From the sublime to the epic - Kitaro turns 66

Masanori Takahashi, the multi-instrumentalist and electronic music legend who became known world-wide as Kitaro, turned 66 yesterday.

He began playing electric guitar in school, and later turned to synthesizers. International acclaim arrived during his years in the Japanese progressive rock group Far East Family Band, when he not only met the Berlin School electronic music luminary Klaus Schulze, but latter also produced the band's two albums.

Kitaro's first solo albums were released in 1978 and 1979, but a huge break-through came with the phenomenal soundtrack he composed in 1980 for the Japanese documentary series The Silk Road. The vast project, which managed to span 17 years, resulted in four electronic albums that are still landmarks of the genre.

His vast discography got him nominated 16 times for Grammy Awards (and Kitaro won one with Thinking of You), and it has huge musical range, too.

Although his music was categorised as "New Age" in lack of a really fitting label, Kitaro's instantly recognisable electronic compositions go from phenomenally delicate motifs and structures to ethnic elements originating all across the world map, from space ambient harmonies to soaring orchestral epics.

While synthesizers have been at the core of his music, electric guitars and percussion instruments, chiefly the mighty Taiko drums, also have a strong presence in his music.

From sublime and delicate sonic paintings we hear on Silk Road or the landmark album Oasis, he can seemingly effortlessly and extremely competently move to vast orchestral visions infused with Japanese traditional music - something we can hear on epic albums like Kojiki.

Latter is based on the ancient Japanese sacred text of same name, and it remains a perfect example of how Kitaro fuses state of the art electronics with ancient musical traditions and Western orchestral arrangements.

There are infinitely delicate and scintillating, translucent structures in his music, there are thundering Taiko drums, woodwind textures ranging from South-American to Japanese traditions, soaring electric guitars, and electronic harmonies that seem to emanate without human intervention from some other Universe.

His technical wizardry is always at play, and one of the most characteristic and individual lead sounds in all of electronic music is what Kitaro used extensively on his albums, a patch he originally created on the vintage Korg 700s synthesizer.

However, he remains one of the few synth legends that view technology "merely" as a creative and expressive tool for passionate and deeply human music - Kitaro, which means "man of love and joy", has never allowed technology to take over and become an end in itself. No wonder that his music can be heard in anything ranging from meditation classes to symphonic concerts and Golden Globe-winning Hollywood epics like Oliver Stone's Heaven & Earth.

Many happy returns and continued blissful harmonies in life and music, Takahashi-san!

From oxygen to outer space - Jean-Michel Jarre at 70

Photo: AFP

Jean-Michel Jarre, perhaps the most prominent post-avant-garde names of the French School of electronic music, turned 70 today.

Whilst he was already a prolific experimental and soundtrack composer before the 1976 release of his landmark album Oxygène, the latter has really projected his name onto the firmament of both popular and critically acclaimed electronic music.

Even in 2018, the album sounds futuristic, timeless and perfectly at home with state-of-the-art current space rock and ambient electronic albums - a fluid, bubbling and seamlessly flowing electronic symphony that still continues to hold many lessons for budding electronic musicians who choose to compose with intent a descriptive and emotionally involving sub-genre of electronica.

As they say, the rest is history...

Whilst Jarre has become perhaps even more known for the record-breaking gigantic concerts, where audiences were in their millions (absolute record was 3.5 million people) and the stage could often be an entire city even, his imaginative musical creations cannot be ignored.

His music was seen by some regimes as ideologically clean and "safe", the music of a technological future - hence it is not an accident, that he was the first Western musician officially invited to give live performances in post-Mao China.

While Jarre established himself as an unparalleled visionary when it came to live performances, with hugely innovative multimedia technology at work alongside his futuristic electronica, his use of innovative new musical instruments was also remarkable.

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Fairlight, the pioneering sampler that completely changed music across countless genres, was mostly used even by luminaries like Herbie Hancock, Peter Gabriel, Art of Noise and Kate Bush as a digital instrument capable of playing back sound samples.

Then Jarre released the to this day astonishing album Zoolook, where he has taken the Fairlight to an unprecedented level, projecting us into a never before heard sonic Universe.

His use of sound processing and alteration via the new instrument sounds simply stunning even today - and all this was not done in a purely academic manner, making Zoolook actually enjoyable by the masses.

Whilst he ventured very happily into the realm of chirpy, dancey, highly trendy electronica, too, we cannot forget the fact that he also composed vast, almost cosmic requiem-sounding suites like Rendez-Vous, and ventured into "pure" electronic ambient music, too (the epic length title track on Waiting for Cousteau).

Even under the surface of sometimes very pop-sounding electronica, he often managed to hide complex musical ideas. A simple example would be Equinoxe, his second album, where the most popular track has employed time signatures that one is challenged to find in any chart-topping creation...

Even in 2018, even at 70, he is not only keeping up with the absolute latest greatest technological advances in sound synthesis, processing and music production, but he remains an influencer and a shaper of sound technology.

His latest studio double opus, the Electronica Vol. I and II., shows how he can collaborate with numerous electronic musicians who come from vastly different musical and technological backgrounds.

The tracks composed with the biggest names, ranging from Vince Clarke to Hans Zimmer to the late Edgar Froese (founder of the veritable Berlin School institution that is Tangerine Dream), show that Jarre's artistic range and sensitivity is able to integrate myriad musical ideas and sources into a coherent concept.

In ways that transcend particular subjective tastes and electronic music preferences, Jarre's trailblazing efforts in the field have left their mark on countless facets of music technology, including creative tools and approaches to the vast world of synthesizers.

His music is also testament to the fact that the most high-tech instruments are mere instruments, and the human using those instruments remains the key factor in the creative process... making the resulting music sometimes unashamedly romantic even, whilst created with (the still often misperceived as "cold") electronics.