And now: more of something I wish there was more history to share about — Lotus Kasumi Experience. It’s that kind of a week. Losing and then regaining an old hard drive — thanks, again, everyone! — sometimes yields unexpected surprises. Case in point, the album listed in the headline.
When my hard drive came to being, going through my collection, I noticed this curious album listed in my collection. When and where did I get this? Looking at the cover, it seemed like the kind of aesthetic best scene on ‘90s sample library discs. And sure enough, as I put it on to play, the first strains of music I heard were the floaty, four-to-the-floor beats popular in clubland around that time.
As I left Lotus’s Kasumi Experience play on — I loathed not to give anything at least one listen — I discovered an album that was more than initial impression. The driving rhythms of “P**K” and “POSI” gave way to the indescribable atmospheric drum’n’bass of “NESS” and that gave way to long, dance floor-oriented tracks like “ONE”.
Then a funny thing happened, as “ONE” shape-shifted into a hypnotic bit of ambient minimal techno, I could sense this album was something a bit more special. Imagine Jeff Mills meeting Eno and turning on the music of Yoshimura-san era Japanese New Age, that in a nutshell was the creative milieu at the heart of their sound.
The roots of Lotus began in the early ‘90s in one of Tokyo’s first underground overnight clubs, Club Razel. There DJ Miku began to spearhead a shift into the more electronic realms of house and techno music. Various headlining joints in Europe and elsewhere, spurred DJ Miku to come back to Japan to establish an independent techno label he’d dub “NewStage Records”, marking a new stage in his career.
Rather than go at it alone, DJ Miku enlisted the help of friends Hideo Kobayashi and DJ Natsu and became the techno trio, Lotus. Somewhere in one of Tokyo’s less safe neighborhoods in Roppongi Dori, right next to Nishi-Azabu and the Metropolitan Expressway, the three of them took in the day and night time atmosphere of their eccentric locale and began laying down the tracks for what became “POSI”.
Just like the rest of the album, Kasumi Experience was recorded live in 1996, in the most human of ways: all in one take. Using barebones Power Mac computers and Roland samplers, Lotus had to manually tweak and caress the songs that came out of their instruments as they were directly to DAT (digital audio tape). It’s that tape pressed onto CD which was used to launch the group under Sony’s watch and under their imprint “NewStage Records”.
NewStage Records, in the brief amount of time it existed, would sign two, now iconic (but then little-known) Japanese techno giants — Kay Nakayama and Susumu Yokota — recording under the aliases of Safari and Anima Mundi. A party was held by their parent Sony label, and for those in attendance they got to hear a hand-off of a sort. With all the acts involved on the label, they began playing house then techno or tribal music, ending with their new school minimalism that was pointing towards an evolution.
Just imagine hearing the timeless strains of “SPACE” and this other music influential to them in that hallowed space, on Dec. 30, 1996, just a few days removed from the start of a new year. In their element, the dance began and ended (once again) in the space between both our ears. And I do think, in some way, this album is a perfect introduction to that music, as rare as it may seem now.
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