Masabumi Kikuchi - Japanesque: Six Elements - Fire - Hybrid SACD

2026

Japanesque: Six Elements is the singular electronic music masterpiece of Masabumi Kikuchi — one of Japan's most celebrated and adventurous jazz pianists, whose career encompassed Gil Evans's orchestra, rehearsals with Miles Davis, and the ECM trio Tethered Moon with Gary Peacock and Paul Motian. Following his acclaimed electric jazz/funk albums Susto and One-Way Traveller, Kikuchi devoted the majority of the 1980s to creating this vast, visionary work: a score for a 15-hour film structured around the six elements of Buddhist cosmology — Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, Air, and Consciousness. This volume, Fire, presents the four-part Fire Dance suite, recorded between 1986 and 1988 at Cracker-Jap Studio in Brooklyn, New York.

Working alone with a real-time synthesizer — no overdubs, no editing — Kikuchi created music of extraordinary intensity and focus, conjuring the elemental force of fire through shifting electronic textures, pulsing rhythmic structures, and moments of blazing, sustained energy. As the label notes: "Amidst the fiercely burning flames, silence emerges in the gaps between them." The music combines the improvisational freedom of jazz with the sonic palette of early electronic music, the punk-influenced New York art scene of the 1980s, and a deeply Japanese aesthetic sensibility that makes it unlike anything else in either tradition. Programmer Lance Massey assisted Kikuchi, and the sessions were engineered by Joe Blaney and Kikuchi himself, with executive production by Yusuke Sato of Dentsu Inc.

Originally a near-impossible-to-find artefact, Japanesque: Six Elements is now reissued across six SACD Hybrid volumes and six 2LP sets by Rings / diskunion, remastered by Taylor Deupree — the revered electronic musician who earned the deep trust of Ryuichi Sakamoto — in what stands as one of the most important archival releases in contemporary Japanese music.