Shigeaki Saegusa & DKW-57349 - Radiation Missa (1981)

An electronic-prog mass for... I'm guessing Hiroshima/Nagasaki, given the album title?  That's all I can really guess about this incredibly strange release by composer Shigeaki Saegusa (b. 1942 in Tokyo, seems to have gone on to do both manga soundtracks and orchestral/chamber works); there's lengthy liner notes for this CD, but only in Japanese.  Googling didn't really help, generally just showing up copies of the record for sale with brief descriptions of its content.

 

The lineup details of the four-keyboard, vocodered vocals and drums ensemble "DKW-57349" who perform the work are written in English, so their names are Minoru Mukaiya, Hiroyuki Nanba, Satoshi Nakamura, Nobuo Kurata (all keys), Yukimasa Morimoto (vocoder) and Daiji Okai (drums).  From looking up their other activities, the only band name I recognised was the jazz-fusion outfit Casiopea, who Mukaiya was a member of.

Anyway, if you've always wondered what the standard Latin mass would sound like arranged for an early 80s keyboard army of prog-minded Japanese musicians, with the text sung through a vocoder throughout, you've come to the right place.  Radiation Missa certainly gets full marks from me for utter uniqueness, as well as some nifty fusion grooves here and there, and ingenious arrangements - especially on the 11-minute Credo.  That longest track even has a neat drum solo towards the end, with phaser effects all over it.  In another highlight, the piano-based Benedictus is a nice calm interlude from all the crazy twists and turns.  Just a couple of the lovely quirks of this odd record - if anyone knows more about Radiation Missa, I'd love to hear about how it came to be.

Original LP cover

link

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