Put on your headphones. Put on and listen to this album.
Spatial audio. Ambisonics. 3-D, virtual sound. There are many words to describe the technology Kohsei Morimoto’s Chaos Zone: Three Dimensional Sounds Created by Roland Sound Space System (カオス・ゾーン) or カオス・ゾーン (Chaos Zone) for short, tries to exploit a technological demo of sorts to promote his idea of a “futuristic” form of musical composition that touches on all the theories behind a lot of Japanese Ambient or New Age music — music as design aesthetic. So, what was this three dimensional sound?
Take a listen to the YouTube video below. In it you’ll find the key piece of music gear that Kohsei used to create the sonic space for all the original compositions he wrote in カオス・ゾーン (Chaos Zone). It should also show you an example of the technology used on this album.
Roland’s RSS-10 Sound Space Processor was a high-end digital audio unit that used such musical effects like doppler phasing, panning, volume, and reverb to affect a “3D” sound from stereo or mono audio sources. Rather than sticking something only on your horizontal listening plane (Left or Right), the RSS-10 could make it appear forward and backwards, upwards and downwards, in effect, creating a new, binaural, pseudo-surround sound source that could be heard move around, on the same headphones and stereo speakers you already own — all without having to buy additional speakers to do so! The potential was there for musicians who ventured there.
It’s a bit of sonic design that’s exploited quite often in virtual reality software, games and 3D movies. That wacky spatial audio found on modern TVs is a form of this.
In 1989, Roland contacted Kohsei to help promote the launch of this product and to give a usage example in a field other ambisonic/binaural units had struggled to make a dent: music. Although, the RSS-10’s target market would eventually become radio stations and movie studios, music studios were where Roland envisioned they’d be used. Kohsei, they imagined, would be the perfect cypher to do this.
Kohsei, a Tokyo native since 1954, had experience in creating sound and music outside the box. A music graduate of Tokyo’s University of the Arts, around 1982, Kohsei had begun creating large, drawn out works that combined video and music, designing video art and A/V software for others to create early generative music.
By 1987, Kohsei, had parlayed his deep A/V knowledge into both CM work for various onscreen media (sometimes under the tutelage of Japanese film music giants like Masaru Sato) and had been tasked to create modern compositions for clients like the Tochigi Prefecture Museum of Art and WACOAL’s Spiral label.
However, Kohsei, the musician was never truly divorced from contemporary music. Kohsei had created healing music for a series dubbed “Music For Stress Relief By Alpha-Wave Analysis” that sounded perfectly in sync with music created by its more known brethren in Hiroshi Yoshimura, and Shiho Yabuki. With カオス・ゾーン (Chaos Zone) he was able to both show a proof of concept and (in a way) step outside of his own zone, using a designed, generative music system by Dr. Takashi Matsumoto (aka the Chaos Sound System) to introduce that musical idea to this spatial one.
Kohsei Morimoto’s カオス・ゾーン (Chaos Zone) is a wild listen, for sure. Half of it is full of ethereal, blissful music that sounds completely devoid of distortion. All done on Roland instruments, it shows the crystalline depth of sound capable from digital synths in all their potential glory.
Another third is wonderfully chaotic music that really skirts the line between unorganized dissonance and just sheer ear candy that even makes these laptop speakers, yours truly is hearing the music on, sound like they’re outfitted with a high-end surround sound system trying to catch every swirling, flying thing, going by.
The final third, for those musical nerds, is the actual map of what this technology can do — it begins in mono and ends in full, binaural sonic wizardry, tasking members of the NHK symphony orchestra to show that evolution in recording media.
Myself, I prefer those songs like “Fantastic Chaos Part-Ⅰ”, “Fractal” or “Double Scroll” where the lines between pre-composed music and simply letting the ghost in the shell do its work are blurred. Obviously, the talented minds of Kohsei and his Japanese, Roland technicians understood the magic behind them but, as for us, we’re left holding the plate trying to understand why they’re so different.
If I read the liner notes correctly, I see that Kohsei took it upon to create all the music here by rethinking how he composes think. Rather than stick with the classical ways, he welcomed the unexplainable things that took him out of the realm of established musical history. For Kohsei, contemporary music had much in store of mystery. For him to have the ability to manipulate sonic space was too good of opportunity to leave standing. In the end, it’s a relaxed feeling to not be completely in control of everything, to just let things go.