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

2026

Masabumi Kikuchi stands as one of the most singular and restlessly inventive figures in Japanese jazz history. Born in Tokyo in 1939, he came of age in the city's post-war jazz underground before relocating to New York in 1973, where he immersed himself in the Gil Evans Orchestra and the electric avant-garde surrounding Miles Davis. After releasing the synthesizer-driven albums Susto and One-Way Traveller in 1981, Kikuchi embarked on an even more radical journey — spending the better part of the 1980s composing and performing the sprawling electronic work that would become Japanesque: Six Elements. Recorded at Cracker-Jap Studio in Brooklyn between 1986 and 1988, the music was created for a 15-hour film of the same name, with Kikuchi performing entirely on real-time synthesizer — an act of pure sonic confrontation that defied easy categorisation.

Wind is the fourth volume in this six-part series, each chapter named after one of the classical elements of Buddhist cosmology — Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, Air, and Mind. Across three extended pieces, Kikuchi sculpts restless, shifting textures that evoke the invisible force and unpredictable energy of wind itself: at once turbulent and meditative, grounded in jazz sensibility yet fully liberated from it. This reissue, presented as 2 x LPs, has been remastered by Taylor Deupree, whose meticulous approach to spatial sound and dynamic fidelity makes this the definitive way to experience a work that was decades ahead of its time.