Masabumi Kikuchi - Japanesque: Six Elements - Mind - 2 x Vinyl LPs

2026

Masabumi Kikuchi (1939–2015) was one of the most singular and restlessly inventive figures in Japanese jazz. Born in Tokyo and trained at the Tokyo Art College High School, he went on to study at Berklee College of Music before forging a career that brought him into contact with an extraordinary range of musicians — from Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones to Gil Evans, Gary Peacock, Paul Motian and composer Tōru Takemitsu. By the early 1980s, having relocated to New York, Kikuchi had already pushed into electric jazz and funk territory with Susto and One-Way Traveller. What followed was an even more radical departure: the majority of his 1980s was devoted entirely to the creation of Japanesque: Six Elements, an immersive body of synthesizer music conceived as the soundtrack to a 15-hour film of the same name.

Mind — known in Japanese as 識 (Shiki) — is the sixth and culminating volume of this six-part cycle, each chapter named after one of the classical Buddhist elements: Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, Air, and Mind. Recorded at Cracker-Jap Studio in Brooklyn between 1986 and 1988, the album presents a single, continuous composition of nearly fifty minutes — a sustained meditation in pure electronic sound that stands apart from virtually anything else in Kikuchi's vast discography. As remastering engineer Taylor Deupree has noted, this music combines "Japanese electronic experimentalism with the edge and punk rock ethos of the early 80s New York art scene."