Since time immemorial, humans have looked up into the heavens, gazed at the stars and moon, and felt something stir within. From the earliest homo sapiens molding clay in the Stone Age to van Gogh abstracting color into Starry Night, we’ve all been connected and inspired by the cosmos—much like Takao Naoi was on バイブレーション パルサー (Vibration Pulsar)—to a seemingly endless universe of which we are only briefly a part of. Touching on the next album from the Cosmo Music Series that I’d like to share with you, I feel uniquely inspired by these ideas lying partly behind this entry.
Listening to Takao’s バイブレーション パルサー (Vibration Pulsar), I resonate with what he is trying to capture. It’s this rare inspiration of creating something out of the ether—writing music to accompany something we cannot hear in any “normal” sense. It’s what he wrote about in the original liner notes, which I’ll share in translation here:
You know, space doesn’t really have anything we can call “air.” That means that sound—as we understand it, as vibrations traveling through air—doesn’t actually exist out there. “Music,” in the sense we humans conceive of it, doesn’t exist in space. That’s what I was thinking during our very first project meeting.
And yet, when you listen to the kind of noise created by converting radio waves from pulsars into “sound,” you can sense a kind of order, a pattern hidden within it. It’s probably the result of natural phenomena, physical reasons producing those “sounds.” But if it were instead the “music” of some intelligent life, then perhaps beauty could exist there.
If we humans were to take the music we play, transform it into a series of zeroes and ones, and send it out into space, would “they” respond by saying, “Hmm, perhaps there’s a possibility of beauty here”?
To “them,” I wanted to convey order. To “you,” I wanted to offer music.
With that thought in mind, I created this album.
Takao’s background is in jazz. Born in post-war Setagaya, Tokyo, in 1947, he dropped out of Shibuya’s Aoyama Gakuin University—trading in a career in science and engineering for his true dream as a professional guitarist.
By the late ’60s he was performing with pioneering Japanese jazz groups led by figures like Isao Suzuki, Yasuo Ōsawa, Shinya Kimura, and Nobuo Hara. A brief stint in New York to study at the Manhattan School of Music further deepened his craft. Upon returning to Japan, he began a prolific career as a session musician and sometime solo jazz instrumentalist—his 1977 fusion-tinged In The Mood becoming his most recognized work.
Appearing on countless Japanese jazz, rock, and pop records, by the early ’90s he had transitioned into many other roles—production, directing, arranging and even becoming the executive director of JCAA (Japan’s version of ASCAP)—leaving live performance mostly to jazz clubs or TV appearances. Recording under his own name remained a more personal outlet. It wasn’t until 1998, more than two decades after his last solo release, that Saegusa Shigeaki gave Takao a new challenge: electromagnetic waves translated into sound by Suzuki Matsumi, entrusted to him to transform into music that resonated with the cosmos itself.
Far removed from anything in his previous oeuvre, バイブレーション パルサー (Vibration Pulsar) finds Takao Naoi taking complete ownership of the instrumentation, reimagining his ideas for a different era. Performing on both electric and acoustic guitars, treated and untreated, every multi-tracked note expresses a wonderfully reflective mood within the EMR sound.
Entirely instrumental, the album features tracks like the languid opener “星の誕生” (Birth of a Galaxy), with its womb-like ambience drifting into romantic, haunting tones. Looking at the date this album was first uploaded to YouTube by Glenn from shouldbeasleep—September 15, 2019—I get the sense (or at least I think I do) of why they shared it then. This album feels like late summer turning into early autumn. It carries faint echoes of Wes Montgomery (an early influence), Santo & Johnny, and Shinsuke Honda, whose heartfelt guitar tones conjure moonlit, windswept seasides.
バイブレーション パルサー (Vibration Pulsar) exists in a space between ambient, folk, and jazz. Songs like “銀河のささやき” (Whisper of the Galaxy) sound like ballads befitting troubadours of the past—except now duetting with the cosmos itself. My favorite track, “流星” (Meteor), is a bittersweet ode that drifts in and out of orbit, swept up in space-borne ephemera, with Takao’s guitar shining through a swirl of unplaceable sonics.
What I love most about バイブレーション パルサー (Vibration Pulsar) is how cozy and lived-in it sounds—not in spite of the cosmic noise surrounding Takao, but because of it. The dreamy atmosphere of certain songs like “夢との出会い” (Encounter With A Dream) emerges from that interplay. At this later stage of his life, Takao seems to have taken every bit of his connection with time and space—every gaze at the heavens—and distilled it into his own message to the stars, expressing it out back to cosmos the only way he could: through the vibrations of his guitar strings.