Photo Credit: Jamie Wdziekonski
Last Friday saw Japanese psych-rock genre defiers Kikagaku Moyo release their excellent new album Masana Temples. Having decamped to the Portuguese capital of Lisbon to record the album, their fourth, with jazz musician Bruno Pernadas, the Tokyo and Amsterdam based quintet were aiming for a more expansive approach conceptually to psychedelic music and a sharpened and focused sound. It has to be said then that the substantial results stemming from the achievement of these twin goals are simply stunning in both form, style and the appropriate brevity of both.
The first taste of the 10 track record came when they shared the ripping yet spacey ‘Gatherings’ back in late July, a track all five members of the band had a hand in writing. Other highlights include the introspective prog-rock of seven minute wonder ‘Dripping Sun’ and the dreamy ‘Orange Peel’, punctured by bouts of xylophone and hand held percussion. The busily compact and jazz inspired ‘Majupose, with its sublime bass runs and effective off beats is another standout and the psych-folk leanings of the band are not forgotten in the form of closer ‘Blanket Song’.
Our pick of the bunch though is the starry eyed and beautifully multifarious ‘Fluffy Kosmisch’, a hypnotic track with a blinder of a beat cycle and an outro of blissed out proportions! Check that out below and get a copy of the record through the band’s own Guruguru Brain label on all formats here.
Fluffy Kosmisch
Kikagaku Moyo (JPN)
From the album, ‘Masana Temples’, Guruguru Brain.
Audio Stream
‘Fluffy Kosmisch’ currently leads off our Post-Punk/Motorik+Kosmische/Darkwave/Coldwave/Shoegaze / Post-Rock Playlist on Spotify. Check out its 30 tracks of diverse goodness here. All our seven Spotify playlists can be accessed at our Spotify profile here.
Think we are lovers of Spotify? Think the recent changes make any difference to the way we feel about them? We wouldn’t want you to read this if we were and it did.
Liz Peller, ‘Unfree Agents – Spotify Pushes an Uber-like Model for Independent Artists’, The Baffler, October 1, 2018.