01. Yew’s Path (07:54)
02. Mavya at The Lacus Yom (07:47)
03. Disembodied Ternion (05:09)
04. Myth of Klüna (01:03)
05. Yellow Serpent (05:23)
06. Kuuminyo (feat.Rekpo) (03:07)
07. Halu Shanta (04:33)
08. Syzygy and A Counter Truth (03:28)

“Grumbling psych played on a whirring blender of guitars, synths and traditional Japanese temple instruments”
— The Wire

Kuunatic’s hotly anticipated 2nd album “Wheels of Ömon,” takes another adventuresome deep dive into their self-made fantasy mythology, proposing whole new worlds of psychedelic drama and ritual.

In addition to their core sonic palette of tribal drums, pulsing bass, atmospheric keyboards and grouped female vocals, the acclaimed Japanese psych-rock trio played an array of Japanese traditional instruments on “Wheels of Ömon.” The result is a thrilling, kaleidoscopic album that brushes against tradition as it whirls into an other-wordly future.

First the facts. Kuunatic are the trio of Fumi Kikuchi on keyboards, Shoko Yoshida on bass and Yuko Araki on drums. All three of them also sing. They formed in 2016 and released an EP and 7” single before, in 2021, dropping their debut album, Gate of Klüna, on an unsuspecting public.

Here’s where things get unusual. Gate of Klüna was no ordinary album. Following on from their Kuurandia EP, it developed a mix of psychedelic garage and prog rock, ritual drumming, chanting female vocals, lush keyboard textures and traditional Japanese folk instruments to tell the mythic tale of the planet Kuurandia – a bold saga of magic, volcanoes and battle.

Now, with the release of their second album – Wheels of Ömon – Kuunatic have come to take us further down the rabbit hole.

Wheels of Ömon builds on the story of Kuurandia, its moon Klüna and its sun Ömon with more tales of prophecy, mysterious powers and magical healing lakes. Each of its eight songs pinpoints a specific moment from one 45-hour orbit of Ömon with atmospheric evocations of fleeting seasons and the rituals that accompany them.

Kuunatic’s imaginative flights of visionary fancy achieve the same kind of epic, science-fiction world-building as legendary French jazz-prog heroes, Magma. But their inspirations come from further afield. “The three of us listen to completely different types of music so our ideas and influences come from all different places,” they say.

In the case of Wheels of Ömon, a huge influence came from a residency at the PALP Festival in the alpine village of Bruson, Switzerland, close to the Vallée du Rhone and enclosed by mountains. Spending time there before recording the album in the Netherlands, Kuunatic found themselves inspired by the region’s rich history and breathtaking scenery.

“We create fantasy stories,” they say, “but it’s deeply influenced by historical events that happened on Earth. So, when we stayed in Switzerland, looking at the Alps and Vallée du Rhône, they made us imagine vast histories of grand Earth and times of several hundred million years ago. We also climbed one of the Alps to do a photo shoot and we learned more about the area. Through the experience, natural scientific facts were added to our concept, and our fictional world became clearer and more vivid. And we scattered the stories around this album.”

Perhaps it’s this majestic natural setting that has imparted to the new album a deep connection to folk traditions, to human stories, to the very roots of storytelling.

It’s a mood that manifests most powerfully in the album’s varied use of Japanese traditional instruments. The band explains: “This album begins and ends with sho, a Japanese traditional instrument consisting of 17 slender bamboo pipes that are used in gagaku, Japanese ancient court music.”

Throughout the album, Kuunatic also play chappa (hand-sized cymbals used at temple rituals or festivals), sasara (a percussion instrument of 108 wooden plates strung with a cotton cord), ryuteki (a flute used in gagaku), kagurabue (a flute used for Japanese traditional shrine music) ougidaiko (a fan-shaped hand drum), kokiriko (small bamboo stick instruments), and wadaiko (a huge traditional drum that has been used for rituals or festivals since ancient times).

