The only other non-jazzy album by ARP synth master Shigenori Kamiya. If you liked his album MU, this is even better - melodic, spacy, plodding synths. He keeps an amazing atmosphere throughout.
Tracklist is odd - B side only has 4 grooves, but 5 tracks, and I have no idea which one is the double track.
Please forgive the odd quality, I tried different tracking weights and messed with my amplifier and I'm fairly sure it's the source, probably whoever cut the lacquer was not very experienced with handling synths mixed that loud. You can see this in Kamiya's MU album as well, the ARP synth lines get really strangely distorted.
From the liner notes:
Takemiya Keiko's famous work is beautifully brought to life in this long-awaited album by synthesizer wizard Kamiya Shigenori!!
His first synthesizer was an ARP2600. It was 1972. He picked it up out of a simple love of mechanics, and after taking it apart in his room and then putting it back together again, he discovered it to be the perfect instrument for him. He said that if his first encounter with a synthesizer had been the Moog III, which Walter Carlos popularized with \"Switched-On Bach\", he wouldn't have become a synth player. Although he had studied science and engineering, he was a novice when it came to anything electrical, but being able to change things around to produce his own sound must have been what caused him to switch from guitar to soldering irons and keyboards.
His music was fostered through sixteen years of chapel at Aoyama Academy. He still believes that the Hallelujah Chorus is the pinnacle of melody and harmony. It seems that this ancient civilization series, made up of his 1979 solo album \"Mu\" and now \"Pharaoh\", is not totally unrelated to the \"brush with death\" he encountered on the circuit. (After placing 6th in the 1966 Japan Grand Prix, he had a terrible accident while rehearsing.) The fact he got into computer programming after picking up the synth cannot possibly be unrelated either. (He has created over 10,000 programs, for use in console games, for synthesizers, and even for industrial and broadcasting use. This rivals the number of programs a software company would have.) The church music he was surrounded by from a young age, the physical prowess of a racer, and the most complicated mechanism of our time: the computer. Within him, these three things become one to create his music, but it is no coincidence that each of these things can be traced back to the lost civilizations of the past. The ones and zeroes of computer language are like the \"existence\" and \"non-existence\" of ancient civilizations, and are expressed in his music as \"god and man\". From a layman's perspective, his music is cheerful with an undercurrent of sweet sentimentality. In the newly renovated Kamiya Studios, computers and synthesizers share space with the sculptures carved by his grandfather (Yokoe Yoshizumi). One could say that the same multi-dimensional harmony of his studio flows through his music as well.
