Far East Family Band Gets Inter-Galactic

It should be easy to appreciate music from Japan that apes style from not just Europe, but the entirety of the west. Of course, eastern culture has frowned upon borrowing so liberally from out side of its own clutch of creative forces. And during Akira Kurosawa’s career, the film director was occasionally lambasted for using Shakespeare as source material.

All of that notwithstanding, the rock music that’s resulted from Japan keeping an eye on its neighbors has been interesting to wade through. The only commonality that it all holds is players’ apparent affinity for mind altering substances as evidenced by the spate of tripped out music from the island.

There’ve been countless acid styled rock bands to make waves through the latest spate of reissue campaigns that are currently flooding hard-drives and mailboxes today. But as interesting, in a completely different way, is the work of the Far East Family Band.

Judging from just its name, listeners should be able to figure that there’s going to be an air of mystery and hippie space oddity surrounding all of this. Aided by Klaus Schulze, who did time in Tangerine Dream as well as Ash Ra Temple, the Far East Family Band was able to turn in a few discs full of weirdo mysticism. The discs won’t play for all of the acid soaked masses, but there’re portions of Parallel World, released in 1976, that are going to fit seamlessly into any long night that turns into an early morning.

Made up of just four tracks, Parallel World is still able to cover a fair amount of ground in the electronic, prog and krauty fields of music. Hailing from a place that wasn’t the impetus for any of those genres (whether real or imagined) allowed the group – which here recorded with seven members – to incorporate any and all ideas that it had without discouragement from peers or founders of those movements.

What the group turns in isn’t at all a traditional rock record. Instead, the band makes use of percussion and Kitaro’s (aka Masanori Takahashi) various keyboards and synthesizers. The fifteen minute “Entering” is greatly taken over by dark key vibes and constant electric drones backed up by some polyrhythmic drummer. During the more sparse sections of the extended track, the Far East Family band comes off as something like krautrock champions of the east. After that simple middle section, as Kitaro takes over, his playing moves the group more towards a ridiculous prog sound. The entire track is littered with misguided production flourishes – thanks to Schulze – but only at its conclusion does “Entering” become a bit too much to bare.

The monstrous, thirty minute title track is basically “Entering,” but expanded and includes a bit more variety in terms of pacing and tempo shifts. It’s not a downer if that’s your bag, but there probably aren’t too many people who’d find it necessary to sit through the whole ordeal.

So, cop Parallel Worlds for the shorter tracks and by the time you’d make it to the final track, it might be time to pass out anyway. For enthusiasts only…