“We would say the sounds of the flutes and drums we used have a very strong folk sense and atmosphere and they helped us to create a mysterious landscape,” says Kuunatic. “Sasara and kokiriko are used for the oldest Japanese folk song called ‘Kokiriko Bushi’ as well, so the historical fact is also included in the album’s narrative. But we mixed those Japanese elements with all different musical cultures and ideas, so this is a fusion of ancient times and modern times, crossing borders to borders.”

One of the most daring and evocative inclusions on the album is the appearance, on the track ‘Kuuminyo,’ of vocalist Rekpo, a member of the marginalised and persecuted Ainu indigenous ethnic people of northern Japan. “We met her when she was touring with Oki, an Ainu music band,” says Kuunatic. “We played together in 2022 and kept in touch. Rekpo is also from Marewrew, an Ainu female vocal group that is on a mission to rebuild and hand down their traditional music of Upopo. They sing this during labours and rituals, and sometimes fortune telling, so we interpreted her as a prophet in our world.”

Voicing the character of a prophet of Klüna on ‘Kuuminyo,’ Rekpo sings the Ainu traditional song ‘Hanro’ with an intimate yet otherworldly resonance that’s surprisingly catchy. It’s just one of the many musical highlights of an album that charts a course from the chilly grandeur of opening track ‘Yew’s Path,’ through the ambient shimmer and ritual chants of ‘Mavya at The Lacus Yom,’ and the stark, insistent tribal rock of ‘Disembodied Ternion,’ to the whooshing galactic prog of ‘Halu Shanta.’

A sweeping tale of far-off worlds and strange civilisations performed by ritual rhythms, chanted vocals, throbbing electric bass and ancient folk instruments, Wheels of Ömon is like nothing you’ve heard before. Climb aboard and let Kuunatic take you on a trip to the edge of imagination.

01. Dewbow (05:42)
02. Desert Empress Pt. 1 (06:20)
03. Desert Empress Pt. 2 (03:44)
04. Full Moon Spree (02:47)
05. Tītián (04:38)
06. Lava Naksh (06:40)
07. Raven’s War (06:49)
08. Para Bennyà (06:25)

KUUNATIC is a thrilling Tokyo based tribal-psych trio bolstered by diverse global sonics and powerful female vocals. Drawing on the members’ different musical and cultural perspectives, their music explores ritual drumming, pulsing bass lines, atmospheric keyboard sounds and Japanese traditional instruments.

Having previously released an EP (“Kuurandia” / 2017) as well as a split 7” (with Taiwanese fuzz psych garage band Crocodelia), “Gate of Klüna” is KUUNATIC’s much awaited debut album. Produced by Tim DeWit (Gang Gang Dance) the record reveals a mesmerizing soundworld that transcends genres and hemispheres and succeeds in being both boldly experimental and wildly catchy.

KUUNATIC are Fumie Kikuchi on keys and vocals, Yuko Araki on drums and vocals and Shoko Yoshida on bass and vocals.

Creating a world has many advantages. Notions of time and space can be bent, Urizen-like, to the will and reasoning of the creator. Although formed in Tokyo in 2016, a city that is very much on this planet, Kuunatic first looked to another heavenly body to shape their project. In interviews the band have cited that their name is drawn from kuu, the Finnish word for the moon; inspired in part by original Finnish guitarist, Sanni. Keyboardist Fumie helps guide the uninitiated. “Kuunatic’s musical concept is a fantasy. Our first EP’s title ‘Kuurandia’ is the name of the fantasy planet we live on. The EP was a prologue. And this [debut album] is a concept album about how the planet began, evolved and was explored. It consists of eight songs and each song has a story to tell.”

Julian Cope once wrote that Japanese rockers “thrust everything they discover from the outside world through their own singularly Japanese filter, […] often bringing forth something magnificent and wholly better than that which had first inspired it.” Given we are dealing with a band whose drummer, Yuko Araki, proclaimed (in an interview with African Paper) that they are “ultimately unclassifiable – though I could say we are Kuurandian,” it is futile to give Kuunatic any anchoring in terms of style or scene; though recognizing fragments of other sounds is great fun. Fumie considers Cope’s premise. “It applies to us in some sense. We like to mix and experiment with everything we saw, heard, experienced and thought, not only in Japan but elsewhere, to create a unique world. During long tours we always talk a lot, experience the same things, play around, come up with very bizarre ideas and make them into songs. Kuurandia is like our imaginary utopia. We don’t think we are excellent players, but we believe that we always passionately embody our ideas and our adoration for fantasy.”

The listener is advised not to cast their net too narrowly, as Kuunatic’s music seems to invoke many responses around the world. This writer hears the echoes of weird off-kilter hybrids and psyched out chamber music from the likes of Os Mutantes, Basil Kirchin, The Raincoats or Manfred Hübler. Drummer Yuko again: “it’s interesting that audiences always try to categorize us according to so many different musical genres.” But musical interpretations will inevitably circle around their home base on their “other” planet, Japan. Japanese audiences sometimes consider Kuunatic as “amplified” Shinto shrine maidens (miko). Fumie chips in. “Our sound consists of many different kinds of music, but certain unique Japanese instruments and their sounds give a special atmosphere to Kuunatic’s world. Japanese traditional music exists in very close proximity to us even if we don’t go to see Gagaku (Japanese shrine music) or Kabuki (Japanese traditional theatrical performance). Fumie has been playing the Kagura flute (Japanese shrine music flute) since childhood, Shoko’s name includes the Japanese character 笙 which means a Japanese traditional instrument, and Yuko sometimes visits a Homa burning at a temple and listens to their powerful chanting rhythm. We hear traditional music everywhere at summer festivals in Japan, so the music is imprinted in us as a very familiar sound.”

The possibilities to project onto Kuunatic’s music are endless. This is because the band has created that rare thing, catchy music that is impossible to pigeonhole. The track ‘Lava Naksh’ is a form of renaissance dance; a pavane, maybe, albeit with Kraftwerk’s early organ sound. ‘Full Moon Spree’ could be a ritual version of The Fall’s ‘What You Need’. ‘Raven’s War’ is a dry-as-dust progressive soundtrack, it could be a lost cut from the Valley of the Dolls record. The transportative elements in all are key: certain beats and near-melismatic melody lines hark back to archaic processional and ritual music. In ‘Desert Empress Part II’ for example, a glowering bass line walks ponderously alongside the toms, framing and guiding the mood. Finishing matters off with what sounds like a backwards organ is also discombobulating. Such sonic sleights of hand are part of the Kuunatic playbook. But we must remember an old psychonaught’s advice: the menu is not the meal, and the map is not the territory.
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“Gate of Klüna”:

(1) Dewbow
(2) Desert Empress Part 1
(3) Desert Empress Part 2
(4) Full Moon Spree
(5) Tītián
(6) Lava Naksh
(7) Raven’s War
(8) Para Bennyà

Each song on “Gate of Klüna” tells the story of how the imaginary planet Kuurandia “began, evolved and was explored.” The numbered track descriptions below correspond to the track list numbers above.

(1) Sacred bells ring at the dawn of a new era. (2-3) Our new empress rises with magical refrains.
(4) As the planet prospers, Kuurandians hold a ball under the full moon and (5) celebrate the richness of the harvest. The peaceful time seems to last forever…. until (6) a gigantic volcano emerges in the middle of moonrise mountains. KUUNATIC chants enigmatic mantras like praying, to prevent its eruption. (7) However, unidentified invaders appear from its roaming lava, and the war of predation begins. KUUNATIC fights and drops their magical spells, and finally they win the battle. (8) Three pythonesses sing a mystic triumph song, then lead their people to a deep dreamy forest.