 28:00

      conductor – Hiroshi Kumagai
      cello – Masaharu Kanda, Tadao Takahashi
      viola – Hiroshi Nakayama, Takashi Satoh
      violin – Kazuo Yageta, Kenji Kobayashi, Masanobu Hirao, Michiko Yageta
      double bass – Akira Imamura , Kensuke Inomata
      percussion – Midori Takada

RARE ORIGINAL FIRST PRESS ISSUE FROM 1982 of this Minimal / Electronic music & Drone masterpiece.
Released on the collectible ALM / KOJIMA RECORDS imprint.

MANDALA or MANDARA 曼荼羅
Especially important to Japan’s Esoteric Sects

Origin = India
Sanskrit = Maṇḍala, मण्डल
Chinese = Màntúluó
Japanese = Mandara
English = Mandala

The mandala, Hindu in origin, is a graphic depiction of the spiritual universe and its myriad realms and deities. Much later, first in Tibet and China then Japan, the mandala was adopted as a powerful religious icon among practitioners of Esoteric Buddhism (Skt. = Vajrayana). In Japan, the mandala rose to great prominence as a “living entity,” one that ensured the efficacy of esoteric rituals performed in its presence. The original Sanskrit term “maṇḍala” comes from India, and is sometimes translated as circle, essence, or hitch (as when connecting an ox to a cart). The Sino-Japanese spelling of mandala (曼荼羅 or 曼拏羅 or 曼陀羅) is a transliteration of the Sanskrit term. But these transliterations have no inherent meaning -- they simply resemble the sound of the original Indian term.

Mandala scrolls and paintings became popular in Japan in the 9th century onward with the growth of the Shingon 真言 and Tendai 天台 sects of Esoteric Buddhism (Jp. = Mikkyō 密教; Skt. = Vajrayana), which arose in part as a reaction against the power and wealth of court-sponsored Buddhism. The founders of Esoteric Buddhism in Japan were the monks Kūkai 空海 (774 - 835 AD) and Saichō 最澄 (767 - 822 AD). Kūkai, aka  Kōbō Daishi 弘法大師 (his posthumous name), founded the Shingon Sect of Esoteric Buddhism, while Saichō founded the Tendai Sect. Both traveled to China to study and learn the esoteric secrets, and both returned to Japan with numerous artworks and sutras to help spread the teachings. Yet, the oldest surviving color mandala in Japan is thought to be a copy of the Ryōkai Mandara (from China) which was brought to Japan in 859 AD by the Tendai priest Enchin 円珍 (814-891).

Somei Satoh (SATOH Somei 佐藤聰明) was born in 1947 in Sendai (northern Honshu), Japan. He began his career in 1969 with "Tone Field," an experimental, mixed media group based in Tokyo. In 1972 he produced "Global Vision," a multimedia arts festival, that encompassed musical events, works by visual artists and improvisational performance groups. In one of his most interesting projects held at a hot springs resort in Tochigi Prefecture in 1981, Satoh places eight speakers approximately one kilometer apart on mountain tops overlooking a huge valley. As a man-made fog rose from below, the music from the speakers combined with laser beams and moved the clouds into various formations. Satoh has collaborated twice since 1985 with theater designer, Manuel Luetgenhorst in dramatic stagings of his music at The Arts at St. Ann's in Brooklyn, New York.

Satoh was awarded the Japan Arts Festival prize in 1980 and received a visiting artist grant from the Asian Cultural Council in 1983, enabling him to spend one year in the United States.He has written more than thirty compositions, including works for piano, orchestra, chamber music, choral and electronic music, theater pieces and music for traditional Japanese instruments.
Somei Satoh is a composer of the post-war generation whose hauntingly evocative musical language is a curious fusion of Japanese timbral sensibilities with 19th century Romanticism and electronic technology. He has been deeply influenced by Shintoism, the writings of the Zen Buddhist scholar DT Suzuki, his Japanese cultural heritage as well as the multimedia art forms of the sixties. Satoh's elegant and passionate style convincingly integrates these diverse elements into an inimitably individual approach to contemporary Japanese music.

Like Toshiro Mayazumi an Toru Takemitsu, the most well-known of contemporaryJapanese composers outside Japan today, Satoh has succeeded in reshaping his native musical resources in synthesis with Western forms and instrumental sonorities. His work cannot, however, be considered within the mainstream of contemporary Japanese art music, for he writes in an unreservedly non- international style, remarkably free from any constraints of academism. This may be attributed to the fact that being primarily self-taught, he has never been subjected to a formal musical education. Satoh has on occasion, been referred to as a composer of gendai hogaku (contemporary traditional music). Much as Satoh is reluctant to be so classified, this assessment of his writing has some validity if one views him as reworking the traditional Japanese musical aesthetic in a broader, abstract context infusing it with a new vitality.

Minimalism, that Eastern-derived Western phenomenon born of the sixties, has much in common with the hypnotic, regular pulsations of rock. In Satoh's case, however, the repetitions are perceived more as vibrations because of the rapidity of the individual beats in conjunction with an extremely slow overall pulse. This creates the sensation of being in a rhythmic limbo, caught in a framework of suspended time which is typically Japanese. This experience can be summed up in the Japanese word 'ma' which may be defined as the natural distance between two or more events existing in a continuity. In contrast to the West's perception of time and space as separate entities, in Japanese thinking both time and space are measured in terms of intervals. It is the coincidental conceptualization of these elements which is perhaps the main feature distinguishing Japan's artistic expression from that of the West. 

