Babaouo - The Journey through the sea and the sky, 1979

Today we are back to the regularly scheduled program of Japanese rarities with two more wonderful installments still for today and Saturday and a whole lot more fake news too.

With an album title so poetic, a group of gifted Japanese musicians, and the decade of the seventies-- specifically late in that period-- it would seem you can't go wrong here.  And you don't go wrong, for the most part.  Amazingly, this record doesn't appear in the discogs database but thankfully we can use the much less professional but much more progressive rateyourmusic to find a more complete lack of information.

It's a band that wants to have it all, starting with a Beatles-style opener using the classic C - E - F progression that I think John Lennon first made popular (e.g. Imagine), moving on to a jazzy library-style track, later we also encounter lullabies, easy listening 'shopping-mall-organs' (remember those guys?), some rock style compositions that remind me a lot of my old favourites Tranzam and School Band, everything you can think of.  We can't blame them for distributing to us a variety of styles, a strategy that we know was anathema to the record industry who always wanted to pigeonhole, or more metaphorically, pin down these beautiful butterflies.

Then when we get to the 5th track, a surprisingly imaginative and evocative arrangement with digital keys and chorus provides an ethereal atmosphere to the long track called Eine Sage, and even more shockingly, we are blessed with the appearance of those characteristically progressive tritones in the middle instrumental section, long thought to be the "devil's interval" in classical music due to its very simple but jarring dissonance:





The last track presents a kind of poetic finale for the LP's entirety, For a Moment of Silence in the Sky:





And the barbershop quartet ending to the unexpected chord really nails it, for me.