Certain albums just sound special from the get-go. When I put on Ayuo Takahashi’s Nova Carmina instantly I hear something that takes me back. It’s something quite simple: Ayuo’s violin playing streaks of glissando over something he wrote for Aideen Morgan. It’s poetry speaks of a rebirth of sorts, of its narrator finding in the play of light and water, life anew. As the meditative atmosphere of “Guide Us (Water Music)” gives way to the drifting, revolving, “Sounds Of You”, instantly I’m taken back to the far flung past when “folk” or folklore meant something different. This is music touching on that universal song.
We pick up Ayuo’s story in Bath, England. Just a year removed from 1985’s trip back to New York City on his duo releases of Silent Film and Memory Theatre with Ryuichi Sakamato, Ayuo had felt the pull of malaise and indifference to whatever creative vision he had. Ayuo’s record deal was coming to an end and he knew something had to change. Feeling further outside of society, he retreated to the medieval folk music he had quietly loved from a younger age. While the rest of his peers looked towards the “future”, Ayuo couldn’t shake that he needed to explore this, his immediate “past”, in a way that spoke truest to him.
Using the meager budget provided by his record company, Ayuo convinced them to front it to him in traveler’s cheques. Withthat money he’d head to England and try to self-finance its creation, hoping to create music much closer to that source of influence he wanted to explore deeper.
Somehow, a week after his arrival, a musician he befriended gave Ayuo the number for David Lord, noted record producer to XTC, Korgis, and Peter Gabriel. One day Ayuo would ring him up, send some demos, and convince him to work on this album. Transplanting himself fully to England, Ayuo would live the life of a nomad, finding ways to make ends meet while recording in David Lord’s Crescent Studios. Inspired by the writings of Joseph Campbell, the music of Carl Orff, and first wave English folk rock, it was in the studio that Ayuo dove profoundly into the sound and influence of New Albion.
Vacillating between many micro worlds — medieval and traditional, English and Latin tongues, ambient and acoustic — Nova Carmina was his self-described attempt to create neotraditional music. This was music inspired by movements foreign to the classicist temptation, post-Bachian if you will, of separating regional traditions as Eastern and Western. Inspired by the seasons and quite romantic at its core, Nova Carmina was Japanese rock’s crowning attempt to deliver on the promise of William Blake’s mystical meetup of spirituality and art.
Sorely underappreciated English folk rock musical heroes of his, like Maddy Prior and Peter Knight from Steeleye Span, were invited to bring their touch to this next-generation work. Dave Mattacks of Fairport Convention took a sojourn from backing up lesser pop work to dedicate his whole being to creating something that touched on that same spirit his younger self helped pioneer decades ago.
David Lord did his best to make this album done on an indie budget sound like a multi-million dollar one. And armed with a phalanx of string instruments — psaltry, 12-string guitar, hurdy gurdy, and sanshin — everything that could be written by Ayuo was nearly everything performed by him solely, too.
Steeped in mythology, like the words from Carmina Burana spoken by Peter Hamill on “Grates Ago Veneri”, and open-tuned guitars (a reminder of his love of Joni Mitchell and Sandy Denny’s music), the atmosphere of Nova Carmina was genuinely fraternal and inviting. Absolutely gorgeous songs like “Across The Seasons” captured that mood brightly. Everyone who came in simply understood what Ayuo was trying to do and did their best to help him complete what once seemed like the pipe dream of a young 25-year old man.
What do we get to hear? Brief songs like “Silent Springs”, “Half Moon/Full Moon” and “Old Dance” are wonderful neoromantic pastorales full of ignored centuries-old folk ideas. Other songs like “Veris Leta Facies”, “Axe Phoebus Aureo”, and “Grates Ago Veneri” are recitational musical poems blended expertly in with thoroughly impressive forward-thinking arrangements.
Ayuo’s sterling neotraditional compositions (not married to any single folk experience) are Nova Carmina’s obvious highlights, with songs like “End Of Earth”, “Eye To Eye” and “With Closed Eyes” show Ayuo coming into the onus of his own voice. At the end of the day, you’ll stare down your copy of Nova Carmina, hear the music, and read the words “Ayuo Takahashi” spelled on the cover, and still wonder how in the world did we got to this fork in the river way back when it all started…