Explore a psychedelic cyber-occult world and break free from Western rationalism through the music of Henry Kawahara.

We’re all quite familiar with Kankyō Ongaku by now. The Japanese “environmental music”, which loosely encapsulated minimal, ambient, avant-garde, and New Age, has appeared in countless archival projects over the years with artists like Hiroshi Yoshimura, Satoshi Ashikawa, Midori Takada, and others heavily favored. But what about the music and artists that emerged after this era? How did the genre change with the further development of computer technologies and music programming softwares? What happened to the bubble economy ambient genre after Japan’s economic collapse in the early ’90s, and corporations stopped investing in the arts?

One of the key figures from the post-Kankyō Ongaku era is Henry Kawahara, a media artist and electronic music producer who was particularly active in the Japanese cyber-occult underground of the 1990s, which EM Records’ Koki Emura described as investigating “the sense of things hidden or secret, beyond ‘common sense’ and rationalism.” While Kawahara’s music incorporated many of the same elements as Kankyō Ongaku, synthesizers, samplers, mallets, bamboo, etc. his musical vision went much further beyond healing and relaxation into altered states and cybernetic experiences.

Topics explored within Kawahara’s self-released CD-only albums include: Sound LSD, Parallel Data Sounds, Subliminal Sex, Love Meditation, Altered State of Consciousness, Digital Mushroom, Subtropical Illusion, Never-ending Asia. His visionary cyber-occult concept centered around using digital technology, especially 3D recordings, to help listeners break free of the constraints of rationality. Psychedelic, transportive, and often quite orgasmic, the music plugs “directly to the cerebrum,” and after extended listening, very much feels like it has shifted your consciousness in some way or another.

EM Records have released two anthologies of Henry Kawahara’s orgasmic cyber-occult music. In Sheep’s Clothing has copies of both 3CD special editions available in our webshop. All formats feature extensive English liner notes to dive deeper into Kawahara’s world.

Visible Cloaks’ Spencer Doran wrote the following on EM Records’ anthology Cybernetic Defiance and Orgasm: The Essential Henry Kawahara:

“Henry Kawahara has been called ‘the Jon Hassell of Japan’, but upon closer inspection one finds that his work operates on very different terms. Like Hosono’s forays into computerized Ryukyu folk “sightseeing music” or Tsutomu Ōhashi’s Ecophony trilogy, Kawahara’s world projected ancient musical traditions and notions of cultural identity onto the modern digital plane through a fusion of cybernetic thinking and pan-asian cultural introspection that makes Western attempts to do the same seem quaint in comparison. Kawahara’s omnidirectional sound “illusions” were constructed not as albums but psychological experiences, billowing with a then-nascent notion of early 90s cybernetic spirituality that was proliferating on both sides of the Pacific as the hyperlinked state of global connectivity we know today was just beginning to crystalize. Through digital representations of folk instruments, shifting MIDI sequencing and custom binaural recording technology he aimed for psychoacoustic effect as much as artistic, all via a countercultural form of distribution untethered from the commercial expectations of post-bubble modes of artistic production. This EM collection draws out the best of his fruitful early-mid 90s period into a revelatory sequence, generously opening Kawahara’s world to all.”