A man walks into a record shop - at least we should be thankful that he found one to walk in to - with no real sense of purpose other than to buy vinyl. Like some strange compulsion, he didn't even really care what it was. In the rack was a rather ordinary yellow sleeve with a sticker saying that the double LP was by "Japan's leading purveyors of sweet mystic folk about nature and love". That will do nicely.
Nagisa Ni Te are, in fact, a duo made up of Shinji Shibayama and Masako Takeda and this vinyl extravaganza is their seventh album. With no small amount of trepidation - what kind of a name for a musical genre is mystic folk anyway? - the needle was lowered into the groove. Duly the room filled with almost horizontally laidback sounds. Right from the start - on ""Premonition" - you would think that the songs had actually been composed by Mary Jane Bacharach. Alternating "…take me to the heaven" with, to these Western ears, Japanese obscurity was oddly compelling. In fact, I'd go so far as calling it entrancing. Melodic western rock themes get revisited many a time - try "Secrets" for an example" - but always in that laidback manner. Of course, if these songs were always that conventional then it would be easy to dismiss the whole as some sort of pastiche but soon the stylistic right turn comes, with "Ishi River" explaining the "mystic folk" label through fragile musical deconstructions and Masako Takeda's sonorous chantings. Surprises? How often do you get surprised by an album nowadays? The test of quality is whether you want to play the album again and I did.
Another random purchase and another winner. Makes you wonder why record companies spend so much on marketing when you can just dump stuff in a record shop and somebody with a sense of adventure will buy it. Oh, that's right - somebody got rid of most of the record shops…