In Satoh's own words:
"My music is limited to certain elements of sound and there are many calm repetitions. There is also much prolongation of a single sound. I think silence and the prolongation of sound is the same thing in terms of space. The only difference is that there is either the presence or absence of sound. More important is whether the space is "living" or not. Our sense of time and space is different from that of the West. For example, in the Shinto religion, there is the term 'imanaka' which is not just the present moment which lies between the stretch of past eternity and future immortality, but also the manifestation of the moment of all time which is multi-layered and multi-dimensional …. I would like it if the listener could abandon all previous conceptions of time and experience a new sense of time presented in this music as if eternal time can be lived in a single moment."

If you find it, buy this album!

TORU TAKEMITSU – [武満徹の作業] Works Of Toru Takemitsu - 4 (LP-1966)

Label: Victor ‎– VX-23

Series: Contemporary Music Of Japan – 4

Format: Vinyl, LP, Album / Country: Japan / Released: 1966

Style: Contemporary, Classical, Free Improvisation

Manufactured By – Victor Musical Industries, Inc.

Stereo-Orthophonic High Fidelity.  His Master's Voice.

Design – Kohei Sugiura

Photography By – Kiyoshi Otsuji

Engineer [Recording] – Takashi Watanabe

Producer – Jun Taki

Liner Notes – Kuniharu Akiyama

Translated By – George Saitô

Matrix / Runout (Side A runout, stamped): VX-23 – A / VLY 1063 122+ I OA GF

Matrix / Runout (Side B runout, stamped): VX-23 – B / VL Y 1064 152+

side 1:

A1 - Piano Distance ................................................................................................... 4:38

A2 - Pause Uninterrupted .......................................................................................... 7:50

        piano – Yuji Takahashi

A3 - Le Son Calligraphie No.1 for 8 strings ................................................................ 3:23

A4 - Le Son Calligraphie No.3 for 8 strings ................................................................ 2:37

        conductor – Hiroshi Wakasugi

        cello – Akiyoshi Kudo, Tadao Takahashi

        viola – Aya Tanaka, Junko Edo

        violin – Kenji Kobayashi, Mari Hirao, Miyuki Togawa, Namiko Umezu

side 2:

B - Eclipse For Shakuhachi And Biwa ...................................................................... 16:00

      biwa – Kinshi Tsuruta

      shakuhachi – Katsuya Yokoyama

Composer – Toru Takemitsu

Takemitsu's compositional journey is fascinating because his relationship with western music and his native musical traditions shows just how limiting are the categories of east and west when it comes to thinking about music's development in the 20th century.

Takemitsu's enthusiasm saw him investigate electro-acoustic music in his early 20s (this was roughly the same time that Pierre Schaeffer was doing a similar thing in Paris), which led him to compose music in an explicitly modernist idiom. He was crazy about the Viennese School composers at the time. An encounter with Stravinsky, who had heard his 1957 Requiem for Strings and taken the young composer out to lunch because he admired the piece so much, was one catalyst for his musical life.

Another of Takemitsu's influences was the music of John Cage in the early 60s. Takemitsu began to explore aspects of indeterminacy in his work (the improvised sections of From Me Flows What You Call Time, for example, are down to this approach – even if Takemitsu's controlled aleatoricism has more in common with Witold Lutosławski than Cage). But it was also thanks to Cage's Zen-inspired ideas about music and the world, Takemitsu explained, that "I came to recognise the value of my own tradition".

The other seismic moment for Takemitsu was seeing a performance of Bunraku puppet theatre and, a couple of decades after the war, opening his heart at last to the beauty of his homeland's musical traditions. "I got a shock … I suddenly recognised I was Japanese."

From the 60s on, Takemitsu's musical project would be to combine elements of Japanese music with the western modernism he loved so much. The blend is apparent in pieces such as November Steps, composed for biwa (the Japanese lute he studied intensively), shakuhachi and orchestra. The effect is more profound than a fuzzy fusion of styles; Takemitsu uses the timbre and texture of the two Japanese instruments to make the whole orchestra breathe and glow with gossamer lightness, something he continues in a later work for the same instruments called Autumn.

But the real substance of Takemitsu's Japanese heritage can't be reduced to an instrument, a colour or even a harmony. There's something more fundamental about his understanding of music; something that informs his work whether he's writing for solo piano, a film score for Akira Kurosawa (he wrote music for more than 100 movies), a string quartet or a concerto. It's something expressed by the Japanese word "ma", which suggests the concept of a void that isn't empty, an absence that is really a presence, a space between things that is full of energy. It's a principle that underpins Japanese gardens, with which Takemitsu often compared his music. "My music is like a garden, and I am the gardener. Listening to my music can be compared with walking through a garden and experiencing the changes in light, pattern and texture." And yet it's also a way of thinking that is by no means exclusive to Takemitsu in contemporary music; it suggests the same circular, non-hierarchical sense of structure and time that composers from Anton Webern to Pierre Boulez, György Ligeti to Steve Reich have explored.
The idea of a meaningful void is worth keeping in mind when you're listening to music Takemitsu wrote in the last two decades of his life. His pieces are rarely long (From Me Flows What You Call Time is among the longest, at around half an hour), they are seldom fast and rarely overtly demonstrative – but they do weird things with time. Listen to his piano concerto, Riverrun (the title comes from Finnegan's Wake), or Quatrain (scored for clarinet, cello, violin, piano and orchestra) or his violin concerto Far Calls. Coming, Far! (another Joyce-inspired title), to experience what I mean. There's a lot to get to grips with in his output: as well as the catalogue of concert pieces, there are those film scores (start with Kurosawa's Ran), as well as music for radio, theatre and television.

Very subtle and specific music by the great Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu.

If you find it, buy this album!