Japanese psychedelic revivalists Kikagaku Moyo yesterday announced a new album, Masana Temples, due for release on October 5th. You can pre-order the new album here.
Coming two years since their last LP, the new album is inspired by their worldwide touring. As reflected in ‘the album’s always changing sonic panorama’, the band’s travels exposed to them to ‘a series of constant metamorphoses, with languages, cultures, climates and vibes changing with each new town’.
In making the new album, the band found in jazz musician Bruno Pernadas a producer ‘who came from a wildly different background’ and who would ‘challenge their own concepts of what psychedelic music could be’. Recorded in Pernadas’ native Lisbon, the new album retains ‘elements of both the attentive folk and wild-eyed rocking sides’ that make the band but in a ‘sharper and more defined’ form.
In support of the upcoming album, the band released the penultimate track, ‘Gatherings‘, as a single. Check out the song below:
Combining fuzz-heavy riffing and delicate, semi-progressive instrumentals, the new song is an interesting showcase for the union of Pernadas’ jazz-production and the band’s overdriven improvisation. With a style that seems both well-rehearsed and endlessly relaxed, the song’s multi-layered passages of electric piano, oddly-syncopated drumming and stabbing electric guitar are promising signs of things to come with the new album.
With a name that translates as ‘Geometric Patterns’, Kikagaku Moyo are one of the biggest bands in Japan and a well-known export in the international psychedelic scene. Coming off the back of a European tour in 2017 and a North American tour early this year, the band are headed back to the States and Canada this month.
Beginning as a loose collective of buskers, the Japanese rockers released their first two albums, Mammatus Clouds and Forest of Lost Children, within a month of each other in 2014. The band shot to critical acclaim with 2016’s House In The Tall Grass, which harked back to the ’60s with distorted sitars, free-form jamming and abundant reverb.
Masana Temples – out October 5th
