Om - Solar Wind, 1981, from Japan

 

Going into a new year again I'm actually quite shocked there is still music to post here. 

Of course in the last year I cheated a bit by posting more recent music which I shouldn't have--and whose links were duly removed by that AI going around blogger for copyrights, god bless computer intelligence (as I said about covid-19: who needs yet another threat to human civilization, we already have enough to deal with).

But a couple of years ago I thought I was for sure going to run out of music to find and post but it was not to be. It's true that in English speaking countries it's rare to find something new but all over the world as we saw there are musicians and composers who forged the most amazing creative art, witness these fusion albums that I never heard of, from Japan, and I gather most of you had never heard of either. In the end it's more a matter of knowing what to look for, because really where are we going to look? Discogs is not too useful so I have to rely on people's recommendations, which is why I encourage you to provide more of those, some of them have been extraordinary to say the least (e.g. Yuri Chugunov). Who knows where are the lost music might be, still undiscovered?

Thanks to everyone who helped find these.

And let's look forward to more great unknown music not just for next year but for years to come...

The only album, which came out in 1983, from this astonishing group that is best succinctly described as a Japanese Oregon, a discovery from my friend to whom I would have to give profuse thanks for the finding... A little more info on this page, it's difficult to tell who to give compositional credit to. How tragic, again, that this music is totally lost to time. Even in the early 1980s of course it must have been highly unfashionable listening and to be honest, puzzling to even imagine what appreciative connoisseur would have enjoyed this mixture of complex chamber music with ethnic jazz, playing professionally and beautifully by highly competent musicians of course.  (I think I would've but it was utterly out of reach for me since Japanese art music was not available in the last bit where I grew up.) 

As a taste consider the track called Samarkand (which to remind you is a city in Uzbekistan):

Can't resist posting another wonderful track called Pan's Fountain:

The whole album thus is like this. I've posted similar stuff all over this blog, with the mildly ethnic chamber music folky compositions, my favourite is still French LBC Baobab and US Lothlorien. So I guess, favourites would be a better word.