Masashi Kitamura, Phonogenix

80s Japan was wild. Turn a stone, find a record sure to resonate 40 years in the future. Masashi Kitamura was a pivotal figure in the underground of the era, making plenty of cutting edge music of his own while also editing Fool's Mate magazine, a publication seemingly orientated to the more stylised proponents of Japanese alternative music (and Merzbow even wrote for them). Given its year of release and grand title, i was expecting another example of polite sounding kankyo ongaku, which isn't entirely wrong but does certainly undersell what Kiramura and Phonogenix were up to. There's an obvious debt to the Eno ambient series, but there's more so a nod to some of the truly singular talents of 80s Japan, specifically Midori Takada's Mkwaju Ensemble, Yasuaki Shimizu's Mariah project and the mysteriously arranged World Standard crew. There's more edges to this record than you might ordinarily associate with the rounded perfection of, say, the Wave Notation series, a trait that makes sense if you listen to some of Kitamura's other projects, particularly the kraut-y Chrome-isms of YBO. It's a quality most obvious on album highlight Variation III, an emotive synth intro progressing into a white noise fury of distortion and kinetic drumming - truly anything but polite. The second side is one mammoth composition, where Berlin School arpeggios are slowly engulfed by abstract shards of guitar and minimal percussion. I've seen this referred to as New Age in a few places. Do not do it that disservice. There's a demon hidden in the beauty here and it's a true angel. For what it's worth, far superior to what i was anticipating from a record sporting that troublesome title.