Matsuo Ohno. Roots Of Electronic Sound.

Futuristic synthesizer specialist and sound designer Matsuo Ohno was responsible for the sound design of a broad range of film, television, and radio soundtracks, most famously the animation series Astro Boy which he began working on in 1963 together with his assistant, Takehisa Kosugi. Ohno was born in the heavily-populated Kanda district of central Tokyo in 1930 and was heavily affected by the repeated bombing raids on the city enacted in World War II, which took place during his formative years. After the war, deeply motivated by philosophy and Surrealism, he was largely unaffected by popular music, other than the electronic abstractions of Karlheinz Stockhausen; the left-wing filmmaker Fumio Kamei was another early influence. Ohno began immersing himself in the realm of sound effects while working with the Bungaku-za modernist theatre troupe and he performed a similar function at NHK, Japan's national broadcasting corporation, but became so frustrated by the rigidity of the restrictions imposed on him there that he quit his prestigious post at the broadcaster, although his skills were such that he remained in high demand as a freelancer, which allowed him to refine his sound effects techniques with evolving analogue synthesizers. The five suites of tracks that make up the Roots Of Electronic Sound album were recorded between 1963 and 1966; initially released on the ALM label in 1975, it is comprised of brief tape experiments, the cover artwork fittingly representing Astro Boy, from which many of the audio interludes are taken. Includes full color insert; edition of 500.

Here’s possibly... ah hell it IS the best looking Creel Pone yet - thanks to an extended spec and much nicer print-stock - a reproduction of a 1979 Victor label reissue of a 1975 LP on the legendary Alm label featuring a series of short tape music experiments, recorded between 1963 and 1966 by Matsuo Ono, with assistance from none other than Takehisa Kosugi. The artwork and libretto on the lp are full of references to “Atom” - better known to westerners as “Astro Boy” - a mid-60s japanese cartoon to which many of these tape-sounds were used as sound effects and incidental music. Pretty incredible given how zonked & explosion-oriented these short pieces are. The whole thing comes across as an earlier, analog version of Jean-Claude Risset’s Catalogue of Computerized Sound Synthesis (i.e. each cue is announced beforehand by a loud/distorted japanese voice solely in the right/left channel). As the record progresses, the jabs get longer and longer, until morphing into a suite of fully realized, multi edit-per-second blasts & cosmic drift that rival only the earliest WDR & Ina-Grm lineage tape-music etudes. One of the key pieces historical Japanese Electronic Music puzzle, entirely fantastic & completely necessary.