Throughout its long, slow journey west, Mariah’s Utakata no Hibi has been an album without context. After a dormant period at home among Japan’s vinyl geek underground, the 1983 record began to spread farther in 2008, when the tastemaking Scottish DJ duo Optimo shared a cut online. That song, "Shinzo no Tobira", which they first heard in a Tokyo record store, has since earned a cult following worldwide for the ethereal lines it traces between Asian and Middle Eastern tonalities, folklorish Armenian lyrics, and futuristic Japanese synthpop leads. Its soundscapes are like those once dreamt by Brians Eno and Wilson. But for all the love "Shinzo" and its parent album have found in tiny nightclubs and Internet testimonials, surprisingly little has been asked or answered about its origins. It's almost as though Utakata—now reissued by Palto Flats—has at last arrived on our shores not simply through a crate digger’s time warp, but from some other world altogether.
Or maybe a few of them: As befits an album that owes its broader discovery to a Shinjuku record store called Eurasia, Utakata’s plainspoken lyrics are sung in alternating Armenian and Japanese. In this regard—and most others—the record bears no resemblance to Mariah’s previous five, wherein a revolving door of popular Tokyo session men dabbled in everything from prog rock to jazz funk. By 1983, the project was being led by Yasuaki Shimizu, a relentlessly exploratory musician best known for the saxophone takes on Bach’s Cello Suites he would later record in both Japanese mines and Italian palazzos. His brilliant solo outing from the previous year, Kakashi, is Utakata’s only obvious relative. But that earlier work’s East-meets-West patchwork of genres, moods, and scales feels much more cut and dry than the seamless marvel Shimizu would soon create. Given how difficult it remains to find a fair comparison for any of Utakata’s seven songs, let alone synthesize the picture they form together, it’s an album that has well earned its reputation as an elusive classic.
The long tally of pleasant surprises begins with opener "Sokokara…" ("From Here…"), in which slash-and-burn no wave guitar and a frantically overloaded player piano somehow only add to the springtime optimism suggested by the song’s marching beat, blossoming synths, and Shimizu’s skyward warble. "Hana Ga Saitara" ("Were Flowers to Bloom") is a more eloquent draft of the dubbed out, sax-led post-punk that was then beginning to bubble up in England rock clubs, here powered by brass skronk and proto-techno synths. And "Fujiyu Na Nezumi" takes the British nursery rhyme "Three Blind Mice" and translates it into Japanese, Armenian, and a poetic syntax of spare bass, sustained synths, and simple percussion—indicating not so much the album’s sense of humor as the childlike wonder animating its every move. Mixer and engineer Seigen Ono would later work the boards for artists like John Zorn, Arto Lindsay, and King Crimson, but the way he focuses Shimizu’s playtime ruckus of international instrumentation and production techniques remains the accomplishment of his career.
Utakata’s most impressive feat of synthesis, however, lies in its coupling of East Asian and Middle Eastern sounds. The most explicit instance occurs in early highlight "Shisen" ("A Vision"), which weds gorgeous piano pentatonics and koto court music with Armenian vocalist Julie Fowell’s mesmerizing mantra, "Our eyes as one." When the lone, cavernous drum and piercing sine waves enter, the effect is devastating. The twinning effect is at its subtle best on the famously DJ-friendly "Shinzo no Tobira" ("My Life Is Big") that first got Optimo’s attention, where unforgettable melody walks the fine line it all but invents between its authors’ musical heritages.
In 2015, it remains a rare and enchanting thing to hear a piece of convergence culture this effortless—which, after all, may be one reason Utakata still sounds so otherworldly. Another could be the fact that the album owes its existence to a creative moment in Japanese pop that remains virtually unknown to the English-speaking world. Thanks to '80s electronic pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra’s continued chart success and the glory days of the Japanese economy, the mainstream entered a renaissance of open-mindedness and ludicrous recording budgets, producing an abundance of records that answer Shimizu’s sonic adventures with ones every bit as bold and compelling. Maybe Utakata belongs, then, not to some wondrous alternate history, but a real one we’re just beginning to uncover